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

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Yeah, it's a long way to have come from a graduate program in religious studies at Stanford, where we would delve deep into mostly texts, mostly books.

I did a dissertation on studying second century

Chinese translation of Indian sutras.

Talk about going into the fine detail. So from there, to come here and now to be involved in the fine details of the human heart and human suffering.

And the challenges that people have in being a human, they are huge.

And so, and today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, August 8, 80 years.

And I believe there's a person here at IMC who was there at that time as a young child or as a baby or something.

So, and, um, so I, I, what comes to mind today that I want to share is a small tale, a fable, the Buddhist

say, it's called a jataka tale.

It's supposed to be, jataka means having to do with life, with birth.

It has to do with the idea of past stories of the Buddha before he was the Buddha.

And they're kind of like Asop's fables.

They're often with animals. And so it seems that once upon a time, the Buddha was a little parrot.

So this is the story of him being a little parrot.

And he was living in a forest that started to have a forest fire,

which we know about here in California now.

Apparently this is one of the now, already getting to be one of the busiest fire seasons

of years of the ever in California.

And what fires do we have these days?

Not just forest fires, we have fires of war and fires of corruption and fires of hate

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