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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So, hello and welcome to this third talk on the Buddha before Buddhism, which is the title of a translation I published of an ancient

Buddhist text that literally in English would be called the Book of Eight's.

Because many of the poems, it's an anthology of 16 poems.

Many of them have eight verses. And so maybe at the beginning there was only those with eight. So that they were just named after the first set

which have eight. And so yesterday I presented one of the four themes of this book, this teaching, and that is that not clinging to any views.

And today, it's not clinging to sensual pleasures, not clinging to essential desires.

And this is a phenomenally important teaching in this text and in early Buddhism

maybe one that is off-putting for many Westerners who don't necessarily have a problem

with pleasure, sensual pleasures in and of themselves.

But it's probably fair to say that many of us are concerned with pleasure and comfort much more than we realize

that we make many decisions through the days, even as something as simple as which chair we sit on, or sit in the

one that's most comfortable and the most pleasant. We go shopping for food and we're not just

buying the bare minimum to keep ourselves alive in a healthy way, but we choose the food that

brings us some pleasure, some comfort

that provides us with something more than just the nourishment that we need. And we might

actually spend more money than we need to, literally have to spend, in order to buy something

that brings us more pleasure and that would delights us to eat. We might rent or buy a home.

That's maybe a little bit more than we actually need to stay dry and warm because we want to

have the pleasure of a view or a pleasure of something that we want to have.

And so it turns out that there's a lot of little movements for many people,

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