Well, I'm very happy today to welcome Paul Harrison. How does the concept of love in Buddhism differ significantly from what we would think of it? It differs because you have to see it against the backdrop and in the context of other Buddhist notions about how the world is, and the key concept for Buddhism is suffering. It's duhkha in Sanskrit, which is translated in a variety of ways. Some people say unsatisfactoriness is a good way of doing it- it's a little bit of a mouthful. But, however you translate it, in terms of Buddhist doctrine, there's something wrong with our being in the world. There's something painful about it, and the only way to fix this is to renounce, is to let go, to give up the self and its preoccupations. Now, you'd think that with suffering being a central concept of the religion, Buddhists would have very long faces and would be miserable, sad people, but in fact, in my experience, the most impressive people I've met who are Buddhists are not like that at all. They're extremely cheerful and not self-centered, focused entirely on other people, and they seem to have an equanimity and a kind of calm at the center of their being, which is really quite remarkable. And I think, you know, if we think of love, it's not just the word, it's that way of being human that I find really appealing about the tradition, that it encourages that sort of cheerful, non-self-centered approach to human relations. So if we think of Buddhists in the world who are not necessarily monks or people who are meditating daily, how is compassion expressed among Buddhists? Well Buddhism doesn't expect that everybody will become a renunciant. That would be clearly unrealistic. The human race would come to an end if that really happened. So, for those that remain in the world as householders, in other words, they have families and jobs and so on, children, it's expected that they will have emotional relationships with each other and those should be conducted according to basic Buddhist moral principles. There are five precepts that Buddhist lay people take: to not to take life, not to steal, and not to engage in sexual misconduct and so on. And so, in this way, people can lead more satisfying and moral lives, ethical lives, and be compassionate towards each other and generous and so on. So these are regarded as high values in Buddhism. And so the rest that remain in the Buddhist order, the Sangha, who take the renunciant path, for them, compassion is expressed through various acts, but mostly through teaching and through guiding people in the world as to how they can lead more moral and satisfying lives. In a very, very broad sense, would you think that following a path of Buddhism might lead to greater world peace? I mean, is it a strategy that we could use to deal with some of the violence and conflict that the world is experiencing at the moment? Yes, but not by everybody becoming Buddhist. I think that, again, is an unreal prospect. But Buddhism certainly has resources that people can use and, in fact, do use to- shall we say reduce the potential for conflict and discord, and one of them, of course, is very well known, it's the practice of meditation. And a lot of people think that Buddhism is just meditation, but in fact there's more to it than that. But we see in the modern world a huge growth in the practice of mindfulness, for example, which is basically a product of Buddhist meditation technology and that, of course, is, I think, of- it's directly applicable here because if you're doing that kind of practice you might be less reactive to things that could make you angry or inclined to violence and so on. So I think there are ways in which Buddhist techniques can produce good results in terms of peace and more harmonious relations. Could you speak a little further about that? You say there are techniques that can reduce anger. Is there more? Buddhism actually has a number of practices which are designed to encourage positive emotional states. And so we have love and kindness, we have compassion, we have sympathetic joy. In Sanskrit, it's mudita, that's something we don't even have a word for in English. The fact that being happy when other people are happy, and then we have a kind of calm serenity, so those are the four practices. And in those practices, one deliberately encourages in one's self those emotional states and those feelings towards other people, but starting with people that one loves and is positively disposed towards and then moving to those that are- one is different to, and then finally including one's enemies. So that could be a very powerful practice which people could engage in whether they're Buddhist or not, actually. This is reminiscent, I think, of the phrases, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." There's a kind of, not exactly a connection, but it brings to mind some of these things that we've talked about when we spoke to people who were talking about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Tell me about the history, a little bit, of Buddhism. Where did these, would you consider these rules or recommendations for a good life for people or recommendations for a more stable society? How did this all develop? These are all the five precepts, for example, are found in other branches of Indian religion as well. And, in fact, Buddhism, although it began in, say, the fifth century BC, it adopted quite a lot of practices and ideas and ways of doing things which were widespread in Indian religion at the time. It arose in a very pluralistic religious environment with the various religious groups competing for resources and so there are many things that they have in common. Although most of the religious traditions that were contemporary with Buddhism have died out, one of them, Jainism, is still around and that, of course, has been enormously influential because even more than Buddhism, it elevates the principle of nonviolence, or ahimsa, and that, of course, passes into the kind of Gandhian approach to nonviolent conflict resolution and so on. So, Buddhism drew on that kind of background and then developed a sort of particular approach to asceticism and renunciation that was, for some reason, enormously successful. And, of course, it developed in various ways and one of the ways it developed in the form called Mahayana was to develop this ideal of the bodhisattva, in other words, the person who strives entirely for the welfare of others motivated by compassion and wisdom alike, as a means of spiritual cultivation of the self. Right, so the bodhisattva gets rid of hisself or herself in order to achieve liberation, but in the process is supposed to be focused on the welfare of other beings. So, there are all kinds of ways in which Buddhism has developed. So, to think about love and what it means or compassion, and the idea of the bodhisattva is particularly interesting because it goes without an understanding of human identity which is completely against the grain for most people, in other words, the notion that we don't really existence as we think we do. So Buddhism has no god, has no soul, and you know, even our notion of ourselves as permanent entities is false according to Buddhist teaching, and Mahayana Buddhism really picks this ball up and runs with it in the notion of the bodhisattva who who can only be compassionate to others if he or she believes that others don't really exist as separate entities from one's self. So the elimination of the self-other distinction is, in fact, supposed to be the source of true compassion, when you don't see a distinction between you and the other person. Right? And, do many people attain this? I mean, are there bodhisattva – There are people who have taken the vow to be a bodhisattva, and there are people who I think achieved that something of that state of mind and state being who are entirely selfless. But I think this occurs in many religious traditions, and even people who are not religious are sometimes capable of this kind of selflessness, which I think is quite noble. I mean we can point to people like the Dalai Lama for example and say, well, he's a person who's commonly believed to be a bodhisattva, a very advanced one, and to exemplify something of this state of being. Could you elaborate on the the history of Buddhism and its connection to Jainism again, for example? Okay, right. Well, Buddhism arose at around the same time as Jainism. In fact, we think the founder of Jainism, Mahavira, was an older contemporary of the Buddha, of Gautama. And clearly the two religions have a great deal in common and they probably acted on each other in all sorts of ways probably because they shared converts, right, people who've been Jain renunciants and then came over to the Buddhist fowl and then probably happened in the other direction as well. And at the same time, you have to understand India, this multi-religious environment where everybody had to coexist. We're used to a kind of religious monoculture in the West, historically speaking. That wasn't the case in India, and so they just had to get along with each other. And they argued with each other all the time, they debated with each other, and so they shared the same territory, and the lay people in particular would often support different religious groups at the same time. In other words, this notion of exclusive religious adherence was a rather unusual thing, unless you were a renunciant in which you went into the order then you were a Buddhist, right? You couldn't be also a Jain or an Ajiva karo, any of the other religious groups that were there at the time. So, when we think about the history of Buddhism, what we're thinking about primarily is the community of renunciants and their support base, and that community expanded all across India and then all across Asia. And so we have people who are joining the order and marking their passage into their group with various acts like they shave their hair and they give up their names, they give up their identities, their positions, they wear a particular kind of uniform, sort of you can imagine development of Buddhism like that, but constantly in contact with all these other religious groups as well and, in a sense, in a competition with them. As Buddhism has moved to the West, and let's say even in California. Yes. What's happening with that? Is there a significant change in the–. Yes. There is a significant change and it's very difficult to quantify because Buddhism even in Asia was a extremely diverse family of religions rather than one religious system. And even in the Indian context, there were of course two sides to it. As I've said, there was the lay side and there was the renunciant side. So you had, all right, from the get-go, two different ways of being Buddhist, as a lay person or as a monk or a nun. And what we've seen in America, of course, is the explosion in the number of ways that you can be a lay Buddhist and the degree of involvement in the religion and in its practices. So we find a lot of people who remain in the world, so to speak, with families and jobs but they're doing very advanced forms of Buddhist meditation and they're studying the dharma, and at the same time we're finding vestiges of the old system where you have renunciants living in monasteries who have taken very special vows and they shave their heads and they wear robes just as Buddhist renunciants always did. So what you have in, say, North America is an extremely diverse set of approaches to Buddhism which includes, of course, migrant communities who retain a lot of the ritual practices that their fore-bearers were familiar with in Asia, and so this great variety of ways of being Buddhist. I begin this course referring to Thích Nhất Hạnh and the mantras of true love with the idea that increasing people's awareness of and practice of compassion and love and kindness might actually have a positive effect on the world. I certainly think that if people meditated more it would have a positive effect on the world in all kinds of ways. And I think that would bear fruit in people's relationships if they were more mindful of the effect they had on other people and the effect that other people had on them. So it's to see how in every relationship we have- there's a kind of web of causes and conditions, forces at work, being less reactive. So, you know, I see various Buddhist practices which can be engaged in even if you don't buy the theory of karma, for example, or if you're not taking the trip of refuge. I see various practices that could be beneficial that could, for example, reduce distracted driving on our roads which kills thousands and thousands of people every year just in the United States because we're doing too many things, we're multitasking. So, the practice of focusing and concentrating, this is a very valuable, important skill which the human race appears to be losing because of the huge amount of distraction we have to suffer on a daily basis. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. Thanks.
