The Decline and Fall of Buddhist Scholarship (& "The Q Hypothesis")

hmm
the emergence of myth is not something sequestered to ancient history but something very much ongoing in our time um if i go to amazon.com today and i look for important new research on the philosophy of ancient buddhism i will find again and again seemingly respectable books by a man named christian lintner christian leonard is deceased he either died in 2020 or 2021. today you can still search around the internet and find the last traces of his attachment to holocaust denial and nazi ideology but piece by piece those are disappearing from the internet today you can still find the memorable website jesus is buddha.com where he announces his theory that the origin of the new testament the origin of the gospel of jesus is in fact siddhartha gautama the buddha that the men who wrote the new testament were actually transcribing from and adapting ancient buddhist sources that's the thesis of that website that too now that he's deceased will quite likely disappear i can imagine that his children or grandchildren will want to have something more respectable to remember their father or grandfather on the internet and i can easily imagine how the period of his being disillusioned with neo-nazism and disillusioned with holocaust denial because he did live long enough that he ceased to be a nazi and turned against those people and became their their critic how a sort of myth of his being a good and wonderful person could be constructed out of those pieces and certainly um the memory of the people live on this earth who were willing to say to me face to face look this guy can't really read ancient tibetan or look this guy knows less sanskrit than you do people who just said to me face to face that this guy's language ability really was not up to much uh those people will also fade and what will remain are books on the shelf that are perceived first and foremost as having been written by a white man from europe now some of you in the audience may say well what difference does that make how would you regard a book written about buddhist philosophy that was written by a tribal person in south america a member of an indigenous tribe how would you regard a book written by someone who had a royal title from a small country in africa you had never heard of a black african of the local aristocracy oh it matters and in case you think it's only white western people who are influenced by the ethnicity and social class of the authors of these books their contributions to the history of buddhist philosophy take a moment to ask yourself how different it must seem in the eyes of a japanese person in the eyes of a sri lankan person a thai person the people who themselves are shall we say ancestrally connected to buddhism people who have grandparents and great-grandparents who one way or another are involved in the religious tradition to them the question of the ethnicity social class background and formal education the author may matter a great deal more and they may find it very difficult to be cynical about it christian lintner no matter how easily or because no matter how easily he may discredit be discredited in my eyes all right but it wasn't that easy to discredit him in my eyes either right like i had to look around i had to figure out to what extent this guy was a crackpot right if you just i i first encountered that guy's name by taking a book off a library shelf and i thought this is a great scholar he has doctor and phd next to his name and this is this nicely bound book and here he is telling me buddhist philosophy and it's stating that he's a great scholar who works in these ancient languages and you know i i don't think any book of his had his photograph so i i guess it's just on the basis of his name and title that i presumed he was a white european raised in this raising this kind of elite tradition right it's a lot you don't know when you encounter that book on the shelf but anyway i was able to google around and again i've already alluded to i spoke to some people uh face to face directly about who this guy was and where a scholarship come came from i was able to pierce the veil of respectability uh on a scholarship well even if you were just born and raised in japan you might not see it that way and japan is the home of what's called pera history so you know there's there's history and there's pseudo history there's this other category of imaginative para history and there are actually a lot of people in japan who believe that jesus physically traveled to japan now i i learned this much japanese uh earlier today i was joking with melissa about how much or how little value i get from my study of japanese it was a japanese title and i was able to read it out in convincing sounding uh you know japanese was able to pronounce it properly you know what i always wonder about those people is how would they respond to someone just sitting down with them and saying really really okay you how do you believe jesus actually came here you think he he came on a cloud you keep you like he flew through the air like superman really really you know like you know and like you know these people they always believe there's some physical trace of him like a footprint or something you know like you really think that's just really really just not even not even exercising any kind of you know skepticism but just you know come on really you know like is this is this something you think will benefit your grandchildren to hear as a kind of parable is it something you think has symbolic value or do you really believe this well the japanese culturally they live with a somewhat flexible attitude toward the truth they have a somewhat pliant set of tendencies when reading history they like a great deal now most westerners only get excited about this when it's world war ii when it's the nazis when it's uh you know mass murderer massacres and so on but their their whole history um ancient modern buddhist and secular they they tend to have a much more forgiving attitude it's very easy for me to imagine a japanese person the same age as myself um finding that christian lintner supported this theory that jesus is buddha.com [Laughter] and having a kind of appreciative detached attitude okay oh yeah so we support that and indeed anyone my age in japan would have heard many japanese people uh making similarly outlandish claims uh japanese christians tend to like to validate their religion with very strange comparative reference to buddhism and japanese buddhists like to make strange compared presence to christianity what if you were born and raised in tibet you know the extent to which people are credulous whether they are asian african south american or they are themselves white european the the extent of which people are gullible and extend a kind of unquestioned credibility to someone just because they are a white man from europe um this is a prejudice that haunts us still now obviously we mostly talk about racism in terms of oppression and denigration and dismissing people and not taking their opinions seriously we have to talk about the opposite once them all too which is of taking people's opinions too seriously of giving them too much credibility of not asking the right questions at all now as i've just mentioned this particular example christian lintner he died i believe in 2020 another website said he died in 2021 but at any rate quite quite recently um he's left this mortal coil perhaps perhaps to be reincarnated in a new and better form perhaps [Laughter] or perhaps we could say if there is a hell below [Laughter] who could possibly be more deserving of reincarnation in hell than christian litter um you know this christian lindner phenomenon if you think okay if you are astonished to see that such a crackpot could rise to the highest levels of academic esteem respectability power and influence in the 21st century what kind of person do you think occupied that same position in the 20th century in the 19th century and yes yes y'all in the 18th century this is a pattern that goes back a long way and it's the scope of its influence is tremendously deep now in terms of title this video i do perceive my own lifetime as having been one of the decline of buddhist scholarship so let's just pause for a moment to talk about the decline from what to what the nature of this decline is one that many of you in the audience will relate to immediately uh because you also have lived through the rise of information technology and simply the demise of human cooperation there was a time when writing a book and type setting a book and publishing a book involved the cooperation of a whole army of people now what kind of book let's say you wanted to publish a dictionary whether a dictionary just of english or a dictionary of a foreign language explained in english in the 18th century think about how many people would have participated in that process you know we talk about collective authorship and authorship by committee there was a time when really truly working alone was virtually unknown and you know the exceptions proved the rule i think people did write short poems although and things like this but making a large authoritative text used to be a process that involved a great many people uh collaborating now research into buddhism it seemed to go with seven league boots in the 19th century it seemed to go so quickly so many groundbreaking new discoveries so much progress and that's part of what inspired the crack pottery of our times you know i'll come back in just a moment um and it's not because people were more brilliant 100 years ago or or 200 years ago i think there are many ways we could hear launch into a uh you know critique of our system of education and in what ways people may have actually been better educated centuries ago than they are now but the fundamental difference is that people work together in groups when you talk about the so-called great white men of european scholarship 100 years ago 200 years ago etc what really made them different from scholars today is that they worked in a group of 20 guys and very often just one or two of those guys would be white europeans they'd work with local buddhist monks they'd work with local buddhist lay people they didn't okay depending on exactly what we're talking about they either didn't fly they went by ship they went by boat or they walked over land in some cases like just somewhat decoros some of those literally walked to get from europe to asia they went slowly they made friends they stayed a long time some of them got married so on and so forth now i'm going to use an example actually from the end of this you know sort of heroic period where it seems like people make such rapid progress in the language um they accomplish these great things in just a few years whereas today in the 21st century you ask a buddhist scholar to translate just a few pages a very short you know ancient buddhist texts or sutra and it's five years or ten years and they sit there and hold their chin and you know they're working their part-time job as an instructor at the university and it seems like they can't really get much done and after the five years or ten years have gone by it seems that they haven't really made much of an improvement over what some other scholar did 150 years ago and what why is it that people made such rapid progress in the past i'll mention a female scholar uh from the end of this heroic period where one seems to be going with seven league boots people seem to be working so rapidly and making these breakthroughs uh so on and so forth alexandra david nail also pronounced alexandra david neal [Music] david dale had a series of lovers in asia the one that stands out in my mind was that she became the girlfriend of the crown prince of bhutan smog talk about royalty from a small kingdom you've never heard of some people so she had some some love affairs where she settled down she had an adopted son so she adopted uh tibetan i i think he was a teenager i honestly forget how old he was but he wasn't a he wasn't a small small child when when she adopted him he spoke the language fluently and then obviously she became more fluent in tibetan and he became fluent in english and french i guess primarily french in that case she did speak english also she stayed i believe for several years uh in a buddhist monastery with one particular buddhist monk whom she had a great deal of intellectual admiration for she was one of those well-experienced buddhists who felt that the vast majority of buddhist monks were people of absolutely zero intellectual substance but there was one particular buddhist malcom she met and got to know after she had herself made progress in the language and knowledge of the doctrine and philosophy and what have you and she lived with him and spent time with himself and then what do you know after she gets back to europe with this deep experience she's able to very rapidly translate large quantities of tibetan texts and give you penetrating insights and attacks some of them buddhist some of them some of them what you might call pagan you know but non-buddhist texts that are part of the the tibetan tradition to mispronounce it horribly because i never worked on tibetan myself uh the epic of geshar so geshar ling i i'm certain in tibetan it is not pronounced geshar lang but uh that i i worked on pali and thai cambodia and lao et cetera i worked on southeast asian buddhism and now chinese is my language scholarship so i never i never worked in tibet and all but anyway she did some of this um epic poetry so and so forth and she did write about the the philosophy of buddhism uh too well how is that possible why do you think she was able to accomplish these great things and people who are the products of our phd programs today can't do anything like that well it's precisely because they are the products of these phd programs and you could say to any one of them well you know what if instead of hanging around at cambridge or oxford or even let's say new york university or something it doesn't matter what university says what if instead you had physically walked from europe to tibet the one guy i know who walked by the way is uh chisoma decoros a hungarian scholar what if you had walked there stayed there lived there fallen in love maybe even gotten married and raised a kid there something like you passed many years but even if you didn't get married and raise a kid had some series of local lovers who you practice the language with what if you've done military service there for a few years especially in india in the in the british empire a lot of these guys they lived out there for years as employees of the raj as as employees of the british army of occupation you know again in the case of um alexandra devinell you know she actually adopted a son she lived in a monastery what if you had really spent all these years and during those years you actually gathered a circle of friends or colleagues around you whether those be local buddhist monks or you know farmers or some eccentric intellectuals there who would actually sit with you and help you with these languages and help you with these texts do you think you would have learned more or less than you learned in your phd program in a western university even today even in 2021 and let's be real today if you go to any of these places when you get there people already have the internet people already have sega genesis i'm dating they already have playstation 4 or whatever they've already got they've already got video games they've already got the internet they've you know when you get there they've got uh dvd movies and a lot of them have grown up watching the same tv shows you grew up with you know like really really i mean when i was living in southeast asia everyone was watching the tv show friends is that the tv sitcom starring david schwimmer etc and it touched me recently i saw a news item talking about the state of the internet in cuba which is changing from year to year if not month to month but when i saw this news item they were talking about these big hard drives people were bringing over hard drives the size of efficient tackle box so they'd go to america they'd download as much crap as they could bring it over and then people in cuba would plug in their laptops or phones or whatever and get what they wanted then the hard drive would go back again so because of lack of internet access and because of the presence of uh cuban government internet censorship anyway i i've just lately heard just a couple days ago i heard that it's loosened up and now there are a few places in cuba where people can access the internet normally i don't know could change month-to-month year over here but any case um so the interview asks well look when you look at the data what are the majority of people in cuba downloading and the number one answer was the tv sitcom friends that was what [Laughter] so there's something to the the post communist experience that people in laos people in you know uh you know you'll hear it all over the world you know some of these american sitcoms they're growing up with watching us so you know this is no longer such an exotic remote and distant place as it was a hundred years ago or two years ago technology has in these ways brought us closer together and many of them their uh their idea of buddhism has been influenced by watching some of the same movies you may have watched there are certainly buddhist monks in thailand who grew up watching movies about buddhism made in hong kong taiwan sometimes in communist china you know movies like crouching tiger hidden dragon kung fu movies things that you know animate buddhist philosophy literally or or figure like they're people who've grown up with modern influences and modern expectations so you know the encounter is is somewhat different but there can be no doubt that compared to this sort of heroic earlier era of scholarship we're now talking about a decline it seemed like people at that time were making these groundbreaking discoveries amazing new translations and today i i've actually confirmed this sometimes by emailing or talking face-to-face with the translators of so-called new translations where i say to them look i can read the ancient text i can read pally i probably could do this with sanskrit even though sanskrit is not my area of study but it's closer it's like look i can see that you did not translate this from pali like i can tell you didn't work from because this is what the pali says this is what the english translation from 150 years ago says and then this is what your english says so obviously you took the english and you modernized it or adapted it and yeah by the way in case you know in some cases it's not english to english sometimes it's 120 years ago there was a german translation and you didn't you translated german to english somewhere i can tell you looked at the english and the french like there was maybe there was a french translation a hundred years ago and then you came up with this because it's not really original work um i'm remembering just one case now where a guy emailed me back admitting it he said yeah he didn't he didn't actually work from the palate i think there were some other cases were talking to people face to face they were willing to kind of take on the chin and say all these people have phds all of them live in a type of comfort that 100 years ago was either unimaginable or only kings and queens ever came i'm sorry i appreciate this myself just the the my ability to wash my hands and use a toilet and a shower i do not take these things for granted i know in terms of the number of hours the day people have to put into cooking and cleaning and worrying about pooing in a bucket and showering hopefully not using the same bucket you know i know what it's like to shower the bucket using cold water and all this stuff having heated water and electric lights and of course the almighty uh keyboard and computer you know it's it's made scholarship so much easier and in so many ways um shout out to william mcgeehan who's saying yes in cuba they enjoy all the old american tv shows so i guess i guess for them it's kind of a nostalgia for a past they didn't experience themselves uh you know generally kind of surrogate nostalgia displace nostalgia um maybe a yearning for a type of normalcy that never existed in their own country and perhaps never will how little do they realize that within the united states of america incredibly few people have access to the type of normalcy featured in those same sitcoms it gives us a false sense of normalcy too but we're able to be a bit more uh i don't know at least a bit more yeah a bit more ironical about it a bit more detached about it a bit more cynical about it yeah um [Music] [Laughter] uh what happened with buddhism in particular was that the thrilling fast-paced nature of those breakthroughs when they were happening in scholarship um inspired or reinforced belief in what could be called the q hypothesis on a massive scale so i'll explain what i mean by the q hypothesis for those who don't know i'll just say the disadvantage of the type of collegial cooperation that i was praising before is that many east asian prejudices crept into the work of you know white western european scholars it informed their work in ways that they themselves were often well not critical of and sometimes genuinely unaware of so to give an example many many many europeans who went to work in the british empire in whatever capacity but many of them were literally soldiers they were soldiers living in a barracks while they were doing uh research on buddhism hinduism china's ancient india or just archaeology generally someone just went and started excavating whatever there was to be excavated but you know guys who got interested in the history and philology and what have you research and archaeology some of them were literally soldiers others were bureaucrats like the infamous tw rhys davids himself and a kind of middle management position let's say in the in the british empire which was no great advantage over being a soldier maybe the soldiers had more free time and were thus more able to go and do these things that they had they had a scholarly bone in there in their bodies you know if a soldier were to seek out the company of a respectable brahman and this would presumably be either a brahmana who could speak english or brahman who could work through a cousin a son or a grandson who could translate from the modern language of the area into into english um the myth that would be impressed upon this european outsider again and again was that sanskrit was the most important language sanskrit was the language of the gods all these other languages that people talk about whether it be tibetan pali what have you they've come along later they're much less important in order to understand anything about india or buddhism or hinduism sanskrit sanskrit it's cancer it's this kind of ideology that this one language is the one true language of india that that ought to be study now it's rare to see these european scholars at the earlier period really showing their cards and i've written at least one essay where i was going through that literature and i was finding smoking gun evidence where they admit it that they've taken on this this attitude which is completely ahistorical it's completely false really it would be just as ridiculous as a catholic insisting to you if you want to know about ancient judaism latin latin is the language you guys know latin well you know if you wanted over the history of italy latin is the language to know but if you want to know the history of greece if you wanted the history of the jewish bible you know there there are really different languages and different histories and different churches it's uh it's pretty it's pretty obvious in various ways um but i have managed to piece together some smoking gun evidence of what doubtless was mostly an oral tradition rather than being flagrantly written in the open that what these guys got into their heads was the assumption that prior to the written tradition of teravata buddhism which is called the pali canon prior to the tibetan tradition which is called the tibetan cannon prior to the chinese tradition which can you guess it's called the chinese prior to all these traditions there had been one ur text there had been one original pure perfect text that had been written in sanskrit okay if you don't even dabble in the field you won't get how ridiculous that is but that is just as ridiculous as a catholic telling you that the original words of jesus christ were in latin no obviously latin is a later embellishment upon the words of jesus christ it could could not possibly be that the historical jesus if you believe there ever was one actually spoke latin anyway he would have been more likely to speak greek actually if he had lived in that part of the world that time greek as the lingua franca of the eastern mediterranean but in any case you know no that is really just ridiculous there is no chance if you just look at a map and see where the historical buddha was supposed to have lived and when and all the textual evidence it cannot possibly be that the original uh teaching of the buddha is written in sanskrit but they got into their heads that parallel to the q hypothesis in the interpretation of the bible they would assert the q hypothesis in the teaching of the buddha so i'll say a little bit about the psychology of this but i also have to tell you what the q hypothesis is now if you have read the new testament even once you will have noticed that the most famous and influential part of the new testament is called the gospels and you get multiple versions of the same events in the gospels and they do not differ from one another accidentally it's not that they have errors that have crept in like scribal errors it's not a case of two different witnesses to one event describing it differently a great example of which would be uh jfk hey guys i do see your comments coming in i will uh i'll reply anyone who asks questions on a high enough level i'm happy to reply to um christians tried to convince themselves that the differences between the gospels could be accounted for by imagining or positing an earlier perfect manuscript it doesn't exist and has never existed which is referred to as the q manuscript q is just abbreviating a german word for source we have fella and irkfella from from german you know the where where something comes from so the q manuscript the q hypothesis now today still today uh you can interview witnesses to the assassination of jfk a lot of them are dying of old age now but you can also just on youtube look at video clips and audio clips and some of them differ from one another literally because of their perspective if someone who is standing on the left-hand side of the car facing this way and they describe if someone's standing on the right-hand side of the car i just heard uh uh the perspective of a guy who's standing in front of the car the car was driving towards him would you have to shut here's a somewhat different perspective somewhat different memory up and recollection of whatever and there are some witnesses who are intentionally lying they know that they're lying they know that they're misleading you but nevertheless there you have differences you know you can try to reconcile or study and i think here too it's meaningful to say there is no q hypothesis right there isn't one true story these have all derived from well you know christians clung to this notion of the q hypothesis for a very long time precisely because they didn't want to believe that the authors of the gospels were intentionally lying or that they were intentionally revising one another's stories they were reading an earlier version of the story and saying oh no no i don't want it to happen that way i'm going to write it this way for this reason that they were intentionally trying to write a better fable they wanted to believe that these were competing imperfect recollections of real historical events none of the evidence supports that all of the evidence supports the notion that the new testament was written i should say specifically the gospels within the new testament were written as parables as works of fiction meant to express a moral point like a like a fable now i'll talk about what the buddhist canon is like as very few people will ever read or study it um in just a moment it is very very different from the from the gospels it's a very strange comparison to make um [Music] you know just so that it doesn't slip my mind it'll just give you a really brief anecdote i once got an email from a sincere buddhist but this is a white western person who didn't know any of these languages and she wrote to me after speaking to several other buddhas and they could tell there was something wrong with the english in the translation of a very short sutra so sutra in pali is suta just means a short text i guess they can be long but anyway it's a it's a unit of buddhist texts you know in effect and you know it's true if you just looked at the english you could tell there was some jiggery pokery going on in this translation and the pali was incredibly blunt and straightforward and i said back wow you know this is fascinating you've found an example of a of a sutra that is warning you that meditation causes madness that it drives people insane that people go mad and um you know i said more than this you know a little bit more to the email conversation but in the reply this person uh wrote back and said oh well you know could it be that they're saying meditating excessively causes madness or if you do it the wrong way a cosmic and i went through that part of it word four was like no no this is it it was like let's say it was just three words three words or fours i don't know this is really warning you that meditating leads to madness and i said no i mean this is interesting because it shows the diversity of the authors who wrote the pali canon who wrote the most ancient most historically important version of the buddhist bible if you like these ancient buddhist texts she was very surprised at this she says well what do you mean i say oh well you didn't think it was all written by one person did you oh openly overtly if you just read these texts it's written by many different people and they have different opinions about things now they have a lot in common all of them were buddhist monks you know they were all people who were committed enough to this religion that's that's very different from many other types of religious literature historical literature philosophical literature you know for example you might have a compendium of philosophy and some of the people writing in it are scientists and some are not and the different scientists have different totally different areas of expertise like some come out of physics some goes at a chemistry or something you know they grew up in different parts of the world well the penalty cannon all the guys writing it have a lot in common you know because they all they were all buddhist monks at around the same time but oh no they really have very different opinions about exactly the kind of stuff that this compendium is of philosophy is about they don't view meditation the same way for example you know you didn't you didn't realize this anyways there was a little bit more of that that conversation that i'm not relating i'm just kind of truncating it point is here the anxiety christians had i can sympathize with because they have a text an ancient sacred text that does not in any way based on its own evidence seem to be an historical document of an actual person who was once alive and that's what they desperately yearn for it to be they want the gospels to have the quality and characteristics of a record of an actual person who lived and of actual historical events and even if you have no source external to the bible if you just study the old testament and the new testament including by the way the connections between the new testament the old testament where it's quoting or alluding to things the way it's put together it is inescapable the conclusion is inescapable that the gospels were written as fiction and they were intent to intend to have this kind of allegorical fable quality uh like many legends uh written in greek at that time and had some resemblance to things found within the hebrew canon also you know um but that nobody writing this nobody was alive at that time engaged in the construction of the text and the selection of sources from the old testament and so on and so forth but the people who actually just they themselves didn't think they were quoting an historically real figure when they were telling this story the fable of uh of jesus christ now the pali canon the most ancient buddhist scriptures it's the exact opposite just reading the text just looking at it the internal evidence including these kinds of uh this kind of cacophony the kind of the dissonant voices within it um buddhist monks who often disagree with one another it's completely obvious that the text really is an attempt to describe historically real people and they don't all agree with one another so on and so forth and the actual historical events um are kind of all dismally normal none of them are hard to believe in none of them are miraculous you know what i mean and anyway then it lends itself so easily to an historically realistic interpretation including even the fabulous elements because you have within the pali canon the debate about whether or not they should tell fabulous magical stories whether they should make up these kinds of stories about the buddha what the point is of them you get that debated right so you haven't you have a text that is debating how it should be written in front of you the reader it's it's discussing its own historical origins with you i could say sort of transparently enough um now you know just just to regress very briefly the people who wrote the pathway cannon did they believe in ghosts some of them did and some of them didn't that's what makes it interesting so some sutas or sutras in terms of the universe texts some of them are written by people who ostensibly and probably actually they were completely true believers in supernatural miracles ghosts demons this kind of thing and there are some texts in that collection that are written by people who are obviously ironical skeptics people who think that these are stories made up to entertain children but that really things like ghosts and demons and yetis and magic do not exist in this world and that supernatural miracles even those attributed to the buddha no such thing exists in this world so you can see all of this in this uh this kind of jumbled internally incoherent set of texts all right so the reason for christians asserting the q hypothesis is completely clear and it's also completely fallacious and completely false it's completely impossible to support or substantiate but understand why they're doing it i understand what they're trying to gain from it what what europeans brought into the mix as never before with buddhism was really a kind of hindu [Music] reappropriation of buddhism i think precisely because so many of those europeans relied on hindus to teach them sanskrit and they absorbed this notion that sanskrit was the central most ancient most important most dominant language now secondarily what these europeans believed in was their own genius their own potential to change the world and to transform buddhism for the better babe could you pass me the waterfront i'll look at the uh i'll look at the comments from saying here quote from william again quote believe it or not i've had people tell me that kenny rogers is a great singer recent arrivals to the united states somebody with the memorable name of nobody wins asks hi sir any tips to start on my own path to become an intellectual well without digressing into a one-hour monologue on the subject you know i had someone writing to me recently who seemed to me frankly to be really lost in his own [ __ ] um you know and in some ways that's kind of inspiring someone who is working hard to create his own philosophy and think about life philosophically and seriously but in some ways that's depressing because it's all [ __ ] and um i said to him look you know it's not that i'd really recommend any one thing in particular for you but i feel like if you were to take on a research project on something you're totally detached from where you're not you're not invested morally or emotionally in one side or the other being right that you can learn a great deal about human nature and learn to challenge some of your own [ __ ] precipitations so the the example i gave him what i recommended was that he researched the rise and fall of the revolution in haiti so you have the french revolution the haitian revolution and then you have in a sense the french counter-revolution the french trying to suppress and reverse the revolution haiti now maybe this isn't the best example but this guy is a white european i think he's never thought about the history of haiti before not saying this to insult him he has probably never given much thought to the status of black people in north america south america central america you know it's probably not something he has ever really thought about for five minutes well you know studying the history of haiti doesn't make you an intellectual studying the history of the french revolution doesn't make you an intellectual but i do think that if you're if you are as you as you're saying here if you're just starting on the path to becoming intellectual reading and researching things that that are really remote from you that way uh is important and i'll give you a simple example i mean it is kind of relevant to what we're we're talking about here but whenever i've spoken to people who really were racist on the internet including vegans who don't think they're racist but who were talking about the relationship between dna and iq and these things that the the new uh right-wing racists of our time you know propound belief in genetic inequality of intelligence this kind of thing you know it's okay well look you know you're really wrapped up in talking about that in like downtown chicago you're talking about black people versus white people in chicago or uh the state of georgia you know this this kind of thing within the united states of america okay well i challenge you if you really believe in this framework have you looked at education and outcomes in vietnam different ethnic groups within vietnam and right away they're already shocked they never thought about what there's more than one ethnic group within vietnam yeah didn't you know that you know uh just today i was watching jj mccullough's video about taiwan well you have several totally different ethnic groups within taiwan even you know there are a lot of opportunities for this like if this is actually something sincere if you're not racist why don't you study this somewhere where you're totally detached you have no engagement with one side where you're really challenging yourself and you're really learning something new um so i do think you discover some of the rudiments of what it means to be intellectual if you're if you're just at the beginnings by really challenging yourself that way now look uh this is very very different from advice i've given to melissa um in some ways similar you know one so i made a very passionate video on this channel that is called why i am forcing you to read aristotle so i did force mysterios and you know i did come up with a list of books from ancient greece in rome that are important and i can show that out here and say go watch that video go watch all the videos i did about aristotle athens greece et cetera i think that's worth reading there are books from ancient china i think are worth reading this video is talking about books from ancient ancient india ancient sri lanka and southeast asia that are to some extent you know there there's a lot that's that's worth reading but if you're asking about the the first step you know and one of the other projects melissa and i embarked on was for melissa to study the history of central asia places like uzbekistan tajikistan and so on it's been mentioned several times well that's a bit like haiti in that the point isn't so much you know the unique history of uzbekistan the point is partly melissa's estrangement from it and indeed it thrusts her into a world of contrasting claims to political legitimacy that are just totally alien to her you know obviously like muslim aristocracy and you know the russian empire and the chinese empire and well the iranian empire and so on uh the mongol empire too resident falls there you know kublai khan and all that so you know this this thruster into a world uh totally unfamiliar so you know i think um i think that in challenging yourself to do that kind of research you discover something about yourself and you discover things about what it means to be an intellectual and that might be the most positive thing i could say about my own research about buddhism maybe i got nothing out of it except you know a greater appreciation for in the sense the rudiments of what it is to be intellectual to ask these questions nobody else was ever willing to ask okay so um white europeans you know in asserting that there was this q manuscript there was this great unknown manuscript more ancient than anything extant anything yet discovered anything that ever had been discovered i think never would be discovered in buddhism that there was the original pure teaching of the buddha out there to be established by us by white european males that's that's really what we're talking here especially white men with phds from places like switzerland and germany um much later england got involved in this really england was pretty late to the party in this mission you know um and there were a few mad frenchmen who threw their hats in you know yes partly uh partly it was just an imitation of what was happening in christianity i mean christianity is one of the most influential religions in the world in case you didn't know partly it was just an imitation was like oh okay what's going on in christianity well there's this huge manuscript hypothesis there's this fantasy that we can engage in the comparative reading of different manuscripts and then arrive at conclusions that indicate a more ancient manuscript that doesn't exist today the real original teaching of jesus christ that generated all these different manuscripts uh so partly it's just an imitation of what was gone but above and beyond that think about power and powerlessness for the author or for the researcher if you don't have some kind of messianic delusion that you are going to be the white man who discovers this q manuscript the true original teaching of the buddha your work is really very humble you're walking around asia literally walking talking to buddhist monks who know more than you talking to farmers who know more than you you're learning their language starting off at the level of a child and after many years of research you're really just able to do what we would today call anthropology be able to give a description of their culture their customs their festivals you're able to translate some things into english that have never been translated before but you know you're really just uh you can write travel literature you know here's what it's like to travel in india here's what it's like to travel in sri lanka this is not what white europeans wanted uh what what europeans wanted is a fantasy that played out again and again with the european encounter with ancient egypt and just note pretty much everything you've ever seen with uh scientology and satanism in our times happened like 200 years earlier with white people deciding that they were the reincarnation of some ancient pharaoh from egypt or some ancient wise memory and literally putting on the hat and costume you'd be surprised how far that goes back white europeans and white americans reviving um the religion of ancient egypt obviously just making things up off the top of their head um and sometimes conveniently claiming that through their clairvoyance or through their memory of their past incarnation that they could read an ancient egyptian manuscript or you know uh inscription on stone that nobody else can read through this you know and what do you know you know it just happens to say the most convenient thing for their own cult leadership it says that you should donate money to them because they're the second coming of christ or whatever it says you know uh and by the way um in the founding of the the mormon church um their their quote unquote visionary founder he indulged in a lot of those same excesses he demonstrates some of the same things and in at least one case it was literally an egyptian manuscript that he worked from and he just made up off the top of his head what he thought that this manuscript should say he had no ability whatsoever to actually interpret hieroglyphic writing yeah he had no scholarly background of that kind so you know the fantasy of a white european boldly you know exploring asia and you know as napoleon did quite literally you know clearing the sand off of ancient tombs and ancient structures and revealing something of tremendous importance from the past that had been ignored by locals this fantasy was reenacted again and again even when all of the evidence on the ground grossly contradicted it so again napoleon legitimately strode out into the desert with his army and they discovered a great many things that the locals were ignoring not because the locals were stupid not because locals were blind but because the locals were devout muslims they had no interest in ancient egyptian temples and tombs they didn't worship that stuff they didn't study it they regarded that as part of their impious past they were not interested in the pre-muslim past it's not like it was hidden right it was disregarded it was not regarded as important by the people in that culture now the fantasy that europeans were discovering things that were concealed ignored forgotten by locals this played out again notably in cambodia when the french show up and discover um angkor wat which is still a tourist attraction to this day it was inhabited it wasn't in an uninhabited jungle it wasn't in a desert or wasteland it wasn't being ignored it was inhabited by buddhist monks who were performing rituals there every day and there were buddhist pilgrims whatever you want to say there were lay people who went there and heard sermons and participated in ceremonies it was an active living inhabited temple it wasn't abandoned it wasn't covered with moss and trees interestingly which is now part of its appeal so i just say it was still being used as a buddhist temple not as a as a hindu temple but this fantasy this is one part of the fantasy but then the next part of the fantasy the q hypothesis is is uh crucial to is that these white european men would then with bold decisive acts um reveal the true meaning of these texts of this philosophy that the local indigenous people had been blind to or ignored now i'm i'm in a better position than most to realize the extent to which this fantasy actually can be true i myself like i've done research where i'm discovering things in these texts it's like how is it possible nobody else has seen what i've seen here and it's similar to what i was just saying about islam it's not that they haven't read the text not they haven't looked at the text but it's that they uh they don't see because they don't want to see you know you'll keep it yeah yeah uh you know so to give an example try talking to anyone in thailand today about slavery you know are they unaware of what it says in the ancient buddhist texts about slavery try talking to anyone about you know any of these slightly edgy provocative uncomfortable issues um [Music] whether you're talking to local people or white europeans there are a lot of things people get very uncomfortable and very evasive about very quickly but you are not like napoleon discovering uh some ancient egyptian tomb or you know a relic or monument that's been uh disregarded or forgotten by the by the local people uh it's a very different character but nevertheless i mean you know they're they're if you get into this kind of scholarship you will have some experiences where you know you've in effect discovered something everyone else is ignoring you found something that's of some cultural significance or philosophical significance that other people are disregarding basically because there's something else they want to believe that's motivating them to ignore that the text says that in that place or even that it says it 10 or 20 times uh throw the cannon okay but with that having uh with that caveat or i don't know that i would with that uh having been said you know obviously it's a ludicrous and fundamentally racist power fantasy that europeans would boldly strive into the dust-covered monastic libraries of asia blow the dust off the text and then start making discoveries and start asserting that they we white western europeans we know the true ancient teaching of the buddha which all the local indigenous people have ignored that has remained unknown to them that's been disregarded uh or forgotten or corrupted in their own tradition so that assertion of the q hypothesis is crucial to this uh this fantasy that many different white men acted out in many different ways there is a famous hypothesis uh it's called the solar origin hypothesis solar solar and this is a it's kind of the perfect textbook example of this white man power fantasy playing out this guy strove out into uh i honestly forget if he went to india or sri lanka where exactly he went and he discovered that he would declare that the real ultimate original meaning of buddhism was worshiping the sun s-u-n not s-o-n and that the texts had been corrupted and misrepresented and that in fact if you look at the original text in just the right way the buddha isn't described as an historical figure or a human being he's actually a personification of the sun god and that all this other stuff has been some kind of mistake or misinterpretation now what a ridiculous theory is you know 200 years ago now is it more or less ridiculous than in the year 2021 www.jesusbuddha.com this is this is something with the phd from european university it's the same thing it's the same fantasy it's the same uh mentality there were these drastic attempts at reappropriation and reinterpretation of buddhism uh using one methodology or another but very often um these white western people even if they had a veneer of respectability when posing for a black and white photo very often they were religious eccentrics very often they were people who dabbled in the use of hashish heroin well that time would be opium so on and so forth that they used mind-altering drugs that they were really the long-haired hippies of their time even if they kept their hair cropped short they were wildly eccentric people who often had grandiose delusions about their own importance that the delusion that they were themselves the reincarnation of some spiritual leader uh so on and so forth so you know the idea that you could disregard all of the available evidence in the name of this more ancient texts that uh there was this q manuscript the q hypothesis and that you you maybe you were specially born for this task you were reincarnated just to do this you were going to be the one to solve the ancient puzzle you were going to be the one to discover the ancient egyptian tomb however you want to put it um [Music] you know that really inspired that same what i guess is called the heroic generation you know in this perverse way and it continues to warp our entire literature of what's written about buddhism and our attitudes towards positive in the universities in even the most ostensibly respectable texts that we've got and that delusion was so widespread it influenced and warped research about buddhism in japan cambodia laos thailand sri lanka india tibet is a huge part of the world are you talking about religious scholars some of whom were german and swiss some of whom were french english uh they didn't all come from the same place they weren't all a part of the same conspiracy but i think all of them were influenced by napoleon's journey to egypt all of them were influenced by i mean even if they didn't read them the best-selling books that spun out of napoleon's journey to egypt directly and indirectly all of them were influenced by the fact that so you guys may not know this but for a couple centuries there you know fortune telling done by uh the roma aka the gypsies of europe you know um it was said to be an ancient egyptian art form the tarot card was said to be an ancient egyptian magic or science these things all they have nothing to do with ancient egypt there's no connection they don't have anything to do with modern egypt either there's no connection there you know they they saw you know what were the successful commercialized hippie cults of their of their day and they to some extent competed with them and vied with them they were certainly not people who are interested in in debunking them uh they were not in this sense you know um scientists working against religion uh they were themselves men swept up in the religious mania of their own times and that's hard for people who are born and raised in europe to see well let me tell you something it's harder for people born and raised in cambodia i talked to so many cambodians face to face who just told me but what are you saying uh everything from the buddha has been translated into english by that british couple they would say that british married couple they translate everything you should know all the problems are solved like like they they literally had the idea oh well you don't need to read pali because you can read buddhist philosophy in english because this one married couple did all the work so they're talking about thomas reese davids and his wife whoo you know where do you where do you want me to start it's hard for me to sit down with a white western person and communicate to them look i know you've seen a respectable looking photo of this guy in an expensive suit posing for a camera in black and white okay now i've got to talk you through step by step so you can really understand that this guy was really a dangerous crackpot and a lunatic and his wife was probably even worse in some ways his life was better in some ways his wife was better because once in a while she kind of cracks a smile and jokes with the audience about what [ __ ] all this is that's that's kind of better she lets you in on the joke once in a while as a mean old woman she wrote some stuff where it's like look this this but this is all nonsense you know uh this this kind of thing so you get you get a little bit of a contrast there but anyway that is um you know that is fundamentally the decline and fall of buddhist scholarship we went from one period of our history in which we had a massively collegial cooperative multilingual multicultural model of of buddhism that fundamentally had to do with going to the place living in the place getting married to a local woman or raising a kid or living in a buddhist monastery and even the guys who were with the military living there long enough that they really learned the language and had some some death of appreciation and understanding um so that had advantages and that was a period of incredibly rapid progress in the field i just really sorry if you if you just go and take those books off the shelf you really would have to spend some hours or weeks but just appreciating the mass of scholarship that was done at that time it's incredible okay and then that came to an end you know and then it was all over and instead we switched to a period of time where people were getting educated about buddhism and languages i mean look so melissa just saw this a couple weeks ago i mean she's heard me criticize the way chinese is taught in university classrooms now that you can't you cannot possibly earn trainings but very briefly you talk about having 40 students in a classroom 40 students is small some universities it's 200 students in a classroom it's 300 students okay but let's just say 40 students in a classroom sitting at desks in a grid the professor stands at the front of the classroom and presses play on an audio cd and you fill out a multiple choice test during the class you speak for two minutes you can't learn sanskrit this way you can't learn chinese this way and people pay tens of thousands of dollars and they get the credential and people can tell you oh yeah they got a ba an ma and a phd in asian studies or however they define it and no they don't have remotely the level of proficiency that that you know heroic generation however the heroic generation had two unbelievable sources of bias one one source of which was just them directly picking up the [ __ ] of the indigenous people themselves most crucially taking on the attitudes of the brahmanas who taught them sanskrit in india it's not the only example i think there were people who spent time in tibet and took on some of the [ __ ] ideas of tibetan buddhist monks but they actually live with these people and respect those there's something to that but crucially the attitude towards sanskrit and then construing this q hypothesis delusion uh so on and so forth you know the other one was that the europeans brought with them their own kind of [ __ ] and if you don't really know what i'm talking about here this may seem unrelated but it's really related the video of mine i would recommend the most is my video on the spiritual origins of nazi philosophy pardon me the nazis as a political movement had a great deal to do [Music] with exactly these uh european responses to exotic asian philosophies including but not limited to buddhism so i'm going to give you guys the link to that if you if you some of you will just really not know what i'm talking about when i'm talking about the insane european illusion that's a 35 minute long video um the occult origin of nat's ideology one that i put a lot of time into also sadly i think when i finished that video i said i'm never putting that many hours into a video again um but that brings together for you that video a sense of um you know so so i'm saying there was the madness they appropriated from their assistance in asia then there was the madness they brought with them to asia which was i think it can be truly called a uh a napoleon complex this kind of you know napoleonic mania now i'm just gonna have one more thing i see your i see your uh questions guys and i will answer these questions not everyone was so lucky as to be exoticized in the way that india and china were right this pattern i've described i i feel the first real example of it is egypt you could get into the earliest origins you can talk about actually the european conquest of the cannery islands you get into some earlier examples you look at william shakespeare writing about some uh exotic far-off paradises and you know the discovery of islands in the you know caribbean and so on you could talk about some other example what was what was the first exoticization in this in this sense well the way europeans looked at ancient egypt the way they looked at ancient india the way they looked at ancient china they had no such appreciation for ancient australia or for ancient canada for the ancient indigenous people of north america and south america right so large parts of the world europeans just encountered with a genocidal attitude and it could be asked from various angles how much or have little appreciation for the culture and history of africa africa as a whole we have to divide up african to several different zones frankly north africa east west africa but there was no such fascination with african mythology religion or history um so not everyone got this exoticizing treatment and so as bad as it may have been you have to keep in mind the way europeans treated the japanese the way they treated the people of thailand was so much better than the way they treated other other people around the world so you know as especially but yeah what we have coming out of this today um sorry i think you guys got it but my fundamental point is as bad as it was in the old days in the heroic period we then had this transition to the scholarship of our times based in the university which is really just a process of the blind leading the blind and pretty much all scholars today are really just recycling and ripping off the accomplishments of that earlier uh heroic generation and have have nothing positive or negative to offer of their own so yeah that's it that's that's the death of buddhist scotia so baby do you have any any thoughts or questions i mean i say melissa's off camera i will i will answer your questions guys but melissa um you came into my life at an interesting time because it's all totally over for me i mean there's no i don't think there's ever been a time we've been together no there has been i was i was just gonna say there's never been a time we've been together when i've thought about going back and getting a phd in buddhism again but actually actually it has been talked about a few times that i could go and rekindle my expertise and get a phd on this yeah yeah go on yeah i didn't wonder i mean for you what put a little bit of this but what it means for you is very different than what it means for any of my other ex-girlfriends either were other women who were with me and other times in my life uh yeah sure well my ques my question or my comment is not going to be a scholarly question i don't think so if you're okay with me talking yeah what's in your mind well i just remember when i was first uh introducing you to my parents yeah i was gushing basically over how how impressed i was with your scholarship that yeah this period of time in your life when you were but a scholar i just had never met anybody like that and never talked with anybody like that that had really gone to a place and studied ancient scripture you know actually [Music] inscriptions you know stone inscriptions to me that was just so just fascinating so yeah i was really excited you know i was saying like this is somebody who's like studying so many languages and her parents had no interest in that way yeah that's right yeah i was i was i was alluding to that yeah um so yeah i guess in that sense it was sad for me to realize so few people really value that so few people really care about ancient yeah scripture or ancient religions well i was doing i was doing all the modern stuff at the same time i was also studying communism and what happened within the last hundred years they have gotten into meditation you know they they don't understand where it comes from and all these people in the west who don't understand it and they don't have a question that it comes from this you know hallowed place this hallowed source so it is just interesting to me that you you were one of the few people that you know just said no i read this i know from all sides that this is complete [ __ ] right yeah yeah so anyway that's that's me i just heard that as part of your life well you know i'd say my own feeling about it one subtle way in which it's changed is that you know i i used to feel like you know that the sad thing was i'd done all this work and i gained all this expertise and then i moved on to do something completely different with my life right but now of course i see that as my greatest accomplishment and the most wonderful thing about me and precisely what is so rare and extraordinary is to have attained that level of knowledge and proficiency and experience and then give it up and move on that's that's more as opposed to spending the rest of your life [ __ ] around higher education in this way you're being more you knew the problems with it when you were talking with scholars and you were talking to people with phds and buddhism i know at the time you knew this but like right actually shifting was like you know my way to make progress in the world my way to change the world is not through doing the same thing that these people have been doing yeah would you say in this video that they haven't made progress when you have an actual group of people you know so yeah yeah um yeah so that's you know it's partly a change in my attitude towards this change but what what you want to do with it and so on and so forth yeah um [Music] but i think it's wonderful that your scholarship on this will still exist we'll continue to exist that your voice in but a scholarship yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um [Music] you know i i think the big difference is that with buddhism nobody feels there's a sense of urgency for new scholarship and new challenges to orthodoxy uh with islam everyone feels the sense of urgency and nobody knows what to do about it and you know like hey if we don't do something to change the muscle world you know this is a that's a disaster case in point you know afghanistan etc etc something's got to change with islam there has to be some new direction taken um you know and they're wrong i mean there is tremendous urgency it really does matter it's it's of unbelievable importance to like more than a billion people that we really make progress in in buddhist scholarship and i think that you know um the knock-on effects of buddhism for people who have no idea what buddhism is around the world i mean so you mentioned your own parents doing meditation and so on and so forth people like hitomi mochizuki or whatever you know they say that all around the world there are these people who who don't know what it is that they're a victim of you know the kind of knock-on indirect significance of buddhism strongest and you know i feel like when i first came on youtube there was this brief period of intense scrutiny being directed towards christianity there was the atheist movement really challenging christianity and it didn't last it faded you know it was this brief um brief intense period of hope that something would be improved by atheists really challenging uh christianity now you know again i do think there's a difference and if you look around my works you'll see i mention this i think buddhism can have some value in the 22nd century and the 23rd century i think christianity has none at all i think islam has none at all you know but if buddhism is gonna exist in any form it has to be a form that doesn't it doesn't teach people to pray to cure cancer for example i mean i'm sorry but like let's let's be real let's talk about something a lot of different religions have in common the belief in prayer the belief that donating money to that religious institution will um you will be magically rewarded by the gods or by fate or what have you i mean there were a lot of really common scams built into all these all these religions you know there are huge fundamental parts of buddhism that have to be uh challenged and changed and discarded and you know um i i remember so sorry this is a little bit of a long story guys there was a scholar of buddhism who converted to catholicism and it was a very unusual thing newspapers have changed this was mentioned in our local newspaper in canada i forget why or what the excuse was maybe it was just because it was picked up in the catholic papers and somebody was catholic but it was you know buddhist scholar with a phd converts to catholicism and this was the story anyway i was actually in the classroom with professor leonard priestley when one of my other students he was an older guy he was 35 or something he uh he stood up and he said during the question where he said you know uh you might have noticed the newspapers reported that professor so and so you know converted to uh catholicism after so many years of the scholar one of them and when and priestly stood there in his uh ineffable manner and said i don't know if i could say that anybody has really converted to catholicism i think it might be more fair to say that he reverted like that they got a laugh out of me and a couple other more uh intellectual students in the classroom because you know i got i got the point of that um now this particular professor who was in the newspapers at the time his bizarre justification for his conversion was that he felt that catholicism was fundamentally correct because it was based on a human being worshiping something other than themselves and that buddhism was fundamentally wrong because it was based on self fascination that you were yourself the object of the of the religion you know now there were a couple other controversies uh quoted connected to this and exactly what it meant how it was translated into french was somewhat different and so on believe it or not there was people were talking about this for for some time who who said what who meant what exactly talking about self-fascination anyway uh you know i think exactly what everyone picks up on about christianity correctly is that christianity is very fundamentally about self-abasement is that you as the worshiper are nothing and god is everything and you know that you are small and your time on earth is short and is of very little significance whereas what is of significance you know is this other entity this other thing this other story and it doesn't really matter that much whether it's jesus or moses or you know which version of christianity we're talking about here the the the denigrating function of faith in christianity is obvious to everyone now it doesn't mean everyone opposes it some people think it's a good thing you know some people think that instead a religion like buddhism leads to egomania or that nihilism and atheism in general lead to late egomania so my point is this um [Music] i think that people sense the urgency of challenging christianity and of challenging islam even when there aren't terrorist attacks that week or that month or what have you because they feel not even that they understand or know or think about or talk about they feel how denigrating it is you know this aspect of worshiping the great unknown other uh the idea that you don't live for your own interest or your own will but for somebody else's and they lose sight of the profoundly you know denigrating effect buddhism has on people's lives because buddhism is not denigrating in that way it's not now let me ask you honestly though see i think there's a real grass greener on the other side of the hill type of fallacy here what [ __ ] up people more sitting down to pray and hearing nothing back or engaging in meditation where you do hear something back i've got to tell you meditation [ __ ] people up far worse far worse than prayer um i'll just digress on that for one moment i think you can basically talk about two types of prayer uh silent prayer just in the sense that you hear nothing back from god you pray and god says nothing even if you pray for god to give you a sign and then you can talk about ecstatic prayer many different traditions do this in different ways where one way or another you exhaust yourself to the point where you have some kind of hallucination so that can be done through dancing uh just swirling around in a circle uh chanting in a repetitious way while fasting while whipping yourself while eating wormwood if you don't know wormwood it's a hallucinogenic bush that people ate in medieval europe and mysteriously it was associated with a whole bunch of religious occasions in the of the dark ages so you know you can talk about kind of silent prayer you got an ecstatic prayer um but you know even with that ecstatic prayer the fact that you had to fast and frenetically dance and do all these things to get yourself into this altered state of mind to supposedly have some kind of hallucination or or see god or hear from god or something that already separates it from the realm of the normal in a way that buddhist meditation does not um i remember talking about this very honestly and very directly so i i could name the buddhist monks and name the temple but i'm i'm not going to what's the point what's the point i don't know i don't know why i said to myself i remember talking with a group of buddhist monks and some of them were kind of buddhist scholars and like laypeople but who were professional buddhist preachers and everyone other than me was basically deriding the scholarly approach to buddhism and saying that like it was better to just have an approach to buddhism based on meditation and what i said i did speak in a very charismatic self-confident way compared to the other people in that circle so really nobody said [ __ ] back to me most of the other people were kind of waffling hippies and they missed me i said any young scholar who goes and takes one book off the shelf he takes the suta napata off the shelf that's a good book to start with if you want to know about buddhist philosophy you know it's a thin book sit in the path okay he sees how many other books are still on that shelf he knows how little he knows he's aware of his own ignorance okay i said let me tell you every day i meet people who never took that book off the shelf who didn't have a scholarly approach they sat down and meditated and they discovered that they are the next incarnation of the buddha maitreya that they have achieved buddha consciousness that they know something i don't know and nobody else is known for this like i meet people every day who have delusions of grandeur who have messianic delusions affirmed by their meditative experiences and everybody in that [ __ ] circle knows what i'm talking about like that's the thing like like i was i was really young when that happened but i i could say that from my experience so you've got these other senior buddhist monks there they they've they haven't talked to a few hippies who convinced themselves they were the next incarnation of of my trap or they haven't known other buddhist monks who were making money by telling people that by doing guided messages oh so you've discovered you've discovered what i knew about you from when you first walked in this door that you are the reincarnation of ananda and that you know you have this special i could tell you from your aura there's a lot of money in that [ __ ] there's money in sex too money money fame sex power respect everything a lot of a lot of good-looking middle-aged women discover buddhism and have sexual relations with buddhist monks or buddhist gurus who aren't monks men wearing white robes who aren't uh aren't wearing the saffron colored robe as people say you know um yeah uh i'm just telling you honestly you know the type of delusion the type of ego trip the type of impact meditation has on people's lives it's much much worse than prayer it's truly dangerous it's truly destructive and from the outside people don't see it because what we're sensitive to what we're looking for is the type of denigration and self-abdication that's associated with worshiping a god or a god-like figure whether that be jesus muhammad or or otherwise so it's true buddhism is lacking that but buddhism has its own dangers with terrible terrible consequences not just for india and not just for sri lanka not just for thailand but for california you know for for the whole world so we have a question about canada jinsan you have not been watching my youtube channel long enough to know that not only did i criticize canada ginseng i talked with her on several occasions two or three occasions and i made a youtube video summarizing and responding to the conversation i had with her after she had uh converted to islam i don't know i assume she's still with it i assume she hasn't hasn't uh assumed she hasn't lost her faith in that also she lost her faith in youtube to convert to islam okay uh great question from call me squishy uh quote how did you start learning chinese so she's asking how and not why we have done a video together melissa's voice is in it so what is it called the time to learn chinese is now that's really the video to see there you go the time to learn chinese is right now so this is really about the why of learning chinese i'll give you that like but yeah you know i started learning chinese because i had to give up on all this other stuff that's the short answer [Laughter] yeah i mean i can get into it but you know it was after uh after everything else in my life had failed and i knew what a joke western academia was and all these different fields i'd already been involved in before and i thought well i'll go mainstream i'll study a language more than one billion speakers and uh and press ahead that way also didn't work out and uh you know i i love my life i'm very happy that i have the life now that i have and that i didn't end up in one academic trap rather than another but yeah basically i had to turn to chinese in desperation after finding um the powerless state of western academia in a series of other disciplines including buddhism that we've just been talking about so got a question from william again uh oh god can i even remember the name of my own essay asking more about the british couple who translated uh the sutras into english uh i believe it's called the opposite of buddhism so i have this article and you have to click through it's in sections yes here we go i'm gonna give you here we go section one so we'll give you this link um so you see it's a section one and then you have to click to read section two et cetera et cetera this is also one of my essays that's been translated into chinese and i have never read the chinese it was translated did you know that yeah i have several several essays of mine i've translated chinese yeah i was translated before i learned chinese myself years before i never worked on chinese so it was it was translated and published in in chinese uh several my essays were i have several if you if you read my resume you'll see that i've never i've never read it i've gone back and read it after after learning chinese it would be very hard work for me to read but sure that'd be great i should have a youtube video of me reading it out loud chinese my poorly pronounced chinese video the whole thing regret uh the audiobook version anyway that'll that'll really fill you in with more about that and yeah um as you can imagine part of the reason why they were so uh influential was how few people came before them and how few people came after them so uh ddp says i don't know it's an unusual name to use ddp welcome to the crowd quote the attitude towards islam was totally different because amongst western scholars totally different attitude towards buddhism because of the ottoman empire i don't quite find that credible i mean i think the difference is that from a muslim perspective they're right everybody else is wrong they're going to heaven and everybody else can go to hell you know uh in you you have a view with islam that is totally set on mutual extermination it's dominate or exterminate that's really all that's possible with that religion now is christianity so much better depends what century you're talking about there are several centuries in spain and italy where christianity is just about as bad you know christianity was really awful um but today if you live in nantucket you know you know um where christianity has become sufficiently corrupt and cease to take itself seriously it's much much better and now that doesn't mean i'm pro-christian i'm i'm a nihilistic atheist but no i mean you know uh if you start to get into literature there were plenty of white europeans you worshipped um especially the the spiritual schools of thought within islam um [Music] you know sufi islam and so on and so forth what the hell there was that best-selling book the five pillars of wisdom and all this crap there were various attempts so-called perennialism the perennial philosophy of trying to reinvent um sufi mysticism and islamic philosophy uh for a western audience and a lot of that stuff had a big audience it has a big following when i first got involved in veganism a lot of the vegan hippies identified as some kind of sufi mystic were attached to a watered down islam one way or the other um so you know we just say um okay so uh call me squishy says she never thought about that prayer versus meditation and the flip side of that is any excuses people make for meditation should be held up to um the same scrutiny that you would apply to prayer if people tell you that meditation can for example improve your sex life do you believe that about prayer it is equally true of prayer it is neither more or less true of prayer which is to say from one perspective it's totally false about prayer but from another it's kind of a little like you know if you just kind of sit there and think about it you know that's what you're doing with prayer kind of thing i think it makes some some uh tiny difference so and i would refer ddp's final comment to this ddp says quote vipassana is not dangerous close quote that's a goddamn lie and i mean either you're speaking out of ignorance or you're intentionally lying because you're shilling for one of the many groups that makes money out of selling fibasta and look hold it to the same standards you would apply to prayer if you're not skeptical about vipassana just replace the word meditation with prayer and ask yourself if you would now be skeptical or not about exactly the same claims there is a woman who is a vegan activist i believe she still is but i haven't heard from her in years now she blocked me and frankly defamed me on the internet too but she was friends with me for a short time i remember you might think she'd continue to be friends with me because when i first met her she was making excuses for and supporting vipassana and she'd been through the academic literature evaluating the outcomes of the meditation and she would say things like well you know when you compare it to going to the gym or doing yoga you know has some minor effects on you know self-esteem or optimism has some some kind of very minor benefits for people and makes them feel better you take you take people who are depressed and do this and you compare it to a placebo group and compare it to a group that went to the gym and did yoga and weightlifting or something and i remember i talked it through with her in a kind of rigorous way and by the end of the conversation if it was it was just like one or two conversations she really agree with me she realized that she'd been she'd been lying to herself that these claims they you're engaging in a kind of moving the goalpost fallacy um which is equivalent to christians there were real studies doing this i could google around for them there were christians who convinced themselves that prayer would make plants grow faster it's like you had one group of people who would pray in front of a plant every day and then the other group of plants didn't get prayers and they claimed that these plants grew taller than those so so this is the mighty god of israel you believe in like you know even if this were true you have this incredibly trivial five percent higher plant growth thanks to prayer or something you know this is this is what you're what you're getting into so ddp i've got to tell you man um it's a hell of a thing for you to say if you pass and that is not dangerous you don't know anyone where it ruined their life you don't know anyone where it really seriously negatively impacted their life you know i'd say this too to people who make that kind of claim about antidepressant drugs like if you have 50 friends 50 acquaintances who used antidepressant drugs you don't know any of them for whom it had really serious negative impacts in their lives i just say with buddhism and buddhist meditation follow-up can be hard to do because when people quit the church they may just completely disappear you may not hear about it if you're close friends with the buddhist monk and someone but you know if you are if you're still in touch no no no these these religious movements and these religious rituals they have profound negative impacts on people's lives and that is part of the reason why the the rate of attrition is so high for buddhism including defacing buddhism people are drawn in by promises basically of a miracle cure and then when they don't get those results or they actually have negative results they have a negative impact on their life a very very large percentage of them quit and the people who stay in the cult they don't do follow-up and evaluation like oh well where are the other eighty percent of the people who signed up at the same time you know this guy yeah oh that you can quit oh yes well yeah in reality though within islam people do too you know people uh you know i just say people just stop praying and stop going to temple and stop taking it seriously it's true though if they actually formally leave the religion that's a death penalty offense islam that is a big deal sure and yes significant numbers of buddhists convert to islam every year tragically look at look at that phenomenon uh too well william mcgeheen asks quote do you think islam will be sanitized and revised at some point well william you lived through the last opportunity for that to happen and it's over so my answer is no if you look back at the last 500 years there were two big opportunities to revise the religion i would say one was communism you know during the high point of communism there could have been a kind of new revised modernized version of islam that was created by the communist religion by the way if you don't know the nazis literally created their own form of christianity they called it positive christianity stranger things have happened there could have been a kind of official uh revised and sanitized version at that time and then the second was obviously the the shock um and the war ensuing after september 11 2001. and neither neither one of those things happened so it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now it's not going to happen the next 100 years for the next 100 years we're going to be looking at more plainly than ever before one road that embraces modernity secularism science science atheism nihilism pragmatism realism and then another road that instead walks back toward the darkness of the dark ages and in saying this about islam i can say the same thing about judaism i could say the same thing about christianity i can say the uh the same thing about hinduism so on and so forth so i think more starkly and clearly than ever we're looking at uh two roads that part this way and we've got to start asking ourselves and asking others you know which side are you on and if you are on my side guys i mean i'm now in my mid-40s okay what's going to change and what are you going to do to make it happen you know you've seen how little the world has changed in the last 20 years after september 11th 2001 coming up on it's okay it's it's 19 years i admit it they only come you know whatever [Laughter] um you know in that span of roughly 20 years you see how little religion has changed how little the world has changed despite the united states government pouring out over 100 billion dollars a year in this budget for these so-called forever wars forever wars that one day eventually had to come to an end okay what's going to change in the next 10 years what's going to change in the next 20 years i'm not going to live forever with global warming going the way it is this planet may not last forever and frankly global warming puts it in a great comparative perspective what do you want to do about global warming guys oh yeah well you know [Laughter] you know how about having a two-child policy for everyone maximum of two children okay how are you going to enforce that in afghanistan how are you going to force that in saudi arabia any kind of child planning policy you want for planet earth what you're up against everywhere is religion now yes in some places you're up against catholicism in some places you're up against hinduism but obviously for a huge part of the world you're up against islam okay so do you want to deal with global warming through globally having a reduced birth rate religion is your first and foremost obstacle and if we don't do something it's going to be your last option okay well what about radically reducing the amount of meat meat and dairy eggs people consume having a dietary shift toward veganism or semi-veganism guess who you're up against oh what a surprise it's catholicism hinduism islam it's religion so i mean we have these two paths pardon and um we've got to start asking each other which side are you on and if you're on the same path i'm on if you're a nihilist if you can appreciate that the future is nihilism and not faith then you've got to start asking tough questions about you know if you want a better world what are you willing to do to get it and if nobody's willing to start doing anything then soon enough we're going to have no world at all