Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to our live broadcast.
Today we're looking at...
I'm going to go on to the Book of Fives.
I'm not reading the entire thing, but skimming through the Book of Fours...
didn't find anything that struck me.
That's exceptionally useful for us in an immediate meditative sense.
So I'm going to skip ahead to Book of Five, Supta 14.
Skip ahead to
the five powers.
I'm going to talk about the five powers from the point of view of the text.
Let's get there.
15.
No, 14.
So these are powers.
Now, they're also referred to as faculties.
And there might be a bit of a difference.
These powers, well, the way they're described here, they're not actually what is necessary.
And we'll see that when we talk about their definition.
It's important to understand we all have these five faculties.
And the descriptions here are some of the uses or some of the ways these faculties can be developed into powerful mind states, not all of which are necessary.
And all of which are exactly related to the path.
Mainly, but the definitions will give us a sense of what they are.
I shouldn't be too stuck on these for various reasons.
You should be able to see.
So these five powers are faith, saddha.
Sometimes we like to translate it as confidence, but here actually faith works better.
Vidya bala is the power of effort.
Sati bala.
Sati would normally be translated as mindfulness, but we're not going to.
We really never should.
But here we're especially not going to because of the definition.
Sati means the ability to remember.
Sati means, one word would be recollection.
Remembrance.
We don't really have a good word for it in English.
Samadhi.
Number four.
Samadhi bala.
Focus.
Or concentration.
And panya bala.
The power of wisdom.
Pa.
Thoroughly.
Nyaha.
Knowledge.
Thorough knowledge.
Deep knowledge.
Real knowledge.
Real knowledge beyond just intellectual knowledge.
But knowing something deeply, truly, viscerally.
These are the five powers.
So what are these five saddhas?
What does it mean to have saddha faith?
The most powerful faith, what should we have faith in?
Many people would say, well, have faith in yourself.
Maybe.
And it's important to have confidence in yourself, in your ability to succeed.
If you doubt your own ability, you become discouraged.
but that's not really the most important it isn't really the most important type of faith or confidence most important of course is that you have confidence in what you're doing and that includes confidence in your teacher if you don't have those then you've got a problem so the best kind of faith is faith in the Buddha often people will miss this
means that you need to have faith in the system which you're undertaking.
And so this includes in the Dhamma, in the teachings of the Buddha, but mostly in the Buddha himself, because if you have faith in him, well then of course you have faith in his teachings.
And so often this is construed as meaning you have to
Start by believing.
It should be a very unfortunate truth, if it were true.
Because it would mean blind faith, right?
It would mean believing something for no good reason.
It's really what blind faith is, right?
These religions that require faith,
What they're talking about is faith for no good reason.
We'll make up reasons.
Our reason is because we've had some profound experience and we deliberately interpret that to mean something that gives us faith.
So we talk about the religious experience.
Someone will have an ecstatic experience, or a feeling of love, or a feeling of oneness, and they'll say, that's God, or that's Buddha, or that's enlightenment.
We interpret our experiences in ways that help us gain faith.
Some meditators will look for these experiences, and when they get them, they'll say, yes, now I have faith because I had that experience, but it's kind of silly.
It's an artificial affectation of faith.
It's not real.
None of those faiths are really the best kind of faith.
So the best kind of faith is with reason.
And a good reason is meeting the Buddha.
If you meet the Buddha and you just say, wow, this guy clearly knows what he's talking about.
You can tell by his manner, by his demeanor.
You can tell by the words he uses, the way he speaks, how well he's able to cut through all the fluff and get right to the core of reality and truth.
So meeting the Buddha is a good reason to have faith in him.
Listening to the Buddha is a good reason to have faith in him.
And so reading the Buddha's teachings is a good reason to have faith in him.
When you read through the Tipitika, there are some things that I would agree many people find objectionable, but they're few and far between for the most part.
You wouldn't find in here any idea or concept that the Buddha enjoined violence
that he promoted unwholesomeness, that he encouraged cultivation of harm.
You find probably the best and most complete set of teachings, doctrines,
on good, love, compassion, humility, non-violence, morality, ethics, concentration, focus, mindfulness, wisdom.
Above and beyond you find wisdom.
You find a clear and parsimonious expression of the truth.
Parsimonious meaning, you know, there's no fluff, there's no fat, it's quite trimmed.
Sometimes brutally so, in the sense of not pulling any punches.
And that gives someone faith.
That being said, you could argue that that faith in the Buddha himself is not really necessary to become enlightened.
Because Pacheco Buddha ostensibly has no faith in the Buddha.
So the idea that you need to cultivate this and that this is a precursor or prerequisite for meditation, which I've heard from Buddhists, is dangerous.
It's problematic because it encourages the cultivation of blind faith.
And really the point here is that the only person who has pure, perfect faith is someone who has become enlightened.
because once they become enlightened they have no doubt that a Buddha is a Buddha they might doubt whether this person or that person is a Buddha or is an Arahant or is a Sotapanna but they won't doubt that if they know that this person is a Sotapanna and this person is not that the person who is a Sotapanna is far better they have no misconception of that and so much more so for an Arahant they have no doubt about the
the difference between someone who gets angry and someone who doesn't get angry, someone who is greedy and someone who's not greedy.
Whereas an ordinary person wouldn't have that sense.
They wouldn't know whether, given this person who gets greedy, this person who doesn't, which person should I listen to?
Which person should I look up to?
They might have heard that it's, oh, greed is bad, but they won't have the real deep understanding, the clear and perfect understanding
Greed being a sign, a clear sign, a decisive sign that someone is not enlightened.
Or anger or delusion.
So that's saddha.
What we really need for meditation and for meditation purposes is faith in what we're doing.
You could say faith in yourself, your ability to do it.
faith in our teachers.
You need this.
But it comes up, and this isn't to say that if you find yourself doubting these things that you should leave, you should stop.
You're useless.
You're unable to continue.
What it means is these are hindrances.
So either you decide that what you're doing is wrong, or you recognize that some doubt is just delusion.
Some doubt is just wrong, because it's possible to doubt that which is not worthy of doubt.
It's even possible to doubt that which you have become sure, intellectually anyway, of being good, that you've seen proof or evidence, not proof but evidence, significant and pretty much conclusive evidence of it being beneficial.
Because we're quick to forget and we become overwhelmed by doubt, even about things that are not worthy of doubt.
That's an important point to note.
So just because you doubt something doesn't mean that thing is worthy of doubt.
Our tradition is quite simple.
If you doubt, you say, doubting, doubting, let it go.
If you stick to that kind of mindset,
Then you never fall into trouble, you never come to something that is worthy of doubting.
Because, well, doubt is doubt, so what's to doubt about that, right?
You say to yourself, doubting, doubting, you're saying something that's true, you're sticking to reality, to truth.
So the best way to cultivate this kind of, the best kind of faith for a meditator is
By reminding yourself, doubting, doubting.
Let it go.
You'll feel better.
Number two, wiliya.
You need effort.
So we've talked about effort in the Book of Forests.
Aku salanang damang pahanaya.
Aku salanang damang upasampadaya.
For the destruction of unwholesomeness and the cultivation of causing to arise wholesome dhammas.
The point being here that good things don't just come to those who wait.
Goodness doesn't just arise by itself.
Those people who say that everything happens for a reason, that everything turns out well in the end, I don't know.
It really doesn't.
We're not all going to become enlightened.
I think one problem we have as a modern society is that we've become somewhat complacent with our happily ever after culture.
We're too accustomed to watching movies and reading books and listening to stories about everything ending well.
There are notable exceptions.
Shakespeare often doesn't end well.
But nonetheless, to a great extent, we get lulled into this false sense of security.
We might be lost in samsara.
We might be destined to go to hell.
We don't know what our future has in store for us.
Horrible things could happen to us tomorrow, today, in this life certainly.
And so effort is required if you want goodness.
If you want to overcome suffering, you need effort.
We cross-suffering using effort.
Good things aren't going to come, bad things aren't just going to go away, unless you work for it.
That's viriya.
Sati here is curious, but at the very least it gives us an understanding of what it really means, not mindfulness.
So I'll read you the English.
Here the noble disciple is mindful.
He uses the translation.
I think he's just translating sattva, right?
sati mahoti which just means has sati doesn't mean mindful let's read the Pali it's better sati mahoti is possessed of sati I don't know if I can translate it forget that possessing supreme sati and
Wisdom.
Sati nikepa.
Samanagata.
Parama.
Paramena sati nikepena.
Nepakena.
Nepaka is discrimination.
Nepaka is a good word.
You don't often see it paired with sati.
It comes from nipaka.
Sati nepaka.
One who has sati and nipaka.
clever and careful and that it's there to help us understand what sati is the fact that they're paired together here so there's some sense of the penetrating of the experience
going beyond ordinary observation.
That's what nipaka, I would think, implies here.
Samanagata has these things.
But then, curiously enough, the Buddha says, cira-katampi, cira-bhasitampi, sarita, ano sarita, cira-kata, cira-long-kata, dhanu,
One recollects, one remembers, one recollects that which was done long ago, that which was said long ago.
This is called sati bala.
So the important...
takeaway is that sati means to remember sati has very much to do with memory the ability to remember things that happened a long time ago that's sati so it's clear that mindfulness is not a good translation just from that that at least we can get from this the question of um
whether this is the best understanding of, say, the Satipatthana, you have to somehow make a connection there.
Why is the Buddha talking about things long ago?
I think it should be clear from this and other teachings that the Buddha doesn't recommend
encourage as a general practice the dwelling on things that have passed, right?
Going back to the past.
He does talk about recollecting past lives, which is in a roundabout way useful for cultivating a sense of context for our practice.
But all that we can get from this, and I think probably all that we should take from this, is that the ability to remember things that happened long ago and were said long ago.
It's a sign that someone has a sharp mind.
It's a sign that someone has this sati, this ability to remember.
Sarita, one remembers.
Anusarita, one remembers about something.
And so how we relate this to satipatthana in English is by saying one remembers, or one is able to remember the true nature of reality, is able to remember the present moment.
Remember, remember the objects of experience.
To not forget, right?
To be clearly aware that this is this.
Things are what they are.
And so hence, again, as I've already often explained,
That's why we remind ourselves, why we use the word, the mantra.
That's why mantra meditation is so powerful, so important, because of this word sati.
It's the cultivation of the ability to remember the present moment, to remember something.
In the case of samatha meditation, to remember the object, the concept,
In the case of Vipassana meditation, to remember the ultimate reality.
Seeing is seeing, hearing is hearing.
Pain is pain, and so on.
So you can see how this is related, how the word remembrance or recollection.
It's a good translation of the word sati, and we should be careful about this word mindfulness, because it's somewhat vague, and it leads to vague meditation.
It leads to meditation where you just sit there and watch stuff.
It can be useful, generally, but somewhat vague, imprecise.
Anyway, number four, samadhi.
Now samadhi here of course talks about the four jhanas, these jhanas that we have such trouble with in our tradition because it appears that we're perhaps not practicing these.
So granted, these are all the absorptions when you absorb into a single object.
That's very powerful.
But again, we can't take this as meaning that you have to go into those.
Nor should we take these to be necessarily some sort of trance state.
What they mean is that your mind becomes focused.
And being focused, there's happiness, there's peace, there's clarity of mind, equanimity.
And this can be achieved through vipassana.
Mahasi Sayadaw does something somewhat clever and probably based on all the criticism.
And he says that, well, we have vipassana jhanas.
And he describes the four jhanas in terms of the practice of vipassana.
You can find his description in his discourse on the Salekha Sutta.
It's quite interesting.
Nonetheless, the mind has to be focused.
What you shouldn't do is try to cultivate just insight without any kind of focus.
And so again, it's a good reason to use a mantra because it keeps you focused.
It focuses your attention.
It has a power to it.
So it's concentration.
And finally, wisdom.
And this is a good definition of wisdom.
Let's read the Pali.
Here, monks.
A disciple of the noble ones.
His wife.
Possessing of wisdom.
Samanagato.
which means the arising, udaya.
I don't know what the second word is.
Atta, I guess, being, right?
Existence.
And gaminiya, the going.
Udayatta gaminiya.
The arising, existing, well, maybe not.
Maybe the atta, I'm not sure where it's from.
Anyway, at least the arising and passing away.
Sometimes they refer to the being, the arising, existing, and then ceasing.
Panyaya.
With the wisdom of the arising and ceasing, one is possessed, one is in possession of.
And this is an important point to keep in mind
That wisdom, from Buddha's point of view, really the only truly necessary wisdom is this, is seeing arising and ceasing.
It's the beginning of vipassana, when you start to realize that reality is made up of that which arises and ceases.
You start to look at
Not only looking at experience, but you see that experience is simply that, stuff that arises and ceases.
You stop looking at it as me, mine, good, bad.
Vipassana really starts when you start to just see things as arising and ceasing.
You're able to start to look at things objectively.
You're able to watch them arise and cease.
And so you begin to look and you see more and more and finally you come to the realization that everything, everything that arises ceases.
Which is a profound realization because, not simply because of its intellectual value, but because that focus takes away from the mind the idea that
There's anything that arises that could be satisfying.
That could be a refuge.
That could be valuable.
Nothing that arises is of any value because immediately it ceases.
And that's what leads one to realize Nibbana.
Aryaya Nibedikaya Samadukakayagamnya
One has the noble dispassion.
Nibbida means penetrative.
Which is noble and penetrative.
And leads to the right destruction of suffering.
That's wisdom.
So these are the five powers.
Now I've talked about them in my booklet, about how you have to balance them.
If you haven't read my booklet, well, you shouldn't be here.
You should be off reading my booklet, or doing something else, if you're not interested in reading my booklet.
So I'm not going to go into detail in that.
But I recommend reading the booklet.
It talks about balancing these five and more how they relate to meditation.
I'm going to stop there.
So that's the Dhamma portion.
Now we have the question portion.
And with me to help is Robin.
Bhante, I've read in an Abhidhamma book that craving can be categorized as male craving and female craving, since the difference is what determines which bhava-rupani gender element one gets at conception.
Based on that, can we say that the mind has a gender, since craving does condition our habits in the mind?
No, we can't say that the mind is a gender.
If there's male craving, it's not male craving, it would be craving for the male form.
Males don't have a different kind of craving than women.
There would be craving for a type of gender.
That's what that would mean.
It wouldn't mean the craving of a male, it would be the craving for a male.
It would be the clinging or the liking of the male form or the female form, which would indeed determine which bhava-rupa you get.
The best way to deal with mosquitoes, catch them in your hand.
And if you want, I sometimes shake them up a little bit.
But if you just release them, they somehow get confused and they float away.
It's quite interesting.
The best way to get rid of bees is to put a broom out because they'll land on it and you can bring them right outside.
Okay.
They're like brooms.
They do.
They'll walk right on it and you can carry them out.
Are you reading questions?
Or am I?
Oh, I... Dear Bhante, are you a vegetarian?
No.
Buddhism teaches that in this world, that this world is just an illusion, a thought within consciousness, and meaningless have become depressed because of this, seeing this world as an illusion and meaning.
What should I do?
Yeah, Buddhism doesn't teach really that the world is an illusion.
So if you're depressed, you should read my booklet and say to yourself, depressed, depressed.
That will make you feel better.
I daily practice Vipassana meditation.
I want to one over meditation sitting MP3.
Please help me.
Sorry.
No idea what you're asking.
Something about an MP3, which I don't have.
We have some MP3s, right?
But I think you have to be a little clearer.
What is the effect to our minds when being able to meditate for longer periods?
Is that preferable for better insight?
I'm already feeling the effect of my short sessions, two per day of 30 to 40 minutes walking and sitting.
So just wondering.
I would say there's an optimum ratio between the length of time of each session and the number of sessions you do.
So if you're doing two per day,
It might not be, well, if you're doing two per day at, say, well, as you say, 30 to 40, it might be in your better interest of doing, it might be in your, it might be better in your,
What am I trying to say?
In your best interest.
In your better interest, I guess is what I was trying to say.
I don't even know if that works.
To add another session, a third session, rather than doing two hour sessions.
Or I don't know if you mean 30 to 40 each.
If you mean 30, 40 together, well, then probably you'd want to increase it a little bit.
But if you're doing like 30 minutes walking, 30 minutes sitting twice a day, you have to see for yourself, rather than pushing yourself really hard and then having all this time where you lose everything you gained, right?
Because if you do long sessions, it's more taxing, especially on someone whose mindfulness is not very high, so...
So if you increase that time, because there's so much time in between sessions, you're not actually a very good meditator in general.
So that hour that you do or two hours that you do is stressful.
But if you instead added another shorter session, relatively shorter session, in between, then your proficiency would increase.
So then you could start to lift it up.
So there's a ratio between number of sittings per day and length of...
of practice.
And that depends very much on the person.
Don't ask me.
I know everyone wants a schedule.
How many hours?
How many minutes?
You can't really do that.
I mean, we go through that in a meditation course.
It's the kind of thing that we'd have to do together in consultation.
Okay.
I'm sorry, but Chad is going to be banned from our site.
Sorry.
How do we do this?
We can't ban, but we can remove, so that's the best we can do.
Well, that works.
Well, they can always sign up, but they have to use their email to sign up, so.
Anyway, that person's gone.
While doing sitting meditation and feeling strain and pain on the lower back, I say strained, strained.
But when it doesn't go away and getting more painful, I start panicking, saying it more times faster, like a robot saying error, error.
Should I say panic to relate to the new object?
What would you recommend?
Well, you can't say pain, pain, pain.
It doesn't work.
It has to be objective.
When you're panicking, you can't say panic, panic.
If you start panicking, yeah, you should say panicked, right?
Stressed, stressed, worried, worried, afraid, afraid.
Absolutely.
If you start saying it quicker, then yeah, there's something else there that you should be noting.
It should be quite copacetic, copacetic.
Bhante, is it fair to say that to be an arahant, faith is required since one has to follow the teachings of another, as opposed to the special case of Buddhas and Pacheco Buddhas who discover the path by themselves?
You're asking...
It depends how you want me to answer that.
If you want me to answer that from the point of view of the Abhidhamma, then of course there are moments of saddha.
Saddha has to be a part of some of the moments, but saddha in the Abhidhamma sense is...
in an Abhidhamma sense, is very much the confidence of the mind state, the moment of the mind that, among many other good qualities, has no wavering, no doubt, basically.
Which doesn't mean faith in any specific thing, it just means a sense of composure.
So if you're going to talk about what is required, you can only talk in terms of ultimate reality.
So to say that this is required, that is required, you can't really do that except in terms of Abhidhamma.
So to say that yes, you must at some point in your practice have faith, right?
Because again, you can't have faith 24 hours a day.
You can't sit there, right?
It's not that you gain faith and then you have faith.
We only have faith in the moments when we think of the Buddha and have some kind of
appreciation in those moments we have faith now are those moments necessary in your progress no those moments are not necessary they're useful highly useful and recommended and so on but they're not necessary but i get i get what you're getting at um but i think the answer is no i think that based on what i assume you're trying to ask
The answer is no.
The difference with the arahant is they need to learn from the Buddha, the Dhamma.
They need to learn from the Buddha.
But the faith that they have to have is not so much different from that of a Pacheco Buddha.
They just have to have the collectiveness of mind that is free from doubt.
And it's just a technical saddha.
It's just a technical faith.
It's technically those mind states have faith.
But you can get that just by experimenting without any faith in what you're doing.
And I suppose, to some extent, you could call it faith.
Because we do talk about this faith that when someone says, you know, this leads to this.
Well, just even to try it, right?
You need a moment of faith.
But to call it faith is a bit of a stretch because
You're not accepting it.
You're just giving them the benefit of the doubt.
So if giving someone the benefit of the doubt is faith, yeah.
But that's all you need.
So it's just a bit tricky because we start to get technical and then it's a very different realm when you start to get technical.
But anytime you say is X required, you kind of have to get technical.
Do you think concentration or Samatha meditation can be used by some people as an escape from life in the same way an alcoholic person drinks to distract themselves from their troubles?
You can be, absolutely.
You can get attached to it as well.
Ajahn Chah said it's based on craving.
Ajahn Chah, this guy who all these people look up to, there's a bunch of Buddhists in my tradition who are fairly, well not all of them are, but some of them are.
Some of them are really good and actually they appreciate our tradition.
Because our tradition is big in Thailand, but their tradition is as well.
But in their tradition they don't have meditation courses.
So I've been told that if you go to Wat Banana Chat and you're looking for a meditation course, they'll tell you to go to one of our centers.
And if you've come from one of our centers, as I understand, they'll let you practice our technique.
someone recently said to me there's an Ajahn Chah center near where they live and he's been to see these people and they said it's fine if he practices our tradition I think somehow I remember I recently was talking about this or maybe I was the one who said yeah I think they would be okay because generally they are um
So right, getting off track there, but Ajahn Chah is the head of this tradition and some people in that tradition have gotten really, really obsessed with the idea of having to practice Samatha as a requirement.
And they say, oh no, I read a fairly critical article of one of his books where he said that you can't possibly be attached to Samatha because Samatha is the freeing yourself of attachment.
And so I quoted Ajahn Chah, who was this guy's preceptor, I think, as saying...
It's based on craving.
Samatha is not, can't be the end all, be all end all, because it's based on craving.
This is the thing, I leave the doors open and these insects come in.
As long as that big raccoon doesn't come in.
He might, no?
That's right, one of these days the raccoon might come into our kitchen.
Just find a broom.
Hello, I just wanted to ask you what are some good tips for beginners meditation and what is the best time to meditate when tired or we're entered or when energetic in your opinion.
Well, if you haven't read my booklet on how to meditate, that's where I would recommend you start.
If you want to find it, it's on this site.
There's a link to it anyway.
You go to the menu button in the top left, open it up, and you'll see a word that says guide.
Click on the guide and it'll take you to the page that has our guide on how to meditate.
And that page also has a link to a frequently asked questions list, which has some good tips.
So any of you who have read the booklet but are still looking for tips, I think that FAQ is pretty good.
It's got a lot of good questions answered, I think.
I mean, not to toot my, because I was the one who wrote it, but I think it's adequate, at least.
Best time to meditate, whenever you have time to meditate.
Meditate.
Can you develop insight during walking meditation, or is walking meditation just there to increase the effectiveness of sitting meditation?
Of course you can.
You can become enlightened in walking.
Ananda, no, not Ananda, but there was a monk, Naga, I think was his name.
He didn't want to become enlightened.
He wanted to wait for Maitreya, I think.
But then his students found out that he was dying and he wasn't going to become enlightened.
And they said, well, what are you doing?
Here you've taught all of us and you're not enlightened.
He said, well, I've meditated, but I've just made a vow to wait for the next Buddha because he wanted to see the next Buddha.
who was going to come in perhaps a long, long time in the future.
But they convinced him, and he said, okay, fine.
And he said, look, I'm going to show you a new way to become enlightened, because you hear about people becoming enlightened during walking.
I'll show you during sitting, so I'll show you during walking.
And so he got up and walked, and he became enlightened after taking like one step or something.
Hmm.
Just a second.
Looks like we're going to need a way to ban people.
We can just keep making them sign up.
Just keep deleting them.
It'll be a game of cat and mouse.
What is Parinirvana?
Is it an experience, a void, or nothing?
Can it be described?
Parinirvana refers to, means like final nirvana or complete nirvana.
So nirvana is a reality.
It's probably the best way to talk about it.
Parinirvana means complete, a complete nirvana.
Which means
complete end to arising as you could say complete end to suffering if you want to learn about nirvana because it's a very hard thing to talk about um
You could read in the Malinda Panha, there's some really good descriptions of nirvana.
They're not descriptions, but they're similes.
Nirvana is like the top of a mountain, because it's far above the ordinary.
That kind of thing.
But no, nirvana means the end of suffering.
That's all you have to know about it.
Because all you have to understand about Buddhism is it leads you to less and less suffering.
So the more you practice, the more you find peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering.
That's all you really need to know.
Nirvana just means no suffering.
Sorry, I'm not sure if it's just my computer, but it looks like these are loading.
Is that what you're seeing as well?
Maybe we're being hit by some hackers who have gotten angered at the fact that we're deleting their user accounts.
I think sometimes you have to reload the whole thing.
But now I'm getting loading as well.
There's 32 people on, so that might have something to do with it.
It's clear now.
OK.
Should we avoid rhythm when noting?
Or rhyme, sorry, rhyme.
No rhythm.
Rhythm.
We don't really try to avoid things.
But if it does come up, rhythm is not correct.
So you should be noting it as knowing, knowing, and so on like that.
Knowing would probably be the best when you realize that you're rhyming.
You're not rhyming.
You're giving a rhythm to it.
You certainly shouldn't encourage a rhythm.
And if you're gaining a rhythm, it's a sign that you're not really being mindful, because rhythm requires past and future.
The present has no rhythm to it.
A friend of mine has critiqued Buddhism as too passive and defeatist.
I couldn't really come up with a decent response to this.
sorry, just a second, is too passive.
Too passive, right?
Too passive.
Too passive for what?
This is the question.
So let's think of some ways in which it might be too passive.
Too passive to stop the world from falling apart, right?
I mean, Buddhism doesn't make a claim to be able to solve all of the world's problems, but nothing else appears to be working.
And I suppose Buddhism actually makes the claim to being able to solve, what did I say, of having the potential to solve all of the world's problems if people practiced it.
If everyone practiced Buddhism, there would be no problems to solve.
Buddhism is actually quite powerful in terms of solving the world's problems because it cuts right to the source.
So you want us to be very active and get out there and save the world, right?
Except all those people who have tried to save the world have ended up, you know,
being as much a failure as they were a success at the best of times.
Let's look at some of the activisms, the good ones, right?
Gandhi, let's take Gandhi who was, you know, whatever controversy there is, there's some sense that he did some good things.
Well,
I don't want to get into it.
Let's not get into it.
Because there are good things that these people did.
But what is good, what is best about a movement, what is best about activism is the state of mind of the person.
So Gandhi was good because of the purity.
whether it was real or not, but there was a sense, a belief, that there was something noble about it.
And like Martin Luther King, the rightness of their cause.
How do you have rightness of cause?
Buddhism focuses on the rightness, focuses on making people's minds right.
If your mind is in the wrong way, being active is of no use to anyone.
As far as being defeatist, nothing could be more farther from the truth.
Buddhism is very much active in terms of finding a solution.
It says that we are all personally responsible for our universe.
and it teaches us how to find the ultimate happiness the ultimate success to conquer our universe Buddhism is like a religion of conquering dominating winning the game it's very ambitious actually but you know
you can just say to him dude I'm not you don't want to practice Buddhism don't practice Buddhism helps me does good things for me but if you don't it's not your thing power to you since Buddhism isn't about convincing other people a decent response might be to find other friends no I don't know that's probably too harsh
It's hard.
It's hard convincing other people that their views are wrong.
And the best way with Buddhism, I think, is just to state facts that it's helped you.
Can Buddhism help people to deal with the so-called mental illnesses?
Yeah, that's what Buddhism is all about.
I think you're referring to acute mental illness, like the ones that are diagnosed.
But you have to remember, just because a doctor tells you that you have a mental illness, doesn't make it categorically different from the mental illnesses that we all suffer from.
They're acute.
They're just acute versions of the same thing.
So an acute mental illness is of course more difficult, but it's not categorically different.
Even psychosis, I would argue,
are maybe in some way categorically different, but in some way not categorically different.
Meaning that perhaps not in this life can they be cured.
But the mental aspect of them, I would argue that in many cases can be cured.
Like a person with schizophrenia.
could, I would argue, learn to see that their hallucinations are simply hallucinations, that seeing is just seeing, hearing is just hearing, and cease with the paranoia.
I would argue that meditation has the potential to help with that.
It may be very difficult.
It may even be impossible, but I'd say there's at least a chance.
What's the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism?
Yeah, I'm not going to answer that.
Read an encyclopedia.
Then you're all caught up on things.
All right.
Good enough.
We'll have to talk to our IT team about
Like if we could get people's IP addresses, and then we could ban people by IP address, that might be a step we have to take in the future, because we may very well get bombarded.
I mean, these people who have just been acting up may very well decide that they want to do something nasty to us.
So we may have to find ways to prevent that.
Anyway, thanks everyone for the most part, by and large, being a good group of people.
That's what we're here for.
If you've been the sort of individual we might call a not-so-good person, well, I wish you all the best in becoming a better person for your own benefit, that you may find peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering.
Everyone else as well.
Good night, everyone.
And thanks, Robin.
Thank you, Bhante.
Good night.