Buddha Was Overwhelmed by God 

"When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust, and serenity, Buddha was asked: "What is the goal, the final meaning of nirvana?" he did not answer. He smiled. There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child's 'why'. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question. Children admit no limits to anything; they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit. It is liberation, supreme impasse..." This video made me think of this piece of writing by Emil Cioran, I thought it was kinda neat.

Great stuff Brad! Thanks for the extra thought material. 😬 As a teacher myself, I definitely relate to the fact that we end up highly influenced by the teachers we’ve had - I know I have been!

I think the trees in your backyard were showing you their approval of Plant Caravan with the rain of flowers at the end of the intro. Happy Saturday.

Great interpretive intro and content! I have to catch up on my HC videos. Moving an adult child from the Mountains to Chicago tired me and took much time and driving. I thought about this very question while driving. Tim’s reply and your commentary hit the nail on the head. Nothing I am able to express with words can even begin to approximate the concept of God. So, chop wood and carry water.

I can see myself paying for the tab and backing tracks to that. Thanks, I really enjoy your music.

In practicing Zen and meditation for 45 years my best GUESS is the Buddha thought talking to unawakened practitioners about God is like the story of the warrior shot by an arrow. Rather than focusing on taking the arrow out... the warrior wants to know who shot the arrow, what type of arrow it is, etc etc. All the the unawakend mind can do regarding God , is to give others their opinions ....which is rarely helpful. BEST WISHES

God is beyond God. You’d love Meisner Elkhart who said that hundreds of years ago. Really , he is very Zen for a Dominican priest theologian

Great video! Great contents! Love from Italy 🇮🇹

Another gem! Thank you Brad!

Sabbath🤘

i like how you talked about ziggy and the cat

There is no separate self, so there is no separate god with an identity that we give it

That's nice guitar Brad!!!!!

Hey Brad, I admire how you often talk about God. It seems many Buddhists are hesitant to talk about God because it comes with too much baggage. I relate to your story about how you came to Buddhism because you wanted to understand God. I also came to Buddhism for this reason. I think Buddhism certainly has a God, but it’s very different to the western conception of God.

My personal take is that talking about and thinking about god gets you nowhere. No one knows. Therefore I dropped it and engaged with Buddhism which for myself is very helpful and knowable. I live my life as all but Atheist but I do not refute something that is ultimately unknown to me.

Ouuuui nice guitar solo 🙌🙌🙌

You mentioned truth; There is nothing higher than truth, conventional truth and absolute truth Dharma shows it all.

"It´s older than god, provisionally I call it Dào!" (DDJ)

Amazing

Brad How many different T-shirts do you have? It seems endless like impermanence. MS

There is so much truth is in this verbal failure to express the truth ;) Thanks Brad

You should have Tim on your channel. I'd love to hear a conversation between you two.

Thank you Brad I think you and Tim both nailed it. I would like to share this with my mother but I don't want to get ionto a whole discussion on why Jesus is the "Way the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me." As a Buddhist I have my own understanding of that bit of scripture, but I think I'm missing the mark looking for her validation of my chosen "Faith". I know I'm the one with the on going questions and dissonance that can happen when one is raised in a fundamentalist community. Anyway really liked the vid. The tunes are tripadelic. Psych lives!!!

You might find that this book released a few days ago touches on some of what you said today. "Existential Physics A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questiond" by Sabine Hossenfelder.

Science doesn't try to capture reality, or define truth either. We say science is about making and testing models that best predict behaviour. Many people who think science doesn't work might well be ignorant of what science does. (And there's also technology with its R & D)

oh, since both of you are touring europe - i hope you ll have a zen brew with Muho ;) ! oi

Ive heard many geshes say there is no god in buddhism, so im gonna go with that

It'd be really cool if ziggy and that cat could be friends.

Howdy, I thought this was a great video and I think you are correct. When you talk about God everything you are saying is only pointing at the truth rather than being the truth. In my studies of Sihki, Hinduism and Buddhism I've found that the truth is often only comprehensible through experience. Trying to relate that experience usually doesn't really work when using language. I pray to Shiva and Kali on a daily basis but if someone asked me why I did that it would be rather difficult to explain without them having experienced the same things in meditation and otherwise that I have. I still try to talk about it cause I want to encourage other people to search for themselves but I know ultimately I can only point in the right direction.

Peacock song

Brad, the gods showed up for the Buddha's dharma talks; "god" as you seem to describe it here was not a concept in common currency at the time of the Buddha. In the time of the Buddha it was assumed that the classical gods such as Indra were just a matter of fact.

gone beyond even beyond.....bodhi svaha!

If Buddhism had a God, I would not follow it

No need to be " sorry" bout Ziggy, birds and cat, sent you practicing " Buddhism" aware, in moment

That was a cool little post hardcore song. I really like this videos sometimes.

the buddha have stop trying to understand that is why they don't fully understand

It's a little tricky, assimilating God with the ultimate nature of reality strip away God from its conventional understanding. Fine. But then, should we keep using that word if it's become just a shallow 3 letter assemblage without any content?

"Among the many critical opinions which are passed upon Buddhism by Christian or Western scholars, there are two which stand out most conspicuously and most persistently. One of them declares that Buddhism is a religion which denies the existence of the soul, and the other that it is atheistic or at best pantheistic, which latter term implies what is practically tantamount to the rejection of a God, that is, a personal God as believed in by the Christians. Buddhism is not pantheistic in the sense that it identifies the universe with God. On the other hand, the Buddhist God is absolute and transcendent; this world, being merely its manifestation, is necessarily fragmental and imperfect. To define more exactly the Buddhist notion of the highest being, it may be convenient to borrow the term very happily coined by a modern German scholar, "panentheism," according to which God is πᾶν καὶ ἕν (all and one) and more than the totality of existence." -Zen Master Soyen Shaku (1860-1919)

"... reality has a kind of intelligence and a kind of love for itself and everyone else..." I've definitely heard a lot about compassion, and have nothing against it (it seems great to me), but I've never had a sense of it being integral to reality. I've always thought of it as a decision (some) humans make. Thinking about it now, I think of zen as talking about being dispassionate, and having equanimity, which doesn't seem directly opposed to compassion (and love), but also not really in line with it. I'll read inmo (7 pages doesn't seem so hard...), maybe this is something I should focus on for a few years. :)

What does God stands for? It is not a person in the clouds giving instructions to humans. God has many meanings because there are different people in different situations. The words god stands for: The One, unity, source, pure consciousness, emptiness with esoteric meaning, no thing.

Buddhist conception of God, sounds very similar to the Muslim conception especially the name al-Haqq.

I am prepared to tolerate whatever makes sense to you.

God is only a symbol of God is only a...

Buddha wasn’t overwhelmed by god because Buddha knows god is just a delusional creation out of emotions. Buddha actually felt compassion for those who created and believed such an idea called god.

Is God of Buddhism the father of Jesus?

the only universes where god exists are ontological these are not real worlds, but abstracted limited worlds defined by axioms however within these worlds god definitely exists and like maths that has no physics to match, usually sheds light of a sort on the real world, but has profound inadequacies god is after all an answer to a limited question

the Musical intro was OUTSTANDING

Most people are going to assume when you say 'God' you're referring to a supreme and all knowing being. I think using the term 'God' and having to explain what you mean to people can be problematic.

What an irony that our word God is a rendering of GODama,: 1“The name of the Thautawar temple near Picarra is called Godimana, which may be read God-i-mund, or Got-i-mund, i.e. the place of God or Got; mund being the Thautawar name of a village or place, Godimana or Gotimana, a name of Buddha, was probably carried by the Goths into Europe, and from it they derived the name of the deity-Got or God.” Here is another quote taken from the work of Reverend Henry Scadding: “The same writer [Max Muller] says, ‘God was most likely an old heathen name of the Deity.’ Now we are acquainted with the old heathen names of the Deity among the northern peoples who make use of this word; and the nearest to it of these names is that of the Lombard and Westphalia Guodan. In the Germanic languages, the name appears in such forms as to show either that the initial g is not an essential part of the root, or that it marks the original presence of a letter similar to the Hebrew letter which might be retained as a broad vowel, a simple breathing, or a guttural. I hold to the latter opinion, and find the rendering by the broad vowel in Odin, Oden of the Scandinavian. Grimm connects Gwydion, son of Don, of the Welsh mythology, with Odin, making them the same person. It is hard to distinguish this personage from Aeddon, who is Buddwas, and who came from the region of Gwydion. Aeddon presents us with the same form of the root as Odin, while Gwydion is guttural, like Guodan. The prefix of the Coptic article to the vowel form would give some such word as Bodan or Boudan; but, with the aspirate, it would make the Maesogothic Vodans and the old Saxon Wuodan or Wodan, which the old High German, strictly in accordance with Grimm’s law, changes to Woutan. Then the final n, which so far has appeared in every form of our word, is an essential part of it. The Frisian Weda drops it, and it is wanting in the Welsh Aedd, in which we see the Danish Gud and the German Gott. Now this is the same as the Choda of the Persian, a language that has many remarkable points of resemblance to the Germanic tongues. The same word is found in the Sanskrit, and survives in the Hindustani Khuda. But the names of Buddha, which are by no means well understood, are simply names for God with the termination restored, not as n, but as m. These are Codam, Godama, or Gautama; and give us back again the Gotan and Goutan of the Teutonic dialects. A link of great importance is furnished by a name of Woden, Wegtam, the Wanderer, which preserves the initial g along with the softened form of the Coptic article, and gives the termination of Gautama. Buddha, different as it appears in every respect from the word with which it is often ignorantly joined, is in reality the same, having doubtless come into the Sanskrit through some other channel then that by which Gautama entered. In it, we find the final liquid wanting, the German w, in plain disregard for Grimm’s law, changed to b, and the Frisian Weda reproduced. In confirmation of this I may refer to the case of identity already established between the Germanic wot or wout and the Sanskrit budh, to perceive or know, of which the Welsh form is by no accidental coincidence gwyddoni. Thus in Buddha, Wotan and Gwydion we find not only the supreme god of the northern families of the Aryan stock, but also the symbol of knowledge among those different peoples.” Others, such as Professor George Faber, suggested even a broader spread of the Buddha’s name and suggests that the Cuthites were Buddhists who returned home with the Jews after their Babylonian exile; “In short, Cadmus, [also known as Etam] or Buddha was venerated from the extremity of Siam to the remote western isle of Ireland; for the Codom of Pegu, the Gautam of Ceylon, the Cadam of Phoenicia and Egypt, the Cadmus and Cadmilus of Boetia and Samothrace, and the Chadmel of the ancient Irish, were all one and the same character. I might mention various other places, where Cadmus was thought to have come in the course of his wanderings, such as Rhodes, Thera, Thasus, Eubea, Sparta, Attica, Lesbos, and Ionia: but I must not neglect to observe, that, while some bring him from Egypt or Phoenicia; others, preserving genuine tradition with greater accuracy, represent him as coming from Babylonia, the region whence also in their progress westward, the Phoenicians or Pali migrated into Palestine. This was the seat of the first empire of the Chasas or Cuthites under Nimrod, the centre whence the two primeval superstitions branched off in every direction. Here the worship of Cadam or Buddha commenced: and, in each country where they afterwards settled, the enterprising Shepherds of the Scuthic stock were always peculiarly devoted to it.”

yes correct Buddha Was Overwhelmed by God but saying God can not be explained is not correct and you would have to be God to make that statement

Buddha could not believe in a creator God for the same reason he could not believe in LIFE. How could something inherently replete with suffering be of divine origin?

Buddhism is non theistic. It's not really even debatable. "Absolute truth" is not "god".

God can't be distinguished apart from the eternal grace thereof, aka "emptiness", aka "the void", aka "nirvana". Most simply conflate "the Devil" for God, this inversion of reality being the express purpose of (at least) Western religions.