Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
15 transcript-backed records
01 / commitment
“We’ve all been reborn a bazillion times, and we will be reborn forever until we find the path out, which is what the Buddha teaches.”
02 / commitment
“” The Buddha said, “This means that I have relinquished my life force. I will die in three months’ time.”
03 / uncertainty
“For scholars, it’s when the Buddha lived. We don’t know with any precision the year of his death.”
04 / uncertainty
“We have no reference at all to the Buddha ever swimming, so we don’t know why that is.”
05 / belief
“We had a lot of help from our students over that decade, but we had the bases covered, I think, to get that done.”
06 / belief
“You can go to any Buddhist country and be captivated, but I think India would be the first place to go.”
07 / belief
“I think to get away from the secondary sources as soon as you can and get to the original texts in translation — that’s the most fruitful path.”
08 / belief
“The jobs that there were, I think, at certain times during my own career — our own graduate students are having trouble getting academic positions.”
09 / evaluation
“” It’s just a question of who accepts which text as authentic. But I think, from the point of view of, what did Buddhist monks look like in the time of the Buddha, they probably looked most like the monks in Sri Lanka in terms of the robes and their comportment.”
10 / evaluation
“The peaceful religion part is something I think has been made much of, really, since the 19th century.”
11 / evaluation
“Obviously, we don’t know the future. Both those distant futures and distant past are things that are unknown to us, so they’re not contested within the tradition itself.”
12 / preference
“I think I would go to Bangkok just because there are so many great monasteries there.”
13 / evaluation
“I think that for many of us of that generation, we thought Western civilization is dead.”
14 / evaluation
“The idea is that Buddhist monks keep their vows, and by doing that, kingdoms are saved from famine, they’re saved from disease, they’re saved from foreign invasion. That hasn’t worked, so that patronage has disappeared, and because of that, the support for the monastic institution has declined sharply.”
15 / evaluation
“We don’t know exactly what Confucius taught, and as we’ve been talking about, we don’t know when the Buddha lived, and we don’t know what he taught.”