Buddhism is bad for you: the cult mentality in the modern religion.

okay but let me ask because i mean the
reasons for my getting involved with buddhism are completely uh different from iran why now so let's say in the year 2021 why in 2021 would you want to be involved in buddhism and i mean that in the broadest sense whether you're referring to it as a textual tradition or as a cultural tradition or a temple but like not not necessarily any one element of it but why in the broadest sense buddhism is getting why would you want to be involved in what motivates you positively so i grew up in a very violent household um i grew up enduring a lot of physical abuse and when i was in my early teens i found a book about japanese culture and there was so much serenity and tranquility i'm like i don't know what this is and it fascinated me because my house was not tranquil and so i i felt like i needed self-control i needed to understand where the anger was coming from now i got away from that like i told you i went into a lot of drugs i went to a lot of drinking my father was an alcoholic there was just a lot of rampant drugs in my house and so i got away from everything and then when i separated from my wife because i was working too much i really felt like i needed to have some sense of i just wanted to to to get back to the place where i felt tranquil i felt like i could work on myself and do better and be the best dad it could be for my kids and i felt like buddhism was it because it had been such a large part of my life but i'm just i don't know what it is anymore i can't even tell people i'm a buddhist because i'm embarrassed for all the things that they think it is right and so i don't even know what i am but you know i go back to the dhammapada all right go back to okay right but let me just pause let me just point this out to you but your answer has almost entirely been about you it's not been about buddhism [Music] well i think the sad part is is that i think there are a lot more people like me who have been wanting to get involved in it but have hit in the wall of just so much fraud so much [ __ ] so much lying that we get just like we just leave because there are very few people who tell the truth yes and when i came across your information i was blown away because i had this feeling that what i was reading in the in the canon that i was misinterpreting because everybody else like biku bodhi like all of those people were saying that my thoughts were wrong now i don't read paulie but i was kind of getting the intention of is that the intention of what he said now i've run into some people well i don't know if you've heard of daniel ingram have you heard of this guy oh i have but i haven't heard the name for 10 years or something sorry i could google it but i just say when you say that name i think where do i know that from so go on [Music] you know like i call him the harry potter of buddhism because he he basically says that you know he's gone through all levels of jhana and you know he wrote a book about it and he just he's one of these guys who just believes that buddhism is all about meditation right but everything he spoke about is all hallucination right and i asked him that straight out i emailed him i said listen this just sounds like you're hallucinations right he's already very rare though if he's willing to talk about what he saw and felt when he thinks he experienced jhana that's already very very rare most people are right but most people most people are evasive and you know they don't really you know including buddhist monks they will not really admit to what it is they believe in or what they think they've experienced go on there's a kind of honesty in that even if it's even if it's complete [ __ ] or even if it's an intentional cult scam because most people are so evasive go on now he wrote a whole book on it um and again i went through the book i was kind of taken aback by it because i can already tell you're too smart for this i'm sorry just know with the tone of your voice i talked to so many people in buddhism where you know from the first minute you talk to them oh well you know my life is a dream and i just float through life like like you know but i mean you know those people they're out there in their tens of thousands and their hundreds of thousands there are people who are born victims for this but i mean i can i mean look even if you didn't tell me the rest of the story i already know in a sense where this is going because you are not dumb enough to be an uncritical victim of this but but but i have sympathy a lot of people are dumb enough and they matter too but don't go on i mean well no i've run into way too many people who want to have somebody tell them what buddhism is and then just do what they say they don't want to read anything they don't give two shits about the pali cannon they just want to do a ritual grab a magic charm and pretend their life is peaceful i can't do that i've never been one to do that you know i i went to that temple and the only reason i went there is because the only buddhist temple in the entire area and sadly it's a bunch of people who are free to make magic charms to talk about demon you know demonic spirits and and how if you bow 300 times today reciting the name amitabh a thousand times in earnest then you're better off buddhist than anybody who understands anything about buddhism right so i was one of two white people in this entire place i was trying to learn mandarin because i wanted to fit in so badly they were calling me white monkey somebody told me they were calling me that maybe maybe you could get upgraded to the golden monkey or something maybe i didn't donate enough to get there um but yeah it was weird because i was doing all this free labor to them like it was almost i'm starting to write about it the the title of the book so far is called um uh forget the starving feed the statues and and that basically is my entire experience we had people come to the temple begging for food hey maybe the title could be the first of the white monkeys no yeah the first of the white monkeys right the weird thing is it's like i don't want to sound like i'm racist but i was willing to do everything for this temple and they were promoting me as a white person they gave me this this coveted position of like tour guide for this stupa yeah and you know the stoop is gorgeous don't get me wrong there's relics in there if i could get you in there right now it's closed they have got like palm leaf poly up there locked away yeah and i would love to get you in there i've seen a lot of palm leaf manuscripts so don't worry about it i'm not missing but yeah it's all forgeries though do you know what i mean like oh yeah well what what normally happens is just the people well for one thing ethically and legally it may be illegal to buy these things but they're available for purchase it's just the people oh yeah oh yeah there are thousands and thousands throughout southeast asia but most time people buy them not knowing what they are now you know the people who are doing it for money then it's like baseball card collecting where they're buying this stuff and then find out what it is and they hope it's worth money and basically it never is and basically with with teravata buddhism there is no such thing as a financially valuable manuscript there's no market for that you know by by contrast uh tibetan art can be worth a lot of money so people who buy up buddhist paintings and statuary from tibet they can do that in a for profit base even say buddhist sculptures from myanmar but actual pali manuscripts you know they're either worth zero or they're worth less than it talked cost you to import the next for them but you know in terms of what people buy and uh back in the old days i got some questions on the internet it's been a long time where people emailed me photographs of a manuscript and normally they'd say they had acquired it from their grandfather and not purchased it in the black market um yeah but and uh you know sometimes you tell them well bad news it's not written in pally it's actually written in this other language from this other period of time um or sometimes you say guess what it's lotion folklore you know like not it's not really a buddhist text it's the equivalent of robin hood in that culture but you know robin hood is not the bible you know in the same sense folklore is not the the buddhist canon um but yeah that that that stuff is going on um it's just that there's there's really no money in the game the most pathetic and tragic thing is that um the actual archives which i spent a lot of time visiting so like the official government archives in sri lanka the official government archives in poorer countries like laos and cambodia they actually do get looted and it is widely yeah yeah yeah it is widely presumed that it's their own staff it's their own employees stealing right well it could be someone like a janitor but of course it could it could also be a thief it could be someone who comes in but peop somebody is going into these places and stealing the buddhist manuscripts and then uh selling them on the black market so you know i mean um the good news is nobody cares but no that's a mass phenomenon and i went to one of those manuscriptorio with a buddhist monk who'd last been there five years earlier and he was able to say whoa there's a lot of stuff missing from the shelves that was here five years ago and you know so yeah you know it's this is uh when i was in laos there was so so just to be clear the vast majority of manuscripts in a country like laos are of no historical significance um it's just i mean they're books but there was one discovered that i think was 400 years old or something and it was really important and there were these german researchers who discovered it because you know you have to care to know like if you have a pile of manuscripts and a whole bunch of them are from the late 19th century and are worthless and then there's one that's 400 years old it's only going to stand out if you're if you're somebody like me who cares about it like you notice the stuff but you first notice the style of handwriting is different and then you say whoa let's let's take a look um so some german researchers there i met those guys we weren't friends but there were people i drank i'd literally drank coffee with them um coffee wasn't that great but anyway these they they discovered they said wow okay great well let's set it out on this table and we'll come back tomorrow morning and start photographing it uh you know because it's easier to work with digital photographs and then start studying it but the photographs will be preserved they came back the next morning and there wasn't anything on that table anymore so again it's presumed that one of the employees they just saw this oh the white people are getting excited that this particular book is worth money and they the person stole it to sell in the black market but who whether it's the black market or not who would pay even 100 or something like that it's it's very very hard to imagine if something's beautifully illustrated um then it's worth money because the illustrations but basically the the real pali canon the real buddhist manuscripts never are illustrated unless it's something like a medical uh essay in pally like describing how different medicines i think but but uh there are there are there are illustrated things are worth money because the illustration but yeah that long story short about about manuscripts and i have been in meetings at museums i used to be employed in the museum sector and i never signed any contract saying i wouldn't talk about this stuff or keep it secret by the way where people were sitting and openly talking about the illegal uh manuscript trade like buying them for the museum and the uh statuary uh trade you know buying buying up buddha statues so that is that is ongoing and you know where the the the tricks to take something criminal and make it just barely legal were very much being discussed and how how even the most respectable museums put money to this from memory i think if you uh export uh a buddhist um artifact to switzerland i think after 10 days or 10 business days it's declared swiss patrimony and then you can you know auction it and switch so yeah the way there are certain places whether it's switzerland hong kong or singapore they have laws that basically encourage uh the black market in in fine arts but yeah so this stuff is available and these cultures they were massively productive of this kind of art like you know tibet was drowning in buddhist statues the cultural obsession was making as many statues and paintings of buddhist themes as possible and you know likewise southeast asia was drowning in this stuff so you know it wasn't scarce say at the end of world war ii there was a lot of this stuff to be put on the black market and you know it still isn't scarce it still isn't valuable for that reason and sadly it's also not valuable because of scholarship so so one final anecdote but this is probably more of what you're interested in because it's not really the art history side uh there was one researcher who lived in australia and his name was primoz pachenko so i assume he's uh from poland originally i'm sorry maybe he was estonian like i don't i don't know but i assume he was from poland or somewhere in eastern europe but he was living and working in australia as a researcher and he just asked the question well all these white people are working with the commentaries of the pali canon but why do they assume there's only one set of commentaries for these ancient buddhist texts why don't i just go and ask around in some traditional temples in northern myanmar like hey do you have other commentaries and the answer is yes and right you know now i can't say right away but i think his research trip was only like 20 days long it wasn't he wasn't out there for years looking i forget it was i'm sorry it was 20 days or 30 days but you know he had a job back in back in australia but he went he visited some buddhist temples he talked to some monks i think through a translator and then and they took him to the manuscript yeah i think we have some stuff with that and they there were some ancient manuscripts there that were other uh you know commentarial traditions that compete with buddhaghosa so buddhaghosa is not the same person as the buddha he for listeners in the audience he is the person who wrote what are referred to as the commentaries but he wasn't he had competition but this is the point he wasn't the only author on the planet you know at that at the price of that time or whatever so he he found apparently some other commentaries and then he died and the point is the point is nobody had attempted this kind of research before him and nobody attempted this kind of research after him and apparently at that time so this is maybe now 10 years ago 15 years ago i was alive i was as you're about to hear i was involved in my tiny uh way uh at that time you could do it you could go out and discover new ancient buddhist manuscripts nobody had translated nobody had looked at before um so you know this has happened this has happened rarely it happened with the discovery of uh one manuscript in cambodia which it was an ancient pali manuscript from from india but you know hadn't been known before it was discovered in cambodia but it happened so rarely because nobody's looking nobody's interested that nobody cares probably especially in in myanmar in any case who who do you think emailed his widow after his death asking about completing this research project or at least cleaning up the bits and pieces of it because like he died in the middle of researching this and publishing it so probably there's work that's done but that hasn't moved i did i got in touch this one and and i was right so in case you think there's like a ton of intellectual you know resources going to waste here in case there's a whole lot of talented people no there's incredibly little talent there are incredibly few sincere intellectuals uh there are and you know the majority of the people who are involved in the game are insane cult members of one kind or another i wanted to talk to you though is because i think what i find the most offensive thing is that if anybody's really serious about this practice yeah you have to accept the fact that there's spirits and ghosts i get it right i don't you know it is what it is i take it for what it is but what i what i have a problem with is people like yourself are like institutionally pushed away because you have answers and nobody wants to hear it nobody wants to talk about it no they just want to be okay with really bad interpretations and go from there it's almost like people like you are not allowed to exist because how dare you right you know and then i remember you you had that phone call with that professor and he did his damnedest to keep you out of buddhism as a path right and secondly then blamed your attitude on the reason why you'll never succeed and it's like you're like wait a minute i have the answers and it's like that doesn't matter and his answer was basically nope no we just don't like you even though you know what you're talking about more than we do yeah but let's just blame the messenger and that's why i'm like i'm watching your videos going well wait a minute this can't be the whole story but the more and more that i listen and read i'm like that is they just they just want to make sure you don't have a platform they could give a [ __ ] like if they don't know anything i took a course through princeton and i got my money back because the guy that was teaching the course didn't [ __ ] know anything and he was teaching soku gokai the entire time and i'm like that's not really oh wow wow he is the head of buddhism for that university yeah and i'm like you're a soku gokai member i said that to him on chat i'm like that is not buddhism my friend you were in a cult and he said if you don't like it that's what the course is about and i'm like well no i don't i want my money back so i got my money back yeah like i come i hear you and i'm like you should have been one of the main proponents of of shaping how we study this how we practice it but nobody wants to hear from you and it blows my [ __ ] so okay look i partly agree with you the sense in which i disagree is to kind of get to an even simpler level of what buddhism and the cult mentality does to people so i and just to be clear buddhism doesn't have to be a cult but it is it is for most people involved in it like for me it wasn't a cult and i didn't have these kinds of supernatural beliefs i didn't believe in ghosts or demons i didn't believe in reincarnation right so i mean it doesn't have to be and in my videos one of the most positive things i say is this could be meaningful for you in the same way that shakespeare is meaningful for people and i think that's the content there like there's good philosophy there if you're willing to do the hard work well i don't know if you've ever known the sort of romantic wistful character who when tragedy strikes quotes shakespeare you know there are people like that you know like it's shakespeare is something you can quote at a funeral you know you can give a speech at a funeral you can quote it at a wedding and when things happen in life you can kind of live with the literature of shakespeare in this way that's meaningful but it's not magical it doesn't solve your problem it's not like oh i know just what to do in this situation because shakespeare told me but you know if you think about it though that's all people are giving the credence of it's almost like as long as i have a meme that the buddha said this then things are magically better and it's like you know a you know the buddha said that secondly this whole thing is not about memes but it just seems to be co-opted by mindfulness by yoga by all these people who just want to bastardize it for profit yes you know it's like it doesn't make enough money on its own but some some of those people are sincerely insane though it's not always profitable it's not always so around here right no but i mean for meditation classes right like i mean come on sure but but but as much as the money motive may prevail it's always important to keep in mind some of them are sincere and their sincerity precisely indicates craziness but so just to finish what i was saying uh before we got into shakespeare you know my experience is that buddhists will not even be emotionally able to ask me a question like how are things in cambodia and that that shows how brittle their view is we're like we can't even talk about that now i'm not going to praise catholicism as the greatest religion in the world i'm obviously not really a fan of catholicism but i do think catholics can sit down and say wow you know i just got back from a vacation in sicily how are things with the church in sicily well you know it's really corrupt and it wasn't it wasn't what i was expecting based on my experience in spain oh really yeah when i was in spain i lived in barcelona and it was like this and now i was in southern italy in sicily and it was like that catholics can talk in a worldly pragmatic way about what's going on in the church they can talk about the politics of the church how the church relates to and struggles with the world they can talk about topical issues like evolution and the church's attitude towards evolution and homosexuality so this you know in any other context this might be kind of damning the catholics by faint praise but i mean this as sincere praise catholics can deal with all that stuff in my experience of the buddhists even the best the most elite buddhists uh like a lead in the sense of uh having phds sorry i should be more clear because i just i just really mean elite education in this sense yeah they they cannot they cannot just ask me or or appreciate that i know something interesting because i've spent time in cambodia like it's not about right or wrong like it's not like i'm going to prove you wrong or i'm going to debunk what you believe in telling you about cambodia but just can we talk about cambodia and if we can't talk about cambodia then we can't talk about slavery and we we you know we sure as hell can't talk about the fact that buddhists believe that when people are reincarnated with a disability it's you know it's their own fault and you know there are all kinds of i've experienced that i i picked up shifu and we went to get uh some groceries and there was a guy on the side of the road asking for change so i gave him some and he said how dare you he said you just messed with his karma and i'm like what are you talking about the guy's he's homeless we're supposed to help people and he's like no that's his karma that's his problem i'm like what i'm crazy and i was just like i'm sat there going no we help people because he's he was he's in our lives we're supposed to do what we can to ease people's suffering he couldn't get over the fact that i did that he was like oh you've just made damned him to more bad karma and i'm just like nope i don't believe it i don't believe it and i will not believe it because if that's what this is about i don't want any part of it back back to the dark ages but you know i mean the other thing you you wrote to me about is racism within buddhism you know but okay but if we're talking about chinese buddhists specifically i would say it is fairly common for them to believe that people are reincarnated as black rather than white similarly as a punishment for bad carbon now i would not say that's a 100 percent of chinese people believe that but if you ask them so something that they'd be more comfortable answering is say the difference between being born chinese and being born mongolian and they regard mongolians as inferior is that the result of bad karma uh many chinese would immediately say that yes the difference between being incarnated as chinese or fungulian is heck if you're not a chinese you're you're basically not that good either well the thing was i was a white guy so for some reason they thought i was going to bring in all these white people and bring in more money which wasn't the case at all but then secondly when a black gentleman came in and asked to volunteer he was literally told to like get the [ __ ] out and it was like i've never seen her do that and i said to her why she's like no no i want none of his kind here and i'm like oh i get it now well when you put it that way yeah but then the thing was is women had to stay on one side of the temple men we're on the other women had to follow men because men were more important and we was scorching hot one day in the temple we have 80 year old women there i wasn't even allowed to put a fan on them while we did evening prayer because the spirits would enter through their ears if i did right and i'm like are you [ __ ] kidding me and i'm like i can't i just i just this is too much for me right like it just it was so crazy i couldn't deal with it and then i just when people were taking pictures with me i'm like no i'm a [ __ ] circus side show here i can't do this anymore right i can't and so i left but these guys are building a hundred million dollar temple and i'm like where are you getting this money from like literally where are you getting it from and the only thing i can think of is there's money pouring into that church or that temple that i don't know dude it's just it just reeks to me as so much bad stuff it's not buddhism i don't know what they do but they were little stop counters around their neck and they count amitabha and if they say it ten thousand times in one day well the next day they gotta say at ten thousand and one right and that's all they give a [ __ ] about and i'm like and as as you probably know amitabha does not appear in the power cannon is and i was pretty certain of that but i didn't know about amitabha but i'm like hey if you could just make up buddhas and then just say well i don't want to practice you know i don't want to practice what the actual buddha said if he existed i want to practice what one we made upset i mean that's just like oh [ __ ] sakes like how can it be this way you can't make a new jesus you know and say i'm just going to follow this guy now well people can and they do on the contrary get started to start a new religion we can start a new relation tomorrow you can take everything you've just learned and started new vision why is buddhism why are people in buddhism so just okay with people just [ __ ] with it in every way shape or form like you even atheists will defend buddhist buddhism zen to me is the most [ __ ] corrupt of them all yes you're just supposed to sit there and stare at a wall and things will just magically get better in your life right there's no goal mine can't have a goal when you practice well and zen zen is the most authoritarian too you're not allowed to ask questions and so yeah so the the element of blind obedience and blind faith is really the worst thing it's [ __ ] ritual and it is it's just you know i wear the rokasu and i have a title and i'm so special and i have a dharma name and i just don't know what to do anymore you know i feel like i can't tell people have you considered converting the mormonism and what am i gonna well i've considered just like leaving it all behind you know i just got finished reading the gita and it basically has a lot of similar situations that the buddha talked about but then again it's all about you know you better honor krishna and do everything for krishna and i'm like i don't i don't need to do that i just need to focus on my life my kids try to get myself back to a place yeah so i feel like i had more sense of it when i was 12 than i do now you know okay but let me ask because i mean the reasons for my getting involved with buddhism are completely uh different from iran why now so let's say in the year 2021 why in 2021 would you want to be involved in buddhism and i mean that in the broadest sense whether you're referring to it as a textual tradition or as a cultural tradition or a temple but like not not necessarily any one element of it but why in the broadest sense buddhism is why would you want to be involved in what motivates you positively so i grew up in a very violent household um i grew up enduring a lot of physical abuse and when i was in my early teens i found a book about japanese culture and there was so much serenity and tranquility i'm like i don't know what this is and it fascinated me because my house was not tranquil and so i i felt like i i needed self-control i needed to understand where the anger was coming from now i got away from that like i told you i went into a lot of drugs i went to a lot of drinking my father was an alcoholic there was just a lot of rampant drugs in my house and so i got away from everything and then when i separated from my wife because i was working too much i really felt like i needed to have some sense of i just wanted to to to get back to the place where i felt tranquil i felt like i could work on myself and do better and be the best dad it could be for my kids and i felt like buddhism was it because it had been such a large part of my life but i'm just i don't know what it is anymore i can't even tell people i'm a buddhist because i'm embarrassed for all the things that they think it is right and so i don't even know what i am but you know i go back to the dhammapada all right go back to okay right but let me just pause let me just point this out to you but your answer has almost entirely been about you it's not been about buddhism no i'm not saying that i'm sure that's a completely sincere answer and it's probably the right answer but like aside from the aesthetics of japanese culture which you can have in your life i mean without buddhism you become a japanophile and many people do you know you can make japan your winter vacation destination every year you could you could spend a month in japan every year and learn japanese and whatever it is you like about japan you could you know you can enjoy that in life but with that exception all you've been talking about is you and not saying like there's something there's something i want to learn or know or access to through buddhism just really really brief parallel but totally different situation i was giving advice to a young woman recently about thailand and so she's allegedly going to learn thai and move to thailand and get a job in thailand and one of the simplest questions i asked her was why thailand because it could be egypt you could go to egypt well not anywhere i mean you know right now it probably can't be iran you know some you know afghanistan probably off them there are you know there are places that are kind of just more comfortable or more humanly possible i mean even the contrasting thailand and cambodia and laos and so on i know but okay but like can you be honest with me and you could be can you be honest with yourself about why thailand because you're you're talking about making a sacrifice or commitment you're doing work with the next five years your life whether it's a sacrifice or not that will change your life forever and if you chose japan instead of thailand or egypt instead of thailand uh or uh poland you know that could change your your life in your future forever too so why why thailand now look i mean you just say in some ways it's deeper in some ways it's shallower to ask you know why buddhism but there's there's i'm not saying retroactively there has to be good answer like you know i'm sure within the last few years the answer you've given me is the answer you know you were upset about your divorce you had this and that on your mind but now looking ahead to the next five years i don't know how much of a commitment you've already made to chinese as a language chinese is a lot of work okay well okay good then it's not then it's not a huge loss to shift that way because i mean you know you know you you know so it was very hard for me to commit myself to learning a language when i knew deep down inside that i didn't really care for most of the people i was speaking with so it was it wasn't i don't know i think i was trying really hard to be a part of their group um but you're right i mean why buddhism i don't know why did i pick up the gita and find the same things and say well it's not for me i don't know i mean i guess i'm looking why am i not a stoic i need you know i'm a person that likes to take action in life i like to be find some sense of like purpose i like to be accountable and responsible for my own actions why not stoicism i don't know right seems to me like it's blowing up too and people love getting memento more tattoos like something you know but i guess i i guess i was just i felt like there was a connection there prior like i felt that there was something spiritual there but i'm not a hugely spiritual person right there was no god to pray to there was none of that i felt like that was positive but i felt like the poly canon was saying you have to do the work to get the results and that's something that i like because i want to be responsible to myself to do the work whereas a lot of religions i show up on sunday i say a couple hail marys and i'm good to go that's just not me i need to do the work i need to hold myself accountable right but so so look you you are uh we're keeping you anonymous i don't mind if you want to we can we can know you but you are approximately 50 years old right yeah all right so you know another question is at what point do you stop reading other people's books and following other people's philosophies and you know write your own and follow your own that's right like you said that really blew my mind is that these are just stories how come you're not writing your own and i'm like [ __ ] because i've never felt like i was legitimate enough to write my own but when you said that right i wrote about that for about four hours and said wait a minute it's just a story it's just a [ __ ] story how come i cannot write my own right but you know well look it may be it may be that that's something you're doing at age 60 like you know it may not be it may not be at age 50. you know i i wasn't writing my own uh say 10 years ago now that's partly because i was just busy doing other things but you know you've been doing a lot of things yeah yeah you devote yourself so much to it you know what i mean right you're right the person that passes me off is somebody who just gently looks into something you just don't you don't give me that impression at all if you're going to talk about it it's because you know about it right so right i think you dedicate yourself to things quite a bit well i i wanted to i wanted to put in a kind of footnote on that too because some people would would hear what i just said and i've talked to people who have this attitude and think oh they can close up all their books or burn their bookshelf and just focus on being a creative person uh ex nihilo working working from nothing you know so right now i'm writing a book i've ended up researching certain court cases for this book like going through the records of exactly what the judge said in court to include in the book so i mean you know my point is just very simply creative writing also involves reading now even if i were going to write a comedy movie uh like a script for a comedy movie i would probably end up doing research and reading to write that you know something about the setting or whatever so now that's a relatively shallow example but you know i'm not saying learn nothing i think if you are you know i think if you are articulating your own ideas and and kind of uh writing your own books and and regarding yourself as a creative person there are research elements to being a creative person and i think there were also destructive elements to being a creative person i think i think it's completely legitimate uh to you know to kind of lash out at what it is you don't like about buddhist culture or canadian culture or to write something that really you know demolishes these things so i just say when i'm talking about regarding yourself uh creatively kind of first and foremost that does not mean that i think that at age 50 uh you have nothing more to learn i'm now 42 and i still have a hell of a lot to learn and i am learning i am learning but i'm not learning passively like i'm very much learning to get kind of bricks that i'm putting in the wall of what it is about myself yeah i've always taken that approach of of kind of the jeet kune do of of religion for me i've always tried to bruce lead in a sense of like what works and what doesn't and the only way it works is if i test it okay okay okay so let me all right someone push back the problem is if you start from the premise that whatever the buddha taught is profound and true and right and then you you're never going to do that right like just just just even having that worship pardon me worshipful attitude um you know as opposed to i i remember kind of blowing somebody's mind this is a very straightforward example of translation and mistranslation it was a particular very short passage from the pali canon so i think it was like four or five sentences long but it was really warning that uh people who meditate go crazy now i i'm yeah i'm sure the the meaning is you know hey because it's still true today but probably at that time in ancient india some of these people were meditating and they were hallucinating and believing in hallucinations you know exactly the same issues we encounter in the 21st century um that this was really a very stark warning about hallucination uh insanity using the word insanity in in pali uh resulting from from meditation and the translation of it into english was like super vague it was like how can we softball this as much as possible and so this person sent me this and said oh wow and i wrote back oh wow you found a really interesting passage because this is whoever wrote this passage in the pali canon obviously had a very skeptical view of the fact that some people when they meditate go nuts you know absolutely but but part of what blew the person's mind i was talking to you was that i said whoever wrote this and they're like what do you mean i said oh well don't you realize like at least a few dozen people if not a couple hundred people participated in writing the pal again it wasn't written it wasn't written by one person ashoka changed it everybody you but even before that the very first authorship these different little scraps of text reflect different people's perspective you know like like they're not the same philosophy whoever wrote this passage was someone who had this very critical view of meditation but there are other passages that are a hundred percent uncritical of meditation that are 100 uncritical of hallucination itself that just seem to describe whatever you see when you're hallucinating as being some kind of valid transcendental experience of a higher reality that is what has been just ripping apart western buddhism is it's tied into like psilocybin use it's been tied into like spirit rock with all the sexually like problems and you know like shambhala and over in nova scotia with all their sexual problems and it kills me with noah levine too because like i hold people i hold certain people to such a higher standard like this guy who is not only entrenched in recovery but also in like buddhist philosophy like buddhism and meditation is like figuring out ways to let go of ego right let go of pride you know to work through urges and cravings and then you hear about him like forcing himself on women i'm like what have you been doing like you created something that's supposed to help you fight these urges and work through them and be a better person i'm just like what are you doing man a 64-page report describing two credible allegations of sexual misconduct against a former boulder spiritual leader sack young mifam reinpoach according to the denver post a canadian law firm conducted that investigation which found the spiritual leader abused his power the leader of the buddhist community stepped aside from his role as head of shambhala last july after these allegations surfaced and he did write a letter to followers acknowledging how his past relationships caused harm it just it seems to me like it's just rotten from the core and that's why i don't want to tell people that i even think about it because there's you know anybody that looks can see that there's you even posted about all the sexual scandals that's you know with that like it just seems to be everywhere it's like it's okay for a llama to get drunk in front of you because it's a llama knows what he's doing don't worry about it it's okay for a llama to have 15 cars even though you're not supposed to have cars i read a book by a guy named dimac and he wrote a book called broken buddhism and he spent a lot of time in southeast asia and he was saying that the temples he went to there was so much corruption so many things going on and this was in the late 90s but he didn't know what to do anymore as a monk who's been you know a monk for almost all of his life and um he was just saying like everywhere he went they were they told him that if he didn't go along with them that he was he had to get the hell out of the temple and so you know he didn't and so he got himself in a lot of trouble but he wrote about this whole series and i'm reading it going like they were actually a part of a child predator ring in this in thailand where they were bringing young girls or young boys into the temple and then sophia was listing them out for sexual favors it was just mind-blowing you know and i'm just how do people not give a [ __ ] about this then we've got the guy now i'll give you a moderate example one of the most famous and prestigious temples in thailand is called the marble temple that's how it's known um i knew a monk who was resident there for a couple years and he told me that there was a young man who joined the temple and how this is already a form of corruption how it is that you get a bed or a seat at a prestigious temple as opposed to a poverty-stricken temple there's already a lot of shenanigans involved with that this young man as i recall his father had just died and if it wasn't his father it was his grandfather but something like that there'd been death in the family and he made a resolution he said i'm going to become a monk until i earn 1 million thai bot and uh and that's a lot less than 1 million us dollars but still it's a nice round number he was going to earn 1 million tai bot and i think his target was to do it within a year he was going to become a monk and learn earn as much money as possible as fast as possible and then quit go back to go into a business to make his father proud or some of this you know he got this and it says he wasn't and you know he was making money you know this is this is less corrupt than the kind of scandals of course there have been scandals with buddhist monks being involved in outright gangsterism or what have you but he was earning money by doing traditional chanting rituals blessing the house to give some kind of magical lucky quality to the house so you know he was he was going around with a group of monks doing this for for pay i'm now in case you don't know in the pali canon you are forbidden to touch money monks are not supposed to touch money they're not supposed to talk about money uh it even goes into some detail about how to deal with repairs to the roof it shows you know that these things happen in ancient india also like well there's a hole in the roof and you need to talk to some lay people about getting it repaired but you don't talk about how much it costs because you can't you know so you know um there are very detailed guides about how to replace your bowl uh because you need a new bowl but you can't talk about how much it costs or whether or not the person has enough money to buy it so there's an absolute prohibition on having anything to do with with greater money but in this sense you know the the religion and this is this is taravata buddhism i mean as you know mahinda buddhism is way more corrupt that's on another level this is the you know and but but my example is from what's what's supposedly the elite you know most esteemed this is like the equivalent of the vatican you know the the pinnacle of the religion within thailand and it's it's not 90 corrupt it is one hundred percent corrupt so i guess that i mean my i have to go tuck my kids in but yeah but i just wanted to touch base with you because i think there's like i i really i just even watched a video on the mandalorian and you're right i haven't gotten to the second season yet but i don't even think i'm gonna bother because that elbow to the chest well look this is good for audience if we do it as a series of of shorter discussions that's better than one three-hour discussion but as far as i'm concerned you can hear this back before i upload it i don't think you said anything you'll want to censor delete but i can i can delete things before it goes public but i think this is wonderful for the audience and i just want to say really briefly i have people writing into me asking me to make more content about buddhism and one of my answers is i've posted this to patreon lately is like look one of the main reasons there isn't more content on buddhism is that nobody will talk to me and just in the last couple of weeks i've emailed different university professors and i have a long history of emailing leaders in the skeptic movements and the atheist movement saying look you're talking about christian atheism all the time but i want to deal with the problems of business religion can we have a conversation and nobody will talk to me nobody will listen and i think that's part of the context for you reaching out for me now is this terrible sense that nobody cares and these are issues that really matter to millions of people and you know even if even if the white people in the equation like you and i are kind of a minority within a minority um you know when you talk about the big ideologies that are really going to change the world in the next hundred years buddhism is one of them