Hello, you are listening to the secular Buddhism podcast and this is episode number 44.

I am your host Noah Rosheta and today I'm talking about finding the teacher within.

Over the past several weeks I've been watching a series on Netflix called Buddha.

It's a 55-part series about the historical Buddha and it's inspired by Tiktok Han's book Old Path White Clouds,

which happens to be one of my two favorite books on the topic of the historical Buddha, the other book being Buddha by Karen Armstrong.

So if you're interested in learning any of the historical account of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, those are two books that I would certainly recommend.

Old Path White Clouds by Tiktok Han and Buddha by Karen Armstrong.

But what's been great about watching the Netflix series is that it's really fun to finally add a visual image to the stories that I've read in several books and in the discourses of early Buddhist texts.

It's not the best quality.

I like to think of it as a Spanish soap opera produced by a Bollywood production company because that's kind of the style.

There are several moments where I would just laugh because it's quite entertaining in a comical way.

But in general, with the production quality being low and the acting being subpar, I still enjoyed it quite a bit because, like I said,

it's fun to have a visual representation of some of these stories that I've listened to and that I've really enjoyed in my own studies of Buddhism.

But something that really stood out to me while watching the story of the transformation of Prince Siddhartha Gautama turning into the ascetic,

you know, the ascetic Siddhartha Gautama into ultimately into the Buddha, the role of the awakened one, the Buddha,

was that he had various teachers along the way.

Now, historically in the Pali Canon, we know that it's taught that he had two main teachers.

Once he became an ascetic and the forest, he studied with an ascetic named Alara Kalama.

And he taught him how to meditate and studied with him ultimately.

Kalama said, hey, I've taught you all that I know.

There's really nothing else I can teach you. Why don't you stay here and you take over the school because he was older, getting old.

And Siddhartha said, no, I'm not interested in that because he didn't feel satisfied.

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