Hello, I hope you enjoy this recording and consider that in accordance with the Buddhist

tradition my talks are offered entirely without charge and supported by donations only.

Please feel invited to stop by darmaPunks NYC.com, that's spelled with an X,

to check out a chapter from my book, Unsubscribed, which arrives November 2017, and thank you.

So here's my perspective. It's not the correct perspective by any means there is no

correct

Darma at all. From the very beginning, even during the Buddha's life, there were different

perspectives on the darma. There was even split in his community and from the time of his death

there was many schools that developed with different flavors and different approaches.

And everywhere Buddhism has traveled, it has taken on different flavors when it went to Tibet.

It encountered the traditions of the Bonn religion, which was endogenous to that region and it incorporated those

beliefs and became the beautiful practice of Tibetan Buddhism and then when it went to China and Japan

it encountered the very

natural natural spontaneous going with the flow traditions of Taoism and it became what is now known as Zen Buddhism.

And when Buddhism went to Southeast Asia,

it encountered the practices of Sri Lanka and Burma and Thailand and it became the lineage that I have

practiced in and studied in as well as Melissa, the Taravadin lineage.

But then when Buddhism came to America,

it was not only imported by peoples from Japan and Tibet and Southeast Asia, it was brought to America and most popularized here by a group of therapists

and spiritual seekers. therapists and

spiritual seekers who in the 1970s just happened to be on a spiritual retreat at Bad Gaia where they encountered a man by the name of Ram Doss who just happened to be passing through and Ram Doss gave them the very basics of Buddhist meditation.

Ram Das himself was a therapist.

...