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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Good evening.

Welcome, welcome.

So tonight I want to talk a little bit about conflict.

And interestingly, there's this way that conflict shows up in the suta, the early Buddhist literature,

and that apparently there is some heavenly realm

this is just like some little side story

that is sprinkled in very rarely but it's in there

a few times in the sutas this heavenly realm

where the gods and the titans are always battling

they are always in conflict and the Titans are always battling. They are always in conflict. And the gods in

kind of like in Buddhist cosmology, they are just disembodied beings. They have no special

powers. They don't have special knowledge or anything like this. They're just like humans

who happen to be

disembodied. And Titans are, I don't know what they are. They are other disembodied beings who are not gods.

And there's this conflict between the gods and the Titans.

The polyword for Titan is Asura,

and some people translate them as demons,

but they're not demonic so much, as you'll see.

So looking a little bit about how these gods and titans interact,

and specifically the king of the gods and the king of the titans interact we can learn a little bit about conflict about how it was portrayed

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