Notes on "The Buddha" on PBS

• The Legend of the Buddha's Conception and Birth

If you click on the above word button it will take you to a quote of the first part (a few minutes) of the "Buddha" special. (I think Richard Gere and others did this around 2010 originally.

My wife surprisingly wanted to watch it more (since she knows I studied Tibetan Buddhism with Tibetan Lamas in the U.S. India and Nepal). It is pretty advanced and intellectual as I watched about the first 57 minutes of it. It went into his birth as the Prince of Lumbini and of how his mother died 7 days after his birth and how his father wouldn't let him see old age, sickness, or death, and he had to secretly see it without the knowledge of his father eventually. Then it spoke of how he left soon after his son was born to his cousin (his wife) because he wanted enlightenment. It spoke of how he was living on a grain of rice a day until he almost died but eventually realized enlightenment couldn't be attained through austerities.

It goes into an amazing amount of detail much more detailed than I had heard of before. When I studied Buddhism in the 1980s I mostly knew about the Lam Rim path and of Vajrayana path.

The Lam Rim path came from a conversation Guatama Buddha heard while doing austerity practices near a river. He heard the music teacher say to his student something like, "IF you tighten the string on the instrument too tight it will break but if you loosen it too much it won't play right. So you need to have the string on the instrument not too tight and not too loose."

This it is said is how Buddha came up with the Lam Rim Path or the middle way path which is what Buddhists are taught basically all over the world now.

Vajrayana is sometimes called the Lightning Path and it might be unique to Tibetan Buddhism and basically means "Lightning or instant enlightenment".

One way I have heard this described is that "Everyone is already enlightened so all you have to do is to realize you and everyone else is already enlightened and you are.

It is like lifting a veil and realizing you are already where you wanted to get to.

One of my favorite aspects to Tibetan Buddhism is "Spontaneous accomplishment" or being in the right place at the right time which is sometimes called "Crazy Wisdom".

It is completely unpredictable in any given moment. Because of this nothing can stop it ever.

Spontaneous accomplishment cannot ever be stopped because no one knows it is coming.

Two of the most powerful practitioners of "Spontaneous Accomplishment" were first Buddha and then Jesus.