The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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So, hello and welcome to this Monday when we start a new five-part series.

And for this week I'd like to introduce you some of the main themes of ancient Buddhist teaching that I translated.

For about 20 years or so, I studied a particular

Buddhist text that became kind of foundational for my orientation or supporting my orientation

Buddhist practice. Some of you know that some months ago I talked about core Buddhist teachings

for how I teach, and that that's a kind of a naturalistic form of Buddhism. And a lot of this

comes from or supported by or inspired by a particular text that then I translated and published as a book called the Buddha

before Buddhism. And the idea of calling it the Buddha before Buddhism is something like

the Buddha's teaching before Buddhism

or the Buddha's teaching before it became Buddhist.

So with the idea that over time, maybe even his own lifetime,

but over time the teachings got more organized, more

systematized, more developed, more expanded, and the core simplicity of them sometimes got

lost. And the, but the earliest version of these teachings were really radical in many ways in going back

just to the central core of practice.

So the name of the text that I translated, the literal meaning in English is the book

of eights, which is a very uninspiring title.

And so I titled my translation and commentary on this ancient text, the Buddha before Buddhism.

So people would ask a question for themselves, what might have been the earliest teachings of the Buddha

before it became a religion?

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