Craigbain, I thought I'd open up this talking a little bit about the life of the Buddha because his life is a pedagogical value.

He lived 2,500 years ago. Nothing about him was written down in the first 100 years after his death.

So it's dodgy at best to lay claim to the idea that any of the life of the Buddha is factual.

What we can instead understand from that is that it contains some messages or darmic insights as well as the rest of the darmo.

And it's kind of interesting just to hear about his journey and how it set him up for his, some of his insights, specifically

the core insights.

If you're interested, a lot of his life is contained in the suta called the Mahasaka

Suta. I'm going to read. called the Mahasaka Suta.

I'm going to read some of his own words, or at least the words that were attributed to him in the Polly Cannon, and bearing in mind again that these words are probably not historically factual but are just what has been attributed to him.

Of course the Polykimmon has been around for well

over 2,200 years so it is very old even though it was not written down right after the Buddha's death.

So, it starts out by saying, I was born into a wealthy family and lived in three houses. My clothes were beautiful and imported from Varanasi. Servants held shades over my head to protect me from the sun. I was entertained by musicians and dancers. What he's saying, in

in other words he lived in splendour and he lived and he said that his father to dissuade him from getting caught up in too much of the sorrows of life,

dissuaded him from traveling too much where he would see the poverty and the sickness and the death that surrounded the

splendour of the castles where he lived. But of course he did on his own and he saw that the world has a lot of aging sickness and death and he saw that people spent a lot of energy trying to avoid seeing the truth of existence, which is that it's not always pretty that there's also a lot of challenging experiences.

And so he comes to the conclusion that his life living in, you know, his household existence was essentially distracting him from coming to grips with the core existential issues that all of us have to face.

And it's he is I realize the people concerned with beauty and wealth and

accumulation viewed others who are old sick or dying with disgust or

agitation they're oblivious to the fact that we were all subject to the same.

That's foolish. In other words, it's foolish to view other people who are old, sick, or dying with any agitation

is going to happen to each of us.

Seeing that the life of accumulation that he was living

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