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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So I'm sitting here in front of a Buddha statue and these Buddha statues tend to be probably the most common place they're placed in the United States is in gardens.

You can go to a garden shop and they have a Buddha statue and people put it in their garden and they're not even Buddhist.

They don't even know what the Buddha is about, but it's just a nice, cozy thing,

peaceful person sitting there quietly, minding his own business.

It's maybe calming or something inspiring.

And, um, And then we have here,

in the library there, a statue of the Buddha dying,

and he looks serene.

It looks like actually he's just resting,

he's popping, holding his head up and

looks like he's having a nice time.

And the image is the Buddha died peacefully. That's the idea and that's a story. He did it very very peacefully.

So this idea of you know being you know Buddhism is about getting chilled and peaceful and calm and

But what we don't this this that you're here is supposed to be the moment before his

Enlightenment what you don't know about probably most of you about the story of his enlightenment,

just before that for hours and hours of days or years before that,

he was working through a lot of challenges.

The primary, and we don't have so many statues of him being challenged.

There is some, okay, there's a few statues of showing him being emaciated before he was enlightened.

You can see his ribcage and I think his stomach.

The stories tell me, he was so thin and maciated

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