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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Good morning, welcome, welcome again.

So I'm continuing on this series about stories and in the preceding days I

earlier in the week I spoke about you know I gave a few stories and sort

to talk about the role of stories have in our lives and our

relationship to them and I'll do the same today with a different story and And that is the story of the Buddha's path to awakening.

And as you may know, different Buddhist traditions have different versions of this story.

And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.

But I'm going to give one version of this story.

As you know, there's different versions of the

different ways I could do this.

So this version of the story is in one that if it's not uncommon in this lineage, this tradition, is that the Buddha was a historical figure, like somebody who existed, who scholars will say died in

483 before the common era.

So, about 2,600 years ago and his name was Siddhartha Godima and he was a

human he lived and died just like humans do.

So he wasn't a god in particular

or he wasn't born from a god or something like this,

but was a human, just like we are. And he, during the course of his life, made some discoveries about freedom, peace, nirvana, and

these discoveries were practical and profound and groundbreaking.

So over the ages people have felt compelled to have shared

of his teachings, including the story of his awakening.

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