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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Good evening.

Can we have the volume up just a tiny bit here, just so that I don't have to project my voice

as much, maybe a tiny, tiny, tiny bit more. So funny, there we go. Thank you. So I wanted to talk a little bit about this little encounter that the Buddha describes

about before he was awakened when he was just an ordinary person like us,

and he encountered some people quarreling

just in case

you see anything in the news

about quarreling or something.

So

the scene

is that

is between the

Sakian people and the Kossalian people. And they had these irrigation

channels that were from the river that formed the boundary between their two regions. And one

year there was very little rain. So they were quarreling about, okay, what are we going to do?

That we want all the water. No, we want the water. What are we going to do? This is maybe not so

unfamiliar, something like this. And apparently they were insulting each other, and it got so bad that the

different armies were on the two different sides of the river about ready to go to war.

And the person who was to become the Buddha, he's not the Buddha yet, shows up and he wants to talk to them.

And then he describes the impact that it had on them.

...