Do Buddhists have prophets like many other religions?
You mean, does Buddhism, I suppose?
Does Buddhism... Asking questions like this is difficult.
Buddhism...
Buddhism has many, many different things in it.
Or many people call themselves Buddhists and do very, very strange things, just as in the name of any religion people do very strange things.
But Buddhism-Buddhism, the scriptural, what we have passed down, that we understand to be kind of how enlightened beings acted, does actually have some measure of prophecy or admit to some level of prophecy.
Because there's an example that is given.
The first example is of the Buddha himself.
When he was a bodhisatta, he had five dreams.
And these dreams were that... They were...
images.
They were symbols of certain things that would happen.
Like many birds he saw flying towards him of all different colors and they fell down on his feet and all turned to white, I believe, or saffron, I can't remember which.
And this was that all the people who came to him would, from many different corners of the earth and many different walks of life, would all come together to ordain, I think, or to practice his teachings, I can't remember which.
So he had many prophetic dreams about his future, or he had these five dreams about his future, about what his future would be.
But the more well-known example is of King, I believe it's King Pasenadi.
Yeah, King Pasenadi.
The 16 dreams of Pasenadi, I believe.
And these are quite famous in Buddhist circles.
But as usual, I can't remember it accurately.
And these 16 dreams are in the Jataka.
And he had these dreams and he came to ask the Buddha about them.
Yeah, right.
Pasenadi.
Because he wasn't a very wise person.
And so he listened to these Brahmins who told him that, oh, it means there's going to be a catastrophe.
You have to kill all of these animals in a ritual sacrifice, and we have to perform this ritual sacrifice for you.
This is the kind of prophecy that you see in cultural religion all around the world, this shysterism, if that's such a word.
It's not Buddhism.
It's a bunch of con artists where people will look at your horoscope or will look at something that happened to you, a dream.
I'm trying to remember what it was.
People always come up to me with these examples of how they went to a religious person and asked them what this meant or what that meant.
And they would always say,
And they'll always say it means you have to build this.
Oh that's right, this woman told me about this.
She went to see one teacher and he told her, oh you have very bad karma and so you have to build a kuti for our monastery and this and this.
And she couldn't believe because she'd just come to visit this monastery in the beginning for the first time.
And already here was this teacher telling her all these ridiculous things and how he liked her car or something like that.
It was just ridiculous things she was telling me.
Your car is quite nice, you know, you should get one for the monastery and so on and so on.
Just explaining it all the way based on prophecy, on horoscopes and fate and fortune.
And this is much more common.
So this is what the Brahmins did.
They thought to themselves, here's a way for us to make a living.
And they said, oh great king, you have to perform a huge sacrifice and very costly and we will arrange it all and so on and so on.
You see they're so common.
It's funny how actually Buddhist teachers can fall into this trap when throughout the suttas it's ridiculed so blatantly.
And you know they're taking the wrong example from the suttas you might say.
But then he went to see the Buddha.
Then his wife who was actually quite wise, Mallika I believe,
was quite wise, told him to go see the Buddha.
He said, what are you doing talking to these ridiculous people who know nothing?
Why don't you go ask the Buddha what these dreams mean?
And the Buddha explained to him prophecy, something that is going to happen in the future, how people are going to act in the future.
He said, these are prophetic dreams.
And they mean that in the future this is going to happen, this is going to happen.
And he said, but don't worry, it's not going to happen in your time.
So he was saying it to placate the king.
And you know, if you read through it, you might think actually, you know, the Buddha is kind of just using it to placate this man, this befuddled king.
Because the dreams might not actually mean anything, but the Buddha is using them as a means of explaining the truth of the future that the Buddha himself was able to see.
The existence of prophets is allowed for and admitted, but I would say for the most part, prophecy is an exalted form of shysterism.
It's people trying to make a living, become a spiritual leader for this or that purpose.
It's very rare to find someone who is actually prophetic.
And I would say the people who actually do have this kind of understanding about the future, this kind of supervision and knowledge of what's going to happen in the future, are not at all interested in going out and proclaiming it to people.
They're much more interested in the practice of meditation and encouraging people in the practice of meditation.
It's not so useful.
I mean, it could be useful in that sense, as the Buddha used it, to explain how the future is not such a bright thing to look forward to and to try to cultivate and all of these works that we have put into effect.
and that we try to put into effect to benefit society and so on, are really quite pointless because of what we foresee in the future.
I mean, it really doesn't take prophecy because we know what's going to happen.
We can see the writing on the wall and eventually the earth is going to no longer exist.
This entire solar system, galaxy, universe,
as it is now, is totally going to be obliterated at some point in the future.
We don't need prophecy to tell us that.
I think prophecy is, in that sense, short-sighted.
But what would it mean to be able to prophesize something?
It means to see something on the road ahead.
Once you get to it, you just have to keep going.
It's really pointless and meaningless.
It's, I would say, a product of folk religion and cultural religion rather than actual spiritual practice.
Because it doesn't answer the underlying questions of why.
The broader why.
Why does it happen like this?
Not what's going to happen, but why does it happen?
That's all.