Welcome, everybody. This is the third lecture in our course on Asian police women, and today
it is my great pleasure to welcome Vanessa Sasson, who is going to speak to us on the
topic of children in the Pali Canon. Vanessa Sasson is a professor of religious studies
in the liberal arts department of Marianopolis College, where she has been teaching since
1999. She is also a research fellow for the Institute for Studies in Race, Reconciliation
and Social Justice at the University of the Free State, as well as adjunct professor of
comparative religion at McGill University. She has published a number of articles and
book chapters. She is the author of The Birth of Moses and the Buddha, a paradigm for the
comparative study of religions published by Sheffield University Press in 2007, and co-editor
with Jane Mary Law of Imagining the foetus, The Unborn in Myth, Religion and Culture, Oxford
University Press 2009. And she is editor of Little Buddhas, Children and Childhoods in
Buddhist Texts and Traditions, Oxford University Press 2013. So with this, I'll leave you and
welcome to Vanessa Sasson. Good morning. I don't know if it's morning, where everyone is. I hope
you can hear me. Thank you to Viku and Alejo. It's a pleasure to be participating in this program.
It's a wonderful course, a wonderful project, so I'm really happy to be part of it, and I hope
it can be helpful over the next hour and a half. So I have to admit that I've never done a full
online class before, so I'm a bit odd. I think if you ask questions and comment as we go, I'll feel
like I'm actually talking to someone, which will be nice. I can't see any of your faces, which I
would have liked. Okay, so what I want to talk about, I've been thinking about this lecture for a
few months and thinking about how I wanted to organize it. I was originally going to do things
that I knew a bit better, and then I thought I would try out some new material that I'm thinking
about for a new book. And so it's a focus on Children in the Polycanon, and it's a little bit
more specific than even what I've called Children in the Polycanon. It's also going to be a focus,
this lecture at least, is going to be focused on the precocious child and what that means in the
Polycanon. I realized that this lecture is a little bit different from a lot of the lectures that
you'll be receiving. The course is a course about women and South Asian women in Buddhism. This is
about children, and what I'm sure you guys are going to pick up on very quickly is that there
are actually very few female children. Actually, I have no examples of female precocious children
in the literature that I've been scanning. So if any of you... Oh, my voice is weak. Okay,
can you hear me better now? Is this better? My microphone doesn't seem to... Ah, okay. I'm
going to come really close to my computer screen. So I'll be looking forward to your comments,
and if you have thoughts on the material or commentary, it would be great to hear what you
have to say, because this is kind of new and exciting for me. So I'm looking forward to a
good conversation. So what I want to start with is a question about research in the Western Academy
about children in Buddhism. I'm sure that anyone who lives in a Buddhist community is fully aware
of how important children are to Buddhist communities so that they can thrive. Children
are everywhere in Buddhist communities. We need to have schools for children. They run around in
monasteries. They're part of every human community. They can't not be. There are vinya rules for
children. Children are part of the background of any live human community. But for a number of
reasons that I'll help identify, there's been actually very little research done on children
in Buddhism and Western scholarship. So I'm going to try to... Ah, here we go. When I did the book
on little Buddhas, it was literally after having my own child and thinking to myself, where is the
resources? Where's the research? How come there's no discussion about children in Buddhism? And I had
to really scan to look for stuff. I found some random articles here and there. There's Alan
Cole, who's done a significant amount of work. But for the most part, there's been very little
discussion about children in Buddhism. And I have a couple of theories as to why that might be the
case. Number one is Western scholarship was for the most part has been very interested in the
celibacy and the monastic life of Buddhism, which is a really dominant part of Buddhist life,
obviously. But that created a kind of emphasis on adulthood as well, which is not always the case.
Not all monastics are adults. Rita Gross, who some of you, I'm sure, are familiar with her work. She
wrote a number of articles on children in Buddhism over the years. She was one of the few who did
that. But her views were to some extent limiting. And here's a very important quote from one of her
books. She actually uses this quote a few times. She kind of rehashed her work a few times. And so
since developing enlightened attitudes is so basic to Buddhism, its central space is the meditation
hall, not the fields, the hearth, the sacramental table, the sacrificial altar, or the bazaar. People
fare best in the meditation hall as adults, individuals, which is why Buddhism is not
especially oriented towards or focused on families and children. However important these concerns
are to some Buddhists. This view, I think, has dominated Western scholarship for a long time.
And it was why I created that book on children in Buddhism two years ago to try and address the
question, is there more to be said about children than just that they're not relevant, or that
they're not central to the tradition? I think Rita Grosz's right to some extent, obviously,
the meditation hall is a very important space in Buddhism. But I don't think this is the only way
that we can approach the subject. And I tackled this question a bit in the introduction to my
book, which I shared with you. I think it was made available through PDF. But I don't think this is
the only reason why there's another reason that I actually did put in the PowerPoint that I thought
a lot about, but it's hard to articulate at times. As Biko Analayo mentioned, I'm also a professor of
comparative religion. My training was as a comparativist. And I compared biblical and
rabbinic texts with early Pali and Sanskrit texts. And being exposed to the biblical and rabbinic
field of academic research really affects how I understand Buddhist studies. The amount of
research that is available in Western scholarship on Bible is overwhelming. If you go to a
conference or you go to a book exhibition hall, the amount of materials, if you go to the AR and
you see the SPL exhibits of all the material that is being published on the Bible, it is completely
overwhelming and saturated. You have to get a niche, a tiny, tiny niche, and specialize on one
verse or one part of a verse to be able to publish anything anymore. It's a really saturated field.
By comparison, Buddhist studies really is just getting off the ground. I think this has an
impact. I think we're just getting to know Buddhism in Western scholarship. And we're undoing
assumptions and expectations as we go. And I think one of those assumptions was that Buddhism had
little to say about children because we weren't looking for it. And I don't think that that's
a detrimental reality. I think it's just part of our growing up with the tradition and getting to
know it for the first time in the West. So I think this is also a big part of the reality. And I think
it's worth noting. And I think it becomes really obvious when you compare scholarship in two
different fields. So I think those are possible reasons why. The other reasons, number two and
three that I put on the PowerPoint are also really, really striking is that if the only engagement
that we have with Buddhism is through texts, which for the most part, I think was true for a long
time, the most dominant narratives and narratives are very powerful ways to engage with the
tradition are the stories of the Buddha himself in his last life. And the stories of the Sancho
Jattaka. In both these stories, we have very powerful and potentially very detrimental images
of what it is to care for a child. In the story of the Buddha, in his last life, we have a man who
is on a quest. And to achieve what he wants to achieve and fulfill that quest, he has to leave his
family behind. And it's a devastating story. One of the things that I've always appreciated about
this story is that the tradition leaves it this way, that the tradition leaves the Buddha with
his son and his wife and he and they leave a complicated and upsetting narrative in which a
man walks away from his family. In the Jattaka Nidhana, some of you may be familiar with this,
there's a very touching little detail left in the narrative where after he has decided that he would
leave home, and he has seen the four sites, he goes back and he sees his wife, she showed her, well,
she's not named, but he sees his wife and his newborn son. And he wants to touch the child,
but he knows that if he touches the child, he's going to wake her up. And if he wakes her up,
he won't be able to leave. The text doesn't tell us why he won't be able to leave. So we don't know
if it's she will do something or if it will be too hard for him. But he can't leave if he touches
and he wakes her up. And so there's a sense of pathos and sadness and complexity to this narrative.
But at the end of the day, he leaves. And it's, it's a sad story. When I've talked about it,
I talked about it recently with my students, and I told it from this perspective of sadness,
and they all kind of left the class feeling quite devastated about this narrative of this
pull that this tradition is invoking of what it seems to be one or the other. But to achieve this
ultimate goal, he has to leave home. That has led some people to view the tradition as him not
fulfilling his Dharma, which would be a traditional Indian way of reading the narrative is that he had
a responsibility, his Dharma, to his family, to his son, to the king, to his subjects. And he broke
his Dharma to pursue his quest, an alternative interpretation, obviously, that he was fulfilling
a higher Dharma. But for those who were left behind, he leaves people behind, and he breaks
his responsibilities to them. So there's a lot of complexity to this narrative. And it can certainly
lead us to imagine that the conclusion must be to achieve any kind of great spiritual heights.
We have to walk away from our children and our families. This is an obvious kind of conclusion
to these narratives. I don't think it's the only one. I'm not suggesting that. But I think this is
why we've had so little discussion about children in Buddhism. The other story that I think has
had a great impact on how we understand Buddhism is the very famous Visantra, Jessica.
I'm assuming most of you, I don't know anything about you, but I'm assuming
familiar to a lot of you. The Visantra, Jessica, is probably the most famous Jessica and the most
famous narrative outside of the Buddha's own personal narrative. And again, a kind of very
heart-wrenching, more heart-wrenching than the Buddha's last life. The Buddha's last life narrative
is touching and sad and much softer in a lot of ways. But the Visantra, Jessica, is devastating.
And so if you, when I've read it with my students, their responses to it have been
really very strong. The first time they read it, they're shocked and upset about the narrative.
And there's a lot to be upset about when you first engage it. So what you have here is a narrative
where to perfect a virtue, it seems as though he's breaking all other virtues. And that's the
complexity of this narrative. And the tradition doesn't clean it up or try to make everything
okay. It leaves us with this problem as the bodhisattva is on this quest to become perfect
in his generosity. He hurts everything in his path. And so he hurts his kingdom and he hurts
his subjects and presumably his father again and his mother. And then when they go to the forest,
and this is the very famous moment in the Visantra, Jessica, the terrible Jujaka
arrives and he wants slaves. And he goes to see Visantra and he says, I need some slaves because
my wife refuses to work, which is just a terrible situation. And the bodhisattva has this really
complicated set of reactions. And on the one hand, he has excitement because he thinks, wow,
I'm going to be able to perfect my generosity now. The moment has arisen. And so I can give my
children and really be generous. And on the other hand, he's devastated by it. And so again,
this pull this tug of war that's happening in him and potentially in the tradition of what do we do
in these situations. And so he gives the children to Jujaka and the children are devastated. If you've
read the story, not just heard the bear outline, it's a very emotional story. And there's a lot of
emotional detail in the polyversion of it, where the children run away and they run and they go
and they hide in a lotus pond. And they put the lotus flowers over their heads to hide. And then
one of the sweetest details to me is when the father, so Visantra goes to find them and they've
run away because they don't want to go with Jujaka. And so the father goes to find them. And when he
calls them, the text says that the children can't reject their father's voice. And so because he
called, they have to answer, which gives us a sense of the tenderness of the relationship
between the father and these children that these children are well behaved and they love their
father and they don't want to reject their father by ignoring him, even though the situation is so
awful. And so despite their fear, they must listen to their father and they get out and he gives them
again and they run away again and they clutch at his legs and they're crying and he pulls them off
and he tells them, I have to do this. It's a really very difficult narrative. And he hands them over
to Jujaka. And then the authors of this narrative go even further because then Jujaka takes out a
stick and he starts to beat them as he pulls them away and they're crying. And so it's just,
it's a really tormented narrative. And then it doesn't end there because then
Vasantra is left all by himself in the woods. Mahdi, his wife, is out picking fruits and so
she doesn't know what's happening. And he has this thought, a really striking detail in the text,
where he has this thought, maybe I should go and kill Jujaka and get my children back.
And then he stops and says, no, I've given what I need to, once it's given, you have to give.
So it's, it's not a story that celebrates the giving. It's a story that really
is very tormented by this as an attempt to try to perfect this virtue. Now I see there's a question.
The Buddha's teachings about dispassion to interpret the action as an emotional feeling
goes against the knowledge of his predicament. Are we not implying or judging his actions?
Well, first of all, he's not a Buddha yet. He's still a bodhisattva, which is a really
important detail. I can see why you're asking this question. But certainly from the way of,
the way I'm reading, I'm reading it as a narrative, as a story. And as a story of a character before
he achieves awakening, and as literature that has all of, like there's a whole series of these
jahtaka stories where the characters are, they seem more complex and not completely
dispassionate yet. And this is the whole point of being a bodhisattva. If he was a Buddha,
it would be a different question. So the same with when he leaves his son behind, he still hasn't
achieved awakening. And so I think you can see potentially you can read into this story a
possibility of some emotional struggle. Once he becomes awakened, I think then reading his
narratives is very different. But he's not awakened yet. So I think he's still struggling
on the road to achieving awakening. Now, again, I'm just providing one kind of literary way of
approaching these texts. There are so many ways to read these stories because they're so rich
and full of potential. I hope that kind of addresses your question.
Um, so I think these kinds of stories when we need them face on
really can, can be interpreted as though Buddhism is saying, put your children away or ignore them
or worse, give them to a slave, a terrible man like Duchica. I think this is one of the reasons
why we haven't taken that much interest in children. But as I'm going to show, I think
there's a lot to be said about children in the tradition. So I'm just seeing another question.
Talking of a comparative approach, our class at the Dharma Drum Institute, I love the Dharma
Drum Institute, it's a beautiful space. Notice the parallel between the center and the binding
visor. Yes, it's a really good parallel. Seemingly, Isaac has already, it was already a grown up son
by then. We're in a sort of some biblical studies, but read that the book of Genesis does not tell
the age of Isaac at the time. That's right. The Talmudic experts indicate that Isaac was 37,
likely based on the next biblical story, which is Sarah's day. That's right.
The 90 when Isaac was born, he was nonetheless a child. This reminds us of your comments on the
many senses of the world child. Yeah, no, it's a really good point. I'm very interested in this
parallel. It's one of the articles I'm hoping to write eventually is comparing these two stories
of Isaac and Vicentra. And you're right that in the case of Isaac, even though he's described
as a son, he believed the word is for son, I think, but I have to look at the Bible again.
He is traditionally understood to be 37 years old. And that has all kinds of implications,
because then it means that he has to participate in his own sacrifice. Because if you were a child,
then he could be just sacrificed. But as a 37 year old man, you can't just, he has some agency at
this point. So there's a lot to be said about that. And just as I think the children in the
Vicentra, Jessica have a lot of agency, they choose to run away, they choose to come back,
they choose to beg their fathers, they are active agents, they're not just infants that have
nothing that can't do anything. So the children actually in the Vicentra, Jessica, I think are
more complex than what we've often allowed ourselves to see. But that's a wonderful parallel.
Thank you for that. So this just kind of to give you a background of why I think we have not given
that much attention to children and Buddhism. But I think there's a lot to be said. And I think
there's like a whole venue of opportunity here to think about this again, almost as though for the
first time. So I've been thinking about the role of children and Buddhism for many years. But the
way in which I'm going to be talking about it is quite new for me. Somebody else. Are these stories
meant to be taken literally? Are they meant to point to the idea of giving something of great
value in the world as part of developing a spiritual path? That's a fascinating question.
I love questions like that. If you were standing in front of me, my response would be what do you
think? If you I mean, I could, I think that's really more the way to handle a question like
that is you have to decide what you think these stories are meant to do. We can't ever tell what
the intentions of texts are because we don't know who the authors were and we don't have access to
them. So at some point, you have to decide what you think the intention is. Well, if you think
they're metaphors, then you read them from that perspective, right? And then you see things in it
that somebody who will take it more literally will see something else in it. And that's what
makes the conversation of an intellectual tradition. So interesting is we all bring
to our text what we see through our own eyes and the conversation can happen. If there's only one
way to read a text, there's very little conversation to be had. So there has to be,
you know, kind of a multiplicity of voices. That's what makes a classroom so much fun.
Okay, so I want to look at a particular theme that I talked about before. This is a little bit
influenced by one of the articles in my book on Little Buddhas, an article produced by Miriam
Levering where she looked at, it was an edited volume, and she was looking at the precocious
child in Chinese Buddhism. And that got me thinking to the precocious child in the Pali canon.
Now precocious, someone who's advanced beyond their age, the biological age, right? And so
someone who seems to display all kinds of qualities that their age seems to be advanced.
And so the first character obviously that's going to display all kinds of precocious capacities is
going to be the bodhisattva, but it's not just the bodhisattva. So I'm going to give this as
foreground, but there's a really easy kind of counter argument, everything I'm going to say,
which is going to explain my second bit. So I want to talk about the bodhisattva in his past lives
and the kinds of qualities that he shows. Now I've chosen three jaktikas here. I wasn't quite sure
about the timing and how this would work for an hour and a half. So I'm going to talk and hopefully
I'll make it through to the end. I hope I have too little, we'll see how this one works.
So the first one is to go back to the santra jaktika because it's so famous and so powerful.
And so we have this relationship to it. This is a very famous image from Sanchi Stupa for those of
you who want to know what the image is from. And it tells in, there's a technical term for it.
I don't remember what it is when images are shown in order. And so it's almost like a comic book
shows you different scenes of his life story. So you see the santra and his wife Maddy in their
huts there. So in the santra jaktika we have this complex narrative about the santra giving away
his child. I did briefly touch on the fact that I think his children are more interesting than we
often assume because I think they have a lot more personality. The tradition could have made it more
easy on themselves by just kind of eliminating any character and just having infants hand it
over and having them not say anything, but they don't. And so the authors of this tradition,
whoever they were, give us children who are complicated and emotional and very present,
which is what makes this story so upsetting or certainly enhances it. But there's another child
in this story, and at least I did for a very long time. I didn't really notice him until I went back
to the text. And that's the child bodhisattva, when he's both passages up or kind of references
up on the PowerPoint. So when he's born, so there's one verse just when he comes into the
womb. And this is something we see over and over again in Buddhist literature is these kind of
perfect birth narratives, which as an aside, I didn't experience when I gave birth to my son,
right? So there's this very idealized experience of what is normally something of tremendous
pain and suffering, but isn't in the case of a great being. And so the text says, this is the
Pali version of the Santra Jessica, the great being came from his mother's womb free from impurity.
So I have it here on the PowerPoint, open eyed and on the instant holding out his hand to his
mother. He said, Mother, I wish to make some gift. Is there anything? And she replied to me,
just this moment, she replied is very interesting. If my son as he came out of the womb spoke to me,
I would be worried. But here you have the newborn child who is speaking to his mother,
and she just replies to him as though this is an ordinary transaction. And she replies,
Yes, my son, give as you will. And she dropped a person 1000 pieces into his outstretched hand.
So right away, he comes out of the birth out of the womb, and he's ready to perfect generosity.
This is what this verse, this is what this lifetime is going to be dedicated to.
He needs to do it. And so he comes out of the womb, and he's speaking, and he's thinking,
and he's ready to engage in the world. This is the very definition of precocious. This is also,
we could read this as a miracle story, we could read this as a kind of hopeful narrative,
what some infants may be capable of, there's all kinds of ways of reading this. But I think what
it tells us is that there's an imagination of children from very beginning, having qualities
and having desires and having something within them ready to share with the world.
A couple of verses later, we have the king causes the king now has 60,000 children that are born
around the same time as his son. And so he cares for all of them. He has 60 nurses taking care of
his son, and he has 60,000 nurses taking care of the 60,000 other children. So we have this very
elaborate kind of set up stage. And the king then caused to be made a prince's necklace with 100,000
pieces of money, and he gave it to his son. But he being four or five years of age gave it away
to his nurses, nor would he take it back when the nurses wish to give it to him. And they told us
to the king who said, what my son has given is well given, be it a brahmin's gift. And he had
another necklace made. But the prince again still in his childhood gave this to his nurses
and nine times over. Right. And so now the child is five or six years old, and he cannot withhold
the giving and he has to give. Now I'm sure we've met children who have very generous impulses,
and just need to give because that is their character. But usually it's a very short time
span. This is something that the tradition is telling us is following the child from the moment
he's born. I keep thinking when I read this literature of the arguments that are happening
in certain fields right now, particularly amongst neuroscientists and linguists of whether or not
we're a blank slate. And the dominant argument that's coming out of many scholars that I've
been reading is that we are not a blank slate and that we have a neurological makeup that sets up
us to have certain characteristics already. This is very much in line with what the Buddhist
tradition is arguing is that you come into the world already with your karma and your mind intact
in a particular way with certain capacities and propensities. So here this child has come into the
world ready to be generous and wanting to be generous and he gives and he gives and his father
cannot stop him. Now the most powerful part of this narrative to me comes a little bit later
when he's eight years old and this is when he makes his great declaration and it says when he
was eight years old as he reclined on his couch the boy thought to himself all that I give comes
from without and this does not satisfy me. I wish to give something of my very own. If one should
ask of my heart I would cut open my breast and I would tear it out and give it. If one ask of my
eyes I would pluck out my eyes and give them. If one should ask my flesh I would cut off all the
flesh of my body and give it and thus he pondered with all his being in the depths of his heart
this earth 40,000 quadrillions of leagues in extent, 200,000 of leagues in depth,
quaked and thundering like a great mad elephant. scenario chief of the mountains bowed like a
sapling in the hot steam and seemed to dance and stood leaning towards the city of jituta
at the earth's rumbling the sky thundered with lightning and rain
forked lightning flashed the ocean was stirred up and so this is I mean an extraordinary moment
he's eight years old he's not the Buddha yet he will not be the Buddha in this lifetime and yet
at eight years old he's having a thought of such profound generosity such a profound awareness of
what it is that he wants to accomplish that the universe is completely toppling over itself with
a response it's a cosmic response to a moment that has cosmic impact and what has cosmic impact
is an atrial boy's desire I don't know and again I say this from the perspective of comparative
biblical rabbinic materials I don't know of anything quite like this in the biblical tradition
of so much impact coming from one child the only kind of counter the example that I can think of
is with Jesus as God himself coming to earth but this is happening with the Buddha before he's the
Buddha and this is going to happen with other children as well and so I find that this gives
a really powerful presence and space to children in the tradition that I haven't really seen
anywhere else and that's what's fascinating to me
so that's the Cassandra Jessica I'm going to look at a few more just two more from the Mahanipatha
the last 10 so the collection of the last 10 Jessica stories is known as the Mahanipatha
this is a collection a term that was applied to it later how late we're not quite sure
may only Appleton's work on this is really very helpful
but these last 10 Jessica stories have a very special place in the tradition and they eventually
came to be understood as the 10 lifetimes in which he perfects a different virtue each time
which virtue is being practiced is not always clear it depends which text you're going to
use for that but they're very powerful text and they tend to in many temples around the
Buddhist world we'll see images of these 10 together and so I thought it would be useful
to look at a few from the last 10 is having the most impact on the tradition so the next one I
want to look at is the Tamiya Jessica or the Mukapaka Jessica it's known as both depends on which
edition we use it's one of my favorites it's a really striking Jessica and I remember the
first time I came across it I was just stunned I thought who this is an extraordinary narrative
and very very extreme and very intellectually evocative especially from the perspective of
children what it what it's saying about children's capacities that we I think in most parts cannot
imagine so in the Tamiya Jessica the setup is the following after some
prologue material we get the queen so the the king in the Tamiya Jessica again the
Bodhisattva is going to be born as a prince the king has not been able to sire an heir
he has 16,000 wives and none of them seems to be getting pregnant
um there's an obvious joke there but um eventually the queen though does become pregnant
and so the queen becomes pregnant and uh there's a verse here that I think is very beautiful
where the queen's womb seemed to be full of diamond when she finally became pregnant
and when she became aware of it she told it to the king and this again I find very beautiful
I think there was a question last week from somebody about relationship between fathers
and sons because there's so much emphasis between mothers and children here I think there's a real
tenderness between the father and the son and I think that happens right through the Bodhisattva's
life is the tension and the attention between the Bodhisattva and his father and the multiple life
stories is very powerful and the struggle to let go is very powerful in all of those stories
so here the queen's womb becomes full of diamond she tells about it to the king
and at last she brought forth a son endued with the auspicious marks
and on the same day 500 other young sons were born to other ministers
and at that moment the king was seated on his seat and he was surrounded by his ministers
when it was announced a son is born to you old king and at hearing it here's this beautiful
paternal affection arose in him and piercing through his skin reached to the marrow of his
bones and joy sprang up within him and his heart became refreshed very beautiful line so you feel
the attachment and the love and the joy that this child is going to bring to this king he has waited
so long he has tried with 16,000 wives and it never worked and finally the child has arrived
and so there's a great attachment to this child not wanting this child to then walk away right
and so that's going to color the narrative quite a bit and when people come to see him they say are
you are you happy about this and the people answer um no they ask the king asked them are you happy
and the people answer we were before helpless now we have helped we have obtained a lord and so
we see the attachment of the community to this child right the impact of this boy that has
finally been born and how important it is to the community and to the father in particular and the
mother not is not as emphasized she will come later um now here's the part of the timia jazica
that's so um evocative about children and their capacities um when the child was one month old
and so this is the part that i put up for you they adorned him and they brought him to the king
and the king having looked at his dear child again the the intimacy is very strong he embraced him
and placed him on his hip and sat playing with him and so you have a father who's playing with
his son very nice moment and now at that time four robbers were brought before him one of them he
sentenced to receive a thousand strokes from whips barbed with the ones another to be imprisoned
in chains a third to be smitten with a spear and the fourth to be impaled the bodhisatta
who let me remind you is one month old on hearing his father's words which apparently he can
understand was terrified and he thought to himself oh my father through his being a king
is becoming guilty of a grievous action which means bring which brings men to hell
so the one month old is hearing understanding and contemplating the situation um and it worries
him so then he's sitting outside under an umbrella the next day and while he's sitting under the
umbrella he contemplates his experience of the day before and he wonders to himself how did i
come to this palace and then he thinks through his past lives which he has the capacity to do
and by his recollection of his former births he remembered that he had once come from the
world of the gods and then after that he had suffered in hell and that he had been a king
in that very same city and so he remembers that he was a king for 20 years and then he
suffered in hell for 80 000 years and then he realizes
now again i am born in this house of robbers and my father when four robbers were brought before
him uttered such a cruel speech as must lead to hell if i become king i shall be born again in
hell and i shall suffer great pain there and he became greatly alarmed and his golden body
became pale and faded like a lotus crushed by the hand right it's a very powerful moment for
a child and for an infant here umbrella over him and so the goddess is watching this contemplation
of this child and so she speaks to him and she was his mother in a past life which is a nice
detail so in a previous birth she'd been his mother and she comforts him and she says
fear not my child tenya if you really desire to escape then pretend to be a cripple
although not really one though not deaf pretend to be deaf and though not dumb
pretend to be dumb putting on these characteristics show no signs of intelligence
so he's given this advice when he's one month old and he takes it now stories about one month
old and newborns so easily could say okay this is just kind of a play we can't take this too
seriously these are so beyond anything that we can reasonably accept except but the tradition is
not going to hold to that it's going to go much further and so this one month old at this very
moment hold on a second the fourth precept is being endorsed here these stories are dubiously
written i'm not sure i understand what you mean if you want to explain that i'm not sure you mean
by the stories are dubiously written um so the story is going to go much further and for the next
16 years tenya is going to hold no i realize that a lie is breaking the fourth precept but
where are you seeing you'd have to explain a bit more
sorry i'm responding to this um
unless you're suggesting that these texts are a lie which is
oh i see what you're saying that he's lying i see what you're saying i'm sorry it took me a second to
um well first of all again he is a bodhisattva and the bodhisattva as a bodhisattva he does not um
i mean the first precept does not cause any harm and yet in the santra jataka he gives away his
children which causes harm to his children and to his wife i don't think we can put the kinds of
expectations that we have of a perfect buddha onto the bodhisattva and the jasakas that's exactly
what the jasakas are for is this kind of exploration of his humanity before he transcends us
do you see what i mean so i don't know if there's all kinds of behavior that happens in the jasakas
that are not perfect and um they're not supposed to be i hope that's helpful too i think once we
get to the buddha as a buddha then that's where the discussion of perfection is to arise but
not with the jasakas uh and i think that's what makes them so popular is that they're so complex
and human and messy so yes you're right um she's suggesting he lie and then he does for 16 years
you're very right and so for 16 years and but this is the part that really just amazes me
is that for 16 years the child is going to not move not speak not feed himself he's not going
to do a thing he's going to sit in absolute stillness for 16 years now i don't know about
anybody watching this but i probably couldn't do that for a week and here's a one month old making
this decision that's going to extend for his whole life now his family doesn't believe him
right so that the family is seeing that there's something not right here um either that or this
kind of natural parental wish that it can't be true when you imagine that something's wrong with
your child and so they refuse this behavior that has suddenly arisen and they tell themselves
and the text describes his parents telling themselves but he doesn't look like a cripple
and he doesn't there's nothing about him that looks like this and he was perfectly fine
before why is he suddenly stopped moving something's not right here and so they test him
for the next 16 years and they devise ever in the test get really quite extreme
and a little bit cruel but they they just can't believe that he is um just you know crippled and
deaf and dumb they just can't so the test that they um put him under are really most of the
technojetica is about this is about these really radical tests that the um parents put him through
because they can't believe that he really is stuck like this so um when he's an
infant they withhold milk and food waiting for him to cry um and he doesn't cry so eventually
they feed him when he's about five they they take all the other children as well they test it right
so it's kind of like to me i wonder if this is like the beginning of scientific uh testing is
that they take the other children who were born at the same time were all the same age
with temia and they put them all in this hut together and they set a fire to it and they um
wait to see what happens all the other children go screaming running out of the hut and temia sits
there he doesn't move until finally they run in and they save him and they pull him out um they
same thing with the wild elephants and the venomous serpents they take all the children they put them
you know on the road then they set the wild elephants all the children scatter and temia
doesn't move right until again they come and they save him um using the opposite end they
throw these elaborate parties for all the children the children are laughing and playing and they're
happy he doesn't move so they can't kind of shock him out with pleasure either um they set a man
with a sword kind of racing after the children again he doesn't move they um this part really um
amazed me is while he's sleeping he had this kind of poster bed with material all around apparently
and so in the middle of the night they will put through the material all of a sudden below
conchos of under his bed and around his bed and over his bed to scare him kind of jolt him into
wakefulness he doesn't move um they smear him with molasses and they leave him to be swarmed
by biting flies and they even try not bathing him for a year waiting for him to itch or to be
uncomfortable in some way these are very extreme um tests and every single time temia thinks to
himself that he's uncomfortable but if he responds it will be nothing like you know that the
discomfort he's experiencing is nothing like the hell realms and so he chooses not to respond
right this is a very evocative narrative of a child who goes all the way for 16 years without
moving no matter what they do to him so it's not as though he's sitting comfortably in a bed he
doesn't move no matter what they do to him and so finally as i'm sure many of you know uh the end of
the story um well not completely the end but eventually the king and the queen relent and the
king says to the chariot driver take the child out and bring him to a charnel ground and kill
him there and bury him uh and that's what this image is here it's a very popular image so he's
brought to the charnel ground and um while the man is digging the hole that he's going to bury him
in uh finally temia is free because he's outside the boundaries of the kingdom and so he's free
and he moves his body for the first time and he tests his strength and he picks up his chariot to
make sure he can move and he whips the chariot over his head and he thinks oh yeah i'm still good
and uh finally he's free to go now the thing that's very evocative also is clearly he's not
a perfected character yet because there must have been a way to diplomatically negotiate with his
father he didn't have to do this to himself for 16 years so to me this also says this is a character
who's taking an extreme direction right so that should be going to the question that you asked
before this is not a perfected character no it's not most people wouldn't have to do something like
this to get out of not being a king right there are less extreme methods that you could use
but it shows his commitment as a child that he maintains all his life
so the last one i'm going to go through quickly because i want to move to
um the other material the other precocious children
but another one that has a very strong um presence of a child um in the literature is the maha
maga jataka this is the story that takes place just before the santra um so he's really close now
he's just about near the end um and that is really evoked in this narrative it's not um ethically
as complicated as is uh the santra jessica so this story begins um let me just find it in my
book here so this story begins with um a king who has a dream and he dreams of uh here i can read it
to you who i don't need to read it to you but he's got a he's got a dream of four fires in four
different parts of the courtyard as i describe here and then he imagines a fifth fire that shoots
in the middle of the courtyard and it completely terrifies him and it's bigger than the four other
fires um and he wakes up frightened by this big shooting pillar of fire and so he goes to see his
ministers and he asks them what it means and he has four ministers and they say the four pillars
are us your dream says that one day a fifth sage will come and he will overshadow us all
and so this is going to be the bodhisattva and so the bodhisattva is then going to be born
he's not born to the king this time he's not a prince and he's going to be born
instead to a wealthy merchant family um in the same kingdom and just before he comes into the
world uh one of the gods puts a plant in his hand and so he comes out of the womb with this plant
in his hand and again we're going to have a talking newborn uh so the great being sees
the plant in his closed hand and as he came from his mother's womb she did not feel the slightest
pain so again we have a very idealized book but he passed out as easily as water from a sacred
water pot and when his mother saw the piece of the medicinal herb in his hand she said to him
my child what is it that you have and he replied it's a medicinal plant right and so again we have
this conversation between the mother and the newborn and he placed the plant in our hand and
he told her to take it and give it to all who are afflicted with any sickness so she takes that plant
and she goes to see her husband and she says rub this on you because um this should heal you and
he had been suffering from headaches for seven years and so he rubs it on his head and he's
immediately cured of his headaches and so this works um so we have this miraculous birth story
again a miraculous kind of interaction between the mother and the child and this capacity to heal
right from the beginning now the text actually skips rather quickly and all of a sudden he's
seven years old seven years old is going to be uh the age of seven is going to come up a lot and
we're going to see it in the next series of narratives so he grows up he's seven years old
he's going to grow up with all of these thousands of children who are born on the same day as him
again another pattern that we keep seeing in all these narratives and they play together outside
all of the time but sometimes there's rain and sometimes there's a wild elephant and so it's not
always practical to be playing outdoors and so one day there's a terrible rainstorm and
the children go running and falling over each other as they try to get away from the rainstorm
and um he thinks to himself you know this is not a good way to be playing we need a hall to be built
uh to take care of us because this is uh it's not a good thing for these children to be playing
outside now he's seven years old and he decides on this hall and so he says let's build a hall
here where we can stand sit or lie in the time of wind or hot sunshine or rain so let each one of
you bring one piece of money so everybody's going to contribute to this and so they all bring the
money so the thousand boys did so and the great being this is wonderful the great being sends for
a master carpenter and he gives him all the money and tells him to build a hall now he has asked his
parents for permission here he's functioning entirely on his own agency he took the money
the carpenter and leveled the ground and cut posts and spread out the measuring line
but he didn't grasp the great being's idea so he told the carpenter how he was to stretch out the
line to do it properly the carpenter replied i stretched out the line according to my practical
experience i cannot do it any other way so the buddhist sapa asks if you don't even know how
so much as how this can even this how how can you take our money and build a hall take the line
i will measure it and i will show you and so he took the line and he himself drew out the plan
and it was done as though visva karma had done it himself who's the architect of the god realm
then he said to the character carpenter will you be able to draw the plan in this way and he said no
i won't be able to he says well will you be able to follow my instructions and he said yes that i
will be able to and so the bodhisatta is the one who's now the architect of this hall he's seven
years old and he has the entire hall built to his specifications no adults are involved except for
the carpenter and the hall that he built is not just a room for the kids to play in he ends up
building basically what looks like a palace and so it includes the following this is the list of the
following rooms that are included a place for strangers lodging for the destitute for women
for priests one for merchants to store their goods a space for sports a court of justice and
a hall for religious assemblies and so he's basically built a palace right how this seven
year old realizes that all of these needs need to be met is really quite extraordinary
now eventually the king wants to find this fifth pillar and so he sends his ministers out to find
them and one of the ministers comes across this palace or this big hall that's been built and he
thinks oh this must be the kid this must be the sage and he's told who is the one who did this
and they say it's the child mahousada who's the name so he realizes he's found the sage and then
the story gets quite complicated the ministers are jealous they don't want this child to come
to the court because they realize they're about to be replaced and so they stall and they stall and
finally the king through a series of riddles uh finally manages to invite the father and the son
but he does it with a particular word play which we don't need to go into right now
but the word play involves a kind of mule and a horse and um he invites most excellence i mean
it's kind of a distraction from the narrative but basically invites them both the father goes first
and the son tells him you are to go first because of how this riddle was formed and i will go after
and when you go i will ask for your seat and you should give it to me and so this is all prepared
in advance and the father accepts so when the father goes he sits down and then the son arrives
afterwards and the king offers him a seat and he asks to take his father's seat and the father
gives the son the seat and the king is glorified because this is a complete break of decorum
and mahousada's response to this is amazing he says what you think that in all cases the sire
is better than the son's and so this is a direct challenge to ordinary hierarchies normally the
father is to gain to to have respect and the son has to offer it and here the son is arguing but
it's not always true sometimes the son is better than the father right and then the text just to
make sure nobody imagines that you know the bodhisattva is being arrogant or it has no respect
for his father explains no one knows better than the bodhisattva the value of parents
if one asks why he did so it was not to throw contempt on his father but when the king sent
the message said the better horse and the more excellent there's a play on words there between
mules and horses he did this in order to solve that problem to make his wisdom to be recognized
to solve the riddle and to take the shine out of the four sages who were being arrogant
right and so the way to prove his point is to also remind you sometimes the child is better
than the father right um these are really extraordinary countercultural challenging
narratives that tell you over and over again children can be extraordinary now in extraordinary
capacities i think a lot of this has to do with uh coming from a samsaric world view where people
are being recycled and if we're being recycled and we're going through reincarnation over and
over again we can't quite identify how old anyone is is for real so that you can have a very old man
who's much earlier on in his spiritual career of attainment and you can have a child who's
on the very verge of achieving awakening and so the ordinary hierarchy of elders being superior
to youngers to youngsters really doesn't apply from this perspective and i think that's what
this tradition is saying with these narratives the bodhisattva you don't know who the bodhisattva is
you can't tell and so anyone you meet might be a bodhisattva just on the verge of achieving
awakening right if we take the term on a more kind of a global scale of what a bodhisattva is
any one of them could be on the verge of attaining awakening and so the seven-year-old
may know so much more than you right the hierarchies of age just collapse with this world view
that's to me very exciting okay i'm gonna leave the bodhisattva here there's a lot more we could
say but i want to go to one of my favorite narratives and great picture um i hope you
guys smiled when you saw that um that there's in the literature it's not just the bodhisattva
that has these kind of extraordinary capacities as a child there are all kinds of narratives of
specifically seven-year-olds attaining a great deal and attaining and attaining our
hunter uh in the literature so it's not reserved to the future Buddha anyone can be on this
trajectory and just on the verge of attaining awakening and if they can attain it at seven
right which again gives um so much value to children right which is what i'm so fascinated
by that we've missed it all this time at least in western academy you guys have been quiet for a
bit i hope everyone is doing okay and i haven't put you to sleep um okay so here's this one story
i gave you the pdf um i think it's available somewhere oh thanks so there's this story that
i love it's from the damapada commentary i haven't found it anywhere else if anyone knows
of a parallel narrative to this please tell me i think it's just a masterful narrative oh
there we go bikriti um johnathan silken venerable on the lio have both pointed out how the newborn
bodhisattva knew all right um taking a set of steps but then as young adults he knew nothing
this is very true and was portrayed as in need of encountering a sick man old person etc venerable
and the lio genesis of this type of idea has shown that the idea of a super developed and precocious
baby and also that of the foreign characters are later textual developments he's an exceptional
child since he doesn't need to undergo development education when there's finding aspects of childhood
does need to be at cynthia this is a wonder this paradox um it's a wonderful paradox and it's
right through his narrative and you find a lot of the commentators wrestling with this as well
did he know everything or did he know nothing did he was it all a play and so my hyena literature
later is going to make this into a play it's his leela so he knew everything but he's playing it
out um as a historian i would certainly suggest that a lot of his narratives are later additions
to a more human narrative and so we render him more extraordinary which is a natural
effect but i think this struggle is constantly there a parallel would be christianity ever had
developed this kind of literature they would probably have to struggle the same thing what
is god as a child um same thing with krishna you have this we have stories where he is just
extraordinary and others where you don't know that he's really a god i think this is a natural kind
of struggle in a tradition that has an idealized character so yes this is wonderful questions and
this struggle is right through the literature um thank you and it's nice to hear your voice out
there okay so this is the story that i love um the story is called the four novices it's in the
damapada commentary i haven't found it elsewhere um i gave it to you because i think you should
have it and i think it's such fun i think it's playful i told it to my son uh i use him sometimes
as in like i want to see what his reaction is to some of these stories because i think sometimes
these stories may have been written for children i think there's a real possibility there so what
would their response be um and so the story is that there's a wife of a brahmin who desperately
wants to give make an offering to four arhans this is her goal she needs to give to four arhans
um the term that's used is actually brahmin but brahmin in literature is often uh interchangeable
with an arhan as understood as that so she sends her husband she says go find me four brahmines
for arhan and bring them back here go to the monastery ask for them because i want to make
an offering to them and so she prepares the food and she makes these beautiful seats
you know like probably covered with cloth and everything else and she's waiting
the husband goes to the monastery and he says can i have four brahmines please we'd like to make
an offering and so um they give him four novices he forgot to specify old so we give four seven
year old children and these four seven year olds are um who had attained arhan ship and the text
is really clear about this there's seven year old novices that can't be fully ordained yet but they
have achieved arhan ship and their names are san kicha pandita sopaka and regata so she's waiting
and he brings home these four children i mean this is just wonderful because at the site of
the novices she's filled with rage and sputtering as when salt is dropped on a heater she says to
her husband you've gone to the monastery and you brought back with you four youngsters not old
enough to be your grandsons um and so she refused to let them sit on the nice seats that she has
prepared and she puts some low seats to the side she goes sit over there and then she gets mad at
her she goes back there's some very commanding angry wife and she goes back and you go get
somebody else because this is not what i wanted so he goes back as a dutiful husband and he comes
back with sari puta i mean you can't get much better than that unless you bring the puta and
so he comes back with sari puta and she's thrilled right and so he comes and he said sari puta
reaches the house he sees the novices who are sitting on the low chairs he doesn't say anything
about that but he says have these branans received food and she says no they've not received food yet
now he knew that food for only four people has been um cooked and so when he know he looks at
the kitchen and he looks at the four boys he knows they haven't been fed they won't get fed
if he eats so he says no give me my bowl and he proves so she's very surprised by this she
doesn't understand what's going on but she says okay go go again so now the husband goes again
and this time obviously if he has sari puta the first time he's going to get nogalana the second
time so now nogalana comes and he sees the four novices and he says the four novices you know
haven't eaten yet and he says to them you know have they eaten they say no and he says well then
bring me my bowl and he takes his bowl and he leaves and so the brahmin's wife says to her husband
the only thing she can figure from this is these elders don't want to eat you go to the brahmin's
pale and bring back with you just one old brahmin i just need one old man because old age is where
you know the venerable status comes from the novices that had nothing to eat and they're children
right they're famished with hunger but they don't move and they don't say word but their hunger
is what awakens the god saka and so saka who's injured later narratives feels the poor children's
hunger but they won't move because they've attained so much and so they don't need to express their
hunger but they are still in children's bodies and so he's upset for these children so their child
bodies are being emphasized here so saka comes down and disguises himself as an old brahmin to
try to get the story moving along and the husband sees this old brahmin he goes perfect
you're exactly what i wanted and so he says my wife will be delighted this is fabulous this is
what we needed so when the brahmin's wife saw him her heart was filled with delight
and she took the rugs and mats which were spread over the two seats and spread them over noble sir
sit here here this good seats that i prepared saka enters the house the four novices and then
he finds a place for himself at the edge of the seats where the novices sit sat down cross-legged
on the ground not on the high seats so that he honoring their status and lowering himself
before them so now we have an old man sitting below the children when the brahmin's wife
saw him do this she said to her husband you brought here a brahmin but you've brought back
with you one old enough to be your father he's going about saluting children not young enough
to be his grandsons what use do we have of him like this something's wrong with this one he's
so old he doesn't know what's what he's saluting these children this is ridiculous so she says get
rid of him put him out she's a very rude woman i think and so the husband again dutiful picks
up the man who tries to seize him by the shoulder and pull him by the arm pull him by the waist
but saka will not move so finally the wife jumps in and together they each take an arm and they
drag the man out of the house this is terrible goodness here so they pull him out of the house
finally they throw him out the back door and when they come back into the house he's still sitting
there right wonderful magic trick my son loved that so they see him there and they screamed with
terror and they let go at that moment saka reveals his identity and so they understand
and everything is made clear to them and everyone is fed and then they leave magically through the
five doors of the house the five openings the house and the house is then known as the house
of the five openings after everyone is fed it's kind of very quick uh ending to this dramatic
buildup uh all five of them you know take off one through the floor one through the ground one
through the roof one through the back door the front door and one another way and they all just
disappear and go back to the monasteries and of course what's wonderful is when the children get
back to the monasteries the monks ask them weren't you upset that you were treated this way this is
terrible and they say no no or we weren't upset and that's because they really were our hunts
and they accepted things as they were um this is just masterful story uh and it really shows that
um we really can mistake children in their capacities when i told my son this story i said
what do you think and he said yep adults underestimate us all the time right now my
child's not in our hunts but um this sense that we can miss children in their capacities and here is
in the buddhist literature so much material telling us children you don't know what you're
looking at you don't know who someone is you don't know who someone's capacities are
their physical biological bodies don't say anything about what their their inner capacities
are because they could be seven years old but they could be moments away from our
hunter right and so this is what is so compelling and gives such value and agency to children in
their capacities in this tradition and all of this really does come out of this kind of
some sark meta narrative the one life you know each life is like a scene in a very long movie
you don't know which scene you're looking at so you can't judge right um i don't know if people
have questions um because there's i can tell you the stories of some of these arahants because
they're really wonderful i'll tell you the story of the first arahant uh samkicha because it's the
most developed uh the other three uh they're all a lot of fun but uh samkicha is the most developed
and really highlights uh this notion of the seven-year-old child being extraordinary
paticha samupada explains adhija we were born but not having the notion of recollection
yes
i'm not sure where you're going what are you what are you trying to say with that
that because we don't have this recollection um i'm not quite sure what you're doing that
but yeah we're supposed to the idea generally with the notion of recollection is that it comes
with greater awareness and spiritual practice like the story of the buddha um remembering all
of his past lives when he achieves awakening but precisely we don't remember but we are
right and so we don't know how far we've come but we have come from somewhere that much is cool um
what i'll do is i'm going to tell you a couple other things i'm going to skip the stories of
the three novices because there's only like 15 minutes left um i'm going to tell you a few things
about how the tradition uh a couple of statements that are made about children and buddhism and then
if we have time we'll go back to samkicha's narrative and we can end on that note i think
that might be a better way to organize things so i'm going to fast forward here there's a wonderful
passage in the melinda panha because um over and over again we have these seven worlds so we have
these four novices that are all seven have wonderful stories revita's story is very funny
um he runs away he's being married off when he's seven years old he's he's actually um sari puta's
uh youngest brother all the sari puta siblings have become monastics and sari puta's mother who
is famous for having been a difficult woman um is terrified that revita is also going to become
a monk and then she'll have no grandchildren and so when he's seven again seven uh she um
decides she's going to marry him off so that he can't become a monk which we know doesn't
really stop anything but this is her plan and so she decides to marry him off at seven
and sari puta who's kind of yoda like in this moment realizes that this is going to happen
and he instructs the monks at his monastery if revita comes and he asks to become a monk i am
his mother and his father and you can give him permission to enter the order his parents know
it's a really striking um detail in the narrative he he again overrides um you know the family line
and takes the role of parent and he says you let him become a monk and then uh revita is on his way
to getting married and he catches a glimpse of his bride's 120 year old grandmother and somebody
says you know made wife live as long as her grandmother and he sees the grandmother he says
is she going to look like that and uh they say well if she lives 120 years she will and he thinks
i'm out so he has this kind of classic trope that happens over and over again um liz wilson's book
charming cadavers is a fabulous interpretation of these narratives um but he has this moment where
he sees this he's repulsed he thought he was centrally attracted now essentially disgusted
it's his classic trope in buddhist discourse and so he um rejects uh the wife and he has an amazing
scheme i said i wasn't gonna talk about this but such a good material he has this amazing scheme
to get away from the wedding procession and he's in and it's a child scheme he gets in the chariot
going on the wedding procession and he tells him yes to pee he goes he pees he comes back in the
chariot he does this three four times they think wow this child would go back from a lot and then
once they trust him he goes again and he runs away and he goes to the monastery and they don't
look for him because they think he's going to be back soon and uh he joins the monastery so um but
and and achieves our hundhood right away um so all four of them achieve our hundhood one they're
seven very quickly after they ordain some kicha the moment the razor touches his head he achieves
awakening um there's a question about the rose apple tree scene and the final bit is life um
what do i think of it i think this is well again how old he is what's interesting about this is
that he's not necessarily seven or eight the the literature goes all over the map with this
um sometimes it's in the middle of his like buddha goshich i think has it
partway through the four sites he sees i think the three sites and then he has
the rose apple tree scene and then he sees the fourth site so it's not always necessarily
associated with his childhood but it's definitely somewhere in his youth um but he doesn't achieve
awakening there because that's not the moment for it to happen so it's his opportunity to begin
exploring his mind a moment of quiet but he's going to have to do it as an adult so he doesn't
do it as a child but once awakening is established and the dharma is established then other children
can achieve it far younger but he doesn't really have that kind of attainment he only does it when
he's an adult um if you have a more specific question other than what do i think i may get
can answer you more effectively but um it's a very important moment in his narrative because
it gives him that insight of what's possible but he doesn't achieve it he has to achieve it as an
adult in his narrative now um i've pulled out this passage which i think is really fun uh from the
melinda panha obviously this wonderful debate between melinda and nagasena nagasena incidentally
was seven year old seven years old when he uh joined the monastery as well um so it's another
kind of seven year old character there's so many they're everywhere um and melinda asks this
question the king asked this question uh about you know who can achieve awakening and who cannot
and so nagasena uh says to him he was born as an animal even though he regulates his life
a right will not attain to insight nor he was born in the pretzel realm nor he who holds wrong views
nor the deceitful man nor he who has slain his mother or his father or in our hunt nor he was
raised up a schism in the order nor he who has shed a foot his blood nor he was furtively attached
himself to the order or has become a pervert or has violated a sister of the order nor he who
having been guilty of one or the other of the 13 grievous offenses um who has not been rehabilitated
or a eunuch or a hermaphrodite and whosoever is a human child under seven years of age even though
he regulates his life or life will not attain to insight into the truth to these 16 individuals
and 16 it depends how you count when it comes to 16 there's no attainment of insight even though
they regulate their life or right it's a very odd passage right it's telling us all of these people
are just barred from achieving awakening in that lifetime right so we've got a really interesting
list of people who just don't qualify and melinda's question is but why the child so all
the other questions all the other characters he's not interested in i mean i'm really interested
why a hermaphrodite or eunuch can't but his question is why can't a child of seven under
seven years of age achieve awakening and the answer that is given really doesn't answer the
question uh so the following is the reasonable king for my saying that an infant even though he
regulates his life or rights cannot attain to insight if a king one under seven years of age
could feel passionate about things exciting passion could go wrong and things leading to
inequity could be befooled in matters that mislead could be maddened as to things that infatuate could
understand a heresy could distinguish between content and discontent could think out virtue
and vice then might incite be possible then insight might be possible to him but the mind of one under
seven years of age is powerless and weak mean small sleep school or dull whereas the essential
principle of nirvana is transcendental important weighty wide reaching and extensive i don't think
he's answered the question um he's told us that anyone other ages of why seven is the cutoff is
what we don't understand but we're told that before seven the child the mind of the child
is too weak to understand this after seven the mind of the child can right so we don't know why
seven is the cutoff point what happens um one of the things that i'd like to look into eventually
this summer i'll work on this a bit more is uh medical texts of indian traditions to see if there
was some kind of medical tradition associated with the children of seven if they believe that
something important happened to the mind at that point i think that would be one direction to look
but if there isn't anything quite like that um seven seems to be kind of an arbitrary cutoff
point a little bit like eighteen is in north america for an age of adulthood seven is the age
and at the age of seven you have the capacities to attain insight you can see you can understand
heresy you can distinguish between contentment and discontentment you can think through virtue
advice these are the capacities of a seven-year-old according to nada tena and i think that's a very
powerful statement the development of the brain the prefrontal cortex well i don't think they were
talking about the prefrontal cortex back then but what i but there are some really interesting um
today um there are arguments being made that the brain continues to develop well into the 20s and
30s um yes you're right there's a lot of research now on when does the brain reach complete maturity
it's much later than seven that there's no question so obviously what we're understanding
today from a scientific perspective is very different than what the authors of the melinda
panha were imagining um but it's that same question of when is the brain ready and for these
authors the brain the mind the the person was ready at seven so how much do we underestimate
children or overestimate children clearly for the buddhist authors of these texts at least
there's a tremendous amount of value being placed here that children can do a lot more than we
imagine now maybe we're wrong um and they were assuming more than what we know now the brain is
capable of we realize now that teenagers have certain limitations in terms of their capacities
to understand certain certain things um but for the buddhist authors this was not the case
as of seven for whatever reason seven was the cutoff point at seven the child is capable of
great attainment and from that point on now this may be also going backwards in time to
justifying the story of rahula who at seven follows his father becomes the first child monk
and that then becomes the standard um because otherwise the buddha brought him in too young
so maybe that's what's happening but uh i don't think that's the end of the discussion so i'm
going to explore this a lot more and if any of you have any thoughts on it i'll be really good for it
now um
in yanglutu and nikaya there's a really interesting passage i came across and there's another
it's repeated a few times it's a kind of literature that we get in buddhist discourse quite often
where buddhist authors uh redefine uh traditional hierarchies
oh somebody found something on wikipedia always a good source some suggestion children under the
age of four the memory storage capacity limitation constrains copy other then it's four not seven
perhaps related i don't know but i think we'd have to thanks i'm going to look at that that's fun
but um i think that what we're discussing today modern uh scientific studies of the brain is very
different than anything anyone had access to two thousand years ago when these texts were being
compiled so we have to be careful not to apply you know kind of cross too much but um it's
definitely direction to explore so it'll be fun to see uh what happens at different ages so far as
we can tell and also what two thousand years ago people imagined was happening to children as they
developed that's what i don't know and i think that's more the relevant question um as a historian
obviously okay so we know that i'm assuming a lot of you know uh i shouldn't assume anything
let's pretend um that in buddhist discourse there's a lot of renegotiation of hierarchies
and patterns and so a famous one would be you know question of caste and so the buddhist gets
asked often um you know what is a real brahmin you know a real brahmin is x y or z and he'll say
no a real brahmin is someone who attains insights and so he challenges the hierarchy challenges
the caste system doesn't do away with it he said no real attainment is this not that real prayer
in the right directions would be to pray with inwards and not outwards so he's constantly
challenging these kind of external characteristics and hierarchies around him it's a it's kind of a
repeated pattern for many parents seven is a lucky number right there's a definite reason
for this momentous shift the most significant changes in the brain occur at seven
yeah but would seven have been a lucky number two thousand years ago
there's definitely something here to explore
you guys are getting into this this is fun okay in early buddhist text where
now we're definitely having fun
that would be great thank you um but then five is as well and three is
and there's no end to this isn't there and 108
okay i'm gonna write all of this down when we're done thank you um okay
oh thank you i'm glad you're enjoying the lecture and um see there's a lot to know about children
we haven't really paid much attention to which goes back to my argument at the beginning
okay so just to look at this um before we wrap up i'll have to close up in the next 10 minutes or
so um so here in the anguator nikaya we get this um wonderful reversal so here um someone says
we've heard master go to them the ascetic somebody says we heard that go to my says this that the
ascetic go to my does not pay homage homage to brahmins who are old aged burdened with years
advanced in life come to the last stage nor does he stand up for them or offer them a seat
well this is indeed true for master go to them does not pay homage to brahmins who are old age
burdened with years advanced in life and come to the last stage nor does he stand up for them or
offer them a seat this is not proper it then occurred to me these venerable ones do not know
what an elder is or what the qualities that make one an elder are even though someone is old eighty
ninety or a hundred years from birth if he speaks at an improper time speaks falsely speaks what is
unbeneficial speaks contrary to the dharma and the discipline if at an improper time he speaks
words that are worthless unreasonable rambling and unbeneficial then he is reckoned as a foolish
childish elder but even though someone is young a youth with black hair endowed with the blessings
of youth in the prime of his life if he speaks at a proper time speaks what is truthful speaks what
is beneficial speaks on the dharma the discipline if at a proper time he speaks words that are worth
recording reasonable succinct and beneficial then he is reckoned as a wise elder and so here
the tradition is very explicitly overturning the hierarchies child and elder is not what it seems
biology is not our limitation it's just the limitation of this particular life and so if
a child speaks properly and with wisdom that is the definition of an elder that is not the definition
of a child your physical age and what you appear to be is not what you are right so here you can
also think of narratives in which people shift body um sexes and so i'm thinking it's not the
probably canon but the very famous scene in um oh just escape my head um oh that famous text
where you switch man i lost it i'll remember it and i'll tell you um but there's another passage
also in the dhammapada commentary that does the same kind of thing just to show it's not just
this no i'm not thinking of soraya there is also the soraya um narrative but i'm thinking of a
mahayana text um and the vimala kirti sutra how can i forget that the vimala kirti sutra
where there's a scene of people switching male and female just to prove that the physical body
and the limitations and gender and sex are not substantial they have no essence right and so here
age is being treated in the same way that age has no essence right um hold on
oh we're getting stuff on the age of seven we're getting uh do you think the capacity of children
has explained the politics due to their past carbon achievements is there any differentiation
regarding the capacity between okay let me hold this let me read you this last part and then i'm
going to get to those questions um so this again is in the dhammapada commentary and the question
that is being asked is can a young monk be an elder so one day an elder went to wait upon a
teacher and as he left the 34th monk saw him so an elder goes to wait upon the teacher the 34th
monk scene the monks went to the teacher saluted him sat down respectfully to the side the teacher
perceiving that they were right for our hardship asked the question did you see a certain elder
leave the place and they answer no we didn't you didn't well we saw a certain novice
so then he responds monk he was no novice he was an elder he was exceedingly young though
but monks i do not call a man an elder merely because he's old because he sits in the seat
of an elder but he who comprehends the truths and is ever kind to others he is the elder indeed
right so it's again the same kind of thing that we see here it's a repeated
trope in the literature right you don't know who the elder is okay so we have this question
oh that's brilliant according to dumont the number seven in ancient india indicates a totality
okay i'm gonna have to write all of this down because this may actually solve the question
if seven is the totality is when you reach wholeness then that would explain all of this
oh that was fun okay thank you so much that's very exciting um now uh devapriya gosh writes
do you think the capacity of the children as explained by literatures do their past
common achievements yes absolutely uh that's something that comes up so in a lot of the
stories of you know samkicha and reveta and and nagasena all of these amazing children that become
arhan's um i don't know if nagasena i have to check the story and but i don't remember exactly
where in his narrative he achieves arhan's uh shit but he has the desire to enter the monastery at
seven um that in all of these cases um i thought hold on a second with you have these kind of past
life stories that explain where they come from in a lot of cases um that justifies why they've been
born in this life and they're on the verge of achieving arhan's show so absolutely karman
rebirth is really what explains all of this this is why we can have a child that can achieve
arhan's shift and we can have an old man who's not achieved it right is that it depends on your
karman where you come from and you can't know where people come from that's what's so striking
about this if you eliminate karman rebirth all of this narrative has to go right or if you don't
then you're left with that kind of age old really troubling question why do some people have certain
talents and other people don't karma answers that question if you get rid of karma you're just left
with this notion of the random accidents of some people wired in such a way to achieve certain
things and some people aren't and there's no rhyme or reason to it from the buddhist perspective
there is rhyme and reason to it we are responsible for what we are born with it is our responsibility
because we have worked so hard in our past lives to achieve what we've achieved now
but if you eliminate that then there's no responsibility there's just kind of cosmic
bumping into each other that may be the fairest answer but it's certainly not the buddhist answer
is there any differentiation regarding the capacity between the girl child and the boy child
so what's interesting is that all of these novices that i've come across lately are all
boy children and always the bodhisattva is a boy child i'm assuming i'm going to come across
girl children who have great attainments here we have the saka who attains sotakvana
so that's good but i haven't seen i'm waiting i'm sure you've got to be there i have a child
a seven-year-old child a female child who choose our country but i haven't found it and so we
definitely have a gender bias there and i'm hoping i'll find something this busaka example
is a helpful one i don't know but it's a very dominantly male narrative and you know the kind
of the awkwardness of this lecture was that i was thinking this is about south asian buddhist women
and my whole lecture is about young boys i wish i could have found examples of female children but
i haven't already found found very much now bhikkhuni dhammadhana says seven indicates a
completed cycle in ancient india perhaps it also indicates completed first cycle of personal
development that's very smart it's also used in some grammatical traditions a woman must be at
least seven years younger than her prospective husband you guys are amazing is there an electronic
version of little buddhist book i see only i don't think i you know what i think oxford made me sign
a form that said that there would be an electronic form so i'm hoping there's one out there i think
there should be but if you write to me privately i can i can send you a individual article chapters
if you want particular chapters i can certainly do that um i think my time is up and i have my
students writing an exam uh in a few minutes so i might have to go but i've had a lot of fun and
you i'm gonna have to write down all of these things hopefully can we keep this chat can i get
this chat back does it like exist somewhere in the world thank you it was a real pleasure
well thank you bye
it was very male dominating yeah it was thanks bhikkhuni dhammadhana it was a real pleasure
i don't even know how to get out of this but