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I'm Christa Tippett. Up next, my unedited conversation with American Buddhist icons

Sharon Salzburg and Robert Thurman on loving our enemies as the most rational and pragmatic of moves.

There is, as always, a shorter, produced version of this wherever you found this podcast.

Well, you know, I'd like to start where I start all my conversations and I probably asked you

this question all those years ago, Sharon, but just want to hear a little bit about, you know,

what we want to focus on with you as we speak is this teaching and thinking you're doing about

enemies in the broadest sense of how we approach that. But I'd like to start with just a little bit

about whether there was a spiritual background to your childhood and also whether, you know,

in your earliest life, you know, how language and a sense of enemies was present for you.

I'm spiritually or otherwise.

No, that's very interesting. I don't know that there was a spiritual presence in my earliest

life. There was certainly the presence of a lot of suffering and confusion. And out of that,

I, out of that, I really reached for something that, and I actually did sense always, not that it was

given unto me, but I always had a sense there was something other. There was something bigger than

the situations I found myself in. And, you know, my childhood was marked by a lot of disruption,

a lot of loss. My mother died when I was very young. And all of this was surrounded by a very

strange kind of silence. No one would ever actually talk about anything. And so it was when I

went to college and I first encountered the Buddhist teaching in an Asian philosophy course,

...