Original subtitles

(pensive music)

Since the dawn of civilization,

the forces of nature and the whims of gods

held sway over humanity.

But two and a half thousand years ago,

humankind experienced a profound transformation.

(swelling music)

Suddenly, there were new possibilities.

This is a time when rationality overrode superstition

and belief.

This is an ethic which does not rely on the gods.

The world is now explained in terms of natural forces.

We're now responsible for our own destiny.

(uptempo music)

Upheavals across the globe sparked an ambitious vision

of what humans could achieve,

spearheaded by three trailblazers.

Socrates, Confucius, and the Buddha.

Great thinkers from the ancient world,

whose ideas still shape our own lives.

Is wealth a good thing?

How do you create a just society?

How do I live a good life?

By daring to think the unthinkable,

they laid the foundations of our modern world.

I've always been intrigued by the fact that these men,

who lived many thousands of miles apart, seemed,

almost spontaneously, within 100 years of one another,

to come up with such radical ways of thinking.

(epic music)

So what was going on?

I want to investigate their revolutionary ideas.

To understand what set them in motion.

In this episode, I'm on the trail of that most enigmatic

of philosophers: the Buddha.

The wandering seeker of truth,

who challenged religious orthodoxy.

Your caste was not a barrier.

Priests were not required.

Analyzing his thoughts

and desires sparked game-changing insights.

This is the teaching of Buddha.

Everything is subject to change.

Setting the Buddha on his path to enlightenment,

a whole new way of being,

and an escape from the suffering of life.

Technologically, the world has progressed immensely,

but psychologically, I don't think we've moved very far.

(cheering)

(somber music)

Around two and a half thousand years ago,

a young man made a life-changing decision.

We're told that in the dead of night, he left home.

Pausing just once to take a last look at his wife

and newborn son, he then slipped out silently,

into the darkness.

It was the start of a journey that would take him

from the foothills of the Himalayas,

and end here on the plans of northern India.

His mission was to make sense of human life.

For me, it's genuinely exciting that what the Buddha

discovered 25 centuries ago continues to inspire

hundreds of millions of people across the globe.

As a religion or belief system, Buddhism has evolved,

taking diverse forms within different cultures.

And as a philosophy, its relevance is undiminished by time.

The fact it's still on the rise shows

it's a potent way to navigate our modern times, passed down

from the ancient world that the Buddha inhabited.

(dramatic music)

Most of what we know about the Buddha is based

on oral accounts that were written down

a few centuries after his death.

They tell us he was born sometime between the sixth

and the fifth centuries BC, in what's now southern Nepal.

We're told he was a prince: Siddhartha Gautama.

Good-looking, skilled in weaponry,

and prophesied to achieve great things.

But his father the king was worried,

because it was predicted his son would do one of two things.

Stay in the king's palace and become an emperor,

or leave home and become a great religious leader.

The king, preferring his son to be a more

conventional emperor, surrounded the prince with luxury,

to attach him to a worldly life.

The streets were cleared of all unpleasant sites,

so he was blissfully unaware of the suffering in the world.

(pensive music)

But the plan backfired.

One day, whilst out in his carriage,

he unexpectedly saw an old man.

Later, he saw a sick man.

And then a corpse.

Witnessing the pain and frailty of human existence

shook him to the core.

When the prince saw a holy man, he was inspired.

And his destiny was sealed.

I have to say, this colorful account of the Buddha's

early palace life does have more than a ring of fable to it.

It feels like a kind of textbook heroic story.

But it does also seem to reflect a real, existential crisis.

(uptempo music)

The Buddha observed that our lives

were permeated by suffering.

His quest was to find out if there was a way to overcome it.

He left the remote Himalayan foothills, and headed south,

abandoning everything: his privilege, his family.

His homeland.

A small tribal state, it was run by a council

of prominent men from one clan, called the Sakits.

Now, it looked as though his father was probably

a clan leader from a prosperous family,

not the great king that we always hear about.

As the Buddha headed south, he experienced the cultures

of neighboring states for the first time.

(honking)

Arriving here, he'd have seen everything

with the eyes of a curious stranger.

Just like those other groundbreaking philosophers

of his day, Socrates in Greece and Confucius in China,

he was the very definition of what it is

to be a questioning human.

He refused to be constrained by convention

and by complacent belief.

He would follow wherever his inquiry led him.

(somber music)

One of the first things the Buddha would have encountered

was the religion of the Brahmins,

a priestly caste who dominated the cultural landscape

of the Indian world.

(chanting recitation)

They're going to offer rice and flowers to,

evoking the gods now.

Brahmins were responsible

for reciting the Vedas, an ancient body

of divine teachings and hymns, in sacred spaces

and in people's homes, just as they do today.

(chanting recitation)

Another key role was to perform sacrifices.

To persuade the gods to sustain the order of the cosmos

and deliver prosperity.

(chanting recitation)

They memorized all the old scriptures.

You've seen how the Brahmins here have been just chanting,

one after the other, and they can go on like for three,

four hours.

(chanting recitation)

They memorized all the rituals.

They knew what vibrations, what food,

how the water should be, how the earth should be,

what space is required.

They had all the understanding

of how to communicate with the gods.

What kind of ritual were they in charge of?

If somebody had died, and you need to do the last rites,

it was the Brahmin who'd come to do it.

If there was a drought, you'd get the Brahmin

to evoke the rain god.

The whole life depended then on the priest,

the Brahmin, who had the knowledge.

That must have given them real power.

They've always dominated the rest, whether you call it

the caste system or the different levels.

But they had the highest, top position,

and then came the warrior community.

The Rajputs, the fighters, the rulers.

Then came the business community, which is the Vaishyas.

And then came the community that did the service.

The cobblers, the blacksmiths,

and that was the Brahmanic society.

(chanting recitations)

To the Buddha, the rigid hierarchy of the caste system

and the sacrifice to the gods relied on blind faith

and received wisdom, not any kind of rational explanation.

He passionately thought that there must be a more robust,

a more credible way to understand

and explain our place in the world.

(sonorous music)

The Buddha's journey continued on,

down to the Ganges plain.

It was a world in the midst of rapid transformation.

New cities and prosperous centralized kingdoms had emerged.

The Buddha is said to have entered one,

the Kingdom of Magadha and spent time here,

in the royal capital: Rajagriha.

Along these rampart walls, you can still experience

the ancient city as the Buddha would have known it.

The streets of the city here would have been crowded

with brightly-painted carriages,

bringing gold and silver, pearls and blue lapis lazuli,

sandalwood and rich cloths.

And in the distance, you'd have seen great caravans

carrying in more fabulous goods from the Bay of Bengal,

in what is modern-day Afghanistan.

There's a lot of evidence in the literature

for this time that cities were expanding,

but do we get evidence in archeology, too?

We get lots of evidence.

This is the period when cities were emerging

and expanding all over the country.

These are lovely little belongings here.

Did these all come from cities?

All of them did.

You can imagine the people who used them.

Look at this, for instance, this is a razor.

That's great; I love it when design doesn't change.

That is exactly the same as a razor today.

That is one heck of a door-nail,

so that's quite some door that that's holding together.

And these are lovely as well.

Is this, it looks like very fine dining-ware, is it?

It is, this is a very special kind of pottery

that must have been used only by very rich people

for very special occasions.

So do you think, I mean, this kind of different way

of living is affecting how people feel about their lives?

Yes, absolutely.

And the city must have been a very exciting

and also unsettling experience for somebody

who'd walked into one of these cities from a village,

because something new is emerging,

but the old ways of life and the old kinds

of social relationships are dissolving.

This is a time when you have unprecedented

and I think unparalleled level of questioning

about what it means to live in the world

and how one should live one's life,

and all kinds of questions that concern us, very deeply.

(somber music)

Cities were a real paradox.

They did offer dazzling new opportunities,

but they also cut people loose

from everything that they knew.

From their tribes, from their land,

from ways of being that hadn't really changed much

for millennia, so they were wonderful,

but they were also actually quite threatening.

People must have wondered what life was all about,

and how they should now best live together.

It was a time of intense questioning.

Can we control our desires?

And the Buddha would play

a vital role in that debate.

What is justice?

By now deep into his own personal quest,

he engaged with the most intractable question of all.

What happens to us when we die?

(clattering)

(pensive music)

Inspired by the cycles of renewal

in the natural environment,

people had come to believe we were part

of an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth,

known as Samsara.

Samsara is a powerful idea that was very current

to the time of the Buddha, the idea of a birth,

followed by rebirth, followed by rebirth,

in this cycle of time.

But humanity's always been aware of the cycle of life.

So what made Samsara different?

The cycle of rebirth really means that you go

from one life to another, and that you can be

manifested in a different form in each life.

You could be manifested as a god, or you could manifested

as a human being, maybe a higher or lower caste.

You could even manifest as an animal or insect,

as a cockroach, and so that is really the cycle

of rebirth from life to life,

through a continuous passage of time.

So do you think people felt trapped by this?

You can imagine somebody thinking that,

at each birth, he has to go through the travails of life,

of sickness, old age, death, and then rebirth,

and the whole cycle goes on.

And so, it's tedious.

I mean, it's suffering, because the existential reality

was not one that they felt was bliss.

So did people try to work out a way

to release themselves from this trap?

Yes, the great quest at that time was to find ways

out of that cycle of rebirth and re-death.

(sonorous music)

For the Buddha, the rituals of the Brahmins

weren't the answer to the perennial suffering of life.

They didn't seem to offer a permanent solution to Samsara.

But he was convinced that a mechanism to completely

break free from the cycle altogether could be found.

And he wasn't alone.

A wave of truth-seekers had left their families

and homes to wander the Earth in search of the solution.

Renouncing everything, some chose to live in forests,

which is where we're told the Buddha went looking for them.

For the Buddha, self discovery came from examining

your own, individual experiences and then drawing

logical conclusions from them.

So in order to try to evaluate the ideas of these

new thinkers, he decided to try out their methods firsthand.

One of these wandering truth-seekers was a man named:

Alara Kalama.

Now, the solution to the problem of Samsara, as he saw it,

lay in directly experiencing the permanence,

the eternal part of ourselves,

the part that survived every rebirth.

(murmuring)

To do this, he meditated to block out the distractions

of the temporary, external world.

Freed from physical and mental interference,

such seekers could focus on their goal:

to fully merge their eternal soul

with its cosmic counterpart, a kind of universal soul,

the highest reality.

The idea seems to have been that by creating union

between the microcosm, the individual self,

and the macrocosm, this world soul,

they would achieve liberation.

Under Alara's tuition, we're told the Buddha showed

such remarkable ability, he could achieve

a profound stillness of mind, so much so

that Alara offered him joint leadership of the group.

But he refused.

He found that once he came out of meditation,

he was just returned once again to the same fundamental

problems of birth, sickness, old age and death.

It didn't give him the transformative experience

that he sought.

(pensive music)

But the Buddha didn't give up.

(dramatic music)

It's said he next experimented with the techniques

of a different type of renouncer,

who focused on extreme forms of self-denial.

(dramatic music)

These types of renouncers also believed

that the material part of our being

is an obstacle to liberation.

Theirs was a much more drastic solution.

Instead of focusing on the mind,

they put all their efforts into subduing their bodies.

(somber music)

Some groups believed that all human action

left a negative dust on our soul,

weighing us down in this life,

and trapping us in future rebirths.

Some fasted, some stood stock-still for months on end.

Others endured the heat of the midday sun,

all to burn off the results of their previous actions.

Extreme measures to allow space for the permanent soul

to expand to the size of the universe,

eventually liberating them from Samsara.

It seems the Buddha spent six years

experimenting with all kinds of self-denying,

extreme penances.

He tried a technique of holding his breath

for longer and longer periods.

He walked around naked.

He ate tiny amounts of food, just one grain of rice a day.

We're told that he almost died.

His bones were like the rafters of a derelict house,

and he could actually feel his backbone,

through his stomach.

But despite all this, he wasn't making any progress.

The pain was clouding his mind.

The austerities weren't providing a solution to suffering.

They were just making him suffer even more.

So, he abandoned the path of self-denial

by eating a bowl of rice porridge,

disappointing and angering his five fellow renouncers.

Six years of hardship, experimenting with different methods,

had come to nothing.

Now he would go it alone in his quest

to break the cycle of Samsara.

What the Buddha attempted next was something new.

A middle way, between the extremes of self-indulgence,

and the rigors of self-mortification.

Moderation would be his radical new approach from now on.

(dramatic music)

(honking)

The Buddha's change of tack would bring greater clarity

to his examination of the human condition.

(dramatic music)

The Buddha believed that all we can know for sure

is how we experience the world.

And that it's our minds that determine

what kinds of experience we have.

Using his meditation skills, he interrogated

the internal workings of his own mind.

And what the Buddha discovered contradicted the assumptions

people held about the permanence of the soul.

He realized that the external world,

as we experienced it, was constantly changing.

And that we were constantly changing, too.

Our material form, our sensations,

our mind, our consciousness, our character,

all in perpetual flux.

(dramatic music)

This realization exposed a fundamental flaw

in the Buddha's thinking.

All efforts to identify a permanent self were futile.

Because a permanent, or independent self,

did not exist.

When the Buddha is looking at how the process

of his suffering was developing,

he started looking at it very much like doctor.

And he starts looking for the cause,

and he starts realizing that everything is fleeting,

it's changing, there's nothing that he can put his finger on

as a cause, and starts realizing that actually

the cause is the identification with an I.

There's no such thing which you can just pinpoint

at a certain point in time and say, look, this is it.

But it changes in the next moment.

So I think that realization,

that everything is impermanent,

leads to the idea that the permanently existing

entity of a soul is a concept.

Just explain to me, because I can't quite get my head

around this, what does it mean to have no self?

What did he mean by that?

I'll give you an example, for example, let's say,

okay, Bettany, when were you born?

And you say: I was born on so and so date,

and so and so year.

And I'd say: really?

Weren't you born nine months before that?

You say yes.

And I say: weren't you in your mother

and father before that?

If I took your mother out of you,

you're not Bettany anymore.

Bettany is made of non-Bettany elements.

Bettany is the sunshine, the earth, England,

and then you suddenly start realizing

that there was not a single point

when Bettany came about, you know?

So, in Buddhism, we don't talk about creation.

We talk about manifestation.

It's not denying that you exist.

You exist.

But it's not, it's denying that we have an intrinsically

independent entity.

The Buddha believed the idea

of a permanent self wasn't part of the solution.

It was actually at the root of the problem.

Because it made us selfish, self-absorbed.

It created insatiable craving that enslaved us

to transient, earthly concerns,

and kept us trapped in Samsara.

To rid oneself of this deep-seated delusion of self

was the way to liberation.

That realization allows you the freedom

not to get caught in the I, me, mine,

which is really the fundamental cause of suffering.

And then, he says: oh, then there is a way

to overcome suffering.

That's the sort of ah-ha, wow!

So his teaching was based around rediscovering your nature,

which is non-self nature.

(pensive music)

The Buddha's self-analysis revealed the answer:

if we could extinguish the delusion of self,

we would see things as they truly are,

and our suffering would end.

We had the capacity to take control of our lives.

The Buddha seems to have recognized

that there's a plasticity to our minds and characters.

Living in the world with the right attitude

is fundamentally empowering.

Basically, know yourself and the world is yours.

It's cognitive psychology 25 centuries

before the phrase is invented.

(pensive music)

The Buddha was ready to throw all his efforts

into bringing about his self-transformation.

Arriving on the outskirts of a small village,

he found a beautiful stretch of countryside,

with a pleasant grove nestled

on the banks of a sparkling river.

We're told that one night, age 35,

the Buddha came here to Bodhgaya,

and calmly sat underneath the ancestor if this very tree.

Today, it's a pilgrimage site

for many millions for one key reason.

Because this is where it all came together.

The Buddha entered a deep, meditative state.

In which he experienced a vast number of his previous lives.

He describes a cycle of many life forms,

and rounds of existence.

From hell-beings and animals, to humans,

through to more abstract levels of consciousness.

Yet all these forms were subject to Samsara.

Even a god would eventually die and be reborn.

But finally, the Buddha moved beyond these states,

searching deep in his humanity, he was able to root out

and permanently extinguish craving, ignorance, and delusion.

He had finally broken free of the cycle of death

and rebirth and attained enlightenment.

Nirvana.

Unshakeable is the liberation of my mind.

This is the last birth.

For me, there is no more renewed existence.

Later, the Buddha would discourage speculation

about the nature of nirvana.

Describing it was like asking what happened

to a flame once it had been blown out.

And yet, this was no less than a solution

to the human condition, without the need for heavens

or gods or metaphysical knowledge.

This was a state of pure liberation,

directly experienced from within.

(somber music)

The Buddha had harnessed the capabilities

of the mind to identify what he believed

it fundamentally was to be human.

Extinguishing desire and hatred and delusion,

that allowed him to fulfill his full potential.

Now, he can live with absolute wisdom, and compassion.

The Buddha found he had a new mission.

To share what he'd experienced.

He wasn't sure if he could ever communicate it,

but his profound empathy for others drove him on.

His starting point was the five former renouncer friends

he'd left for his middle way.

The sources tell us he found them where I'm heading next,

the outskirts of modern-day Varanasi,

the site of an ancient deer park.

At first, his former companions

were reluctant to welcome him.

And then we're told, they realized

that a great transformation had taken place.

They greeted him with respect and washed his feet.

And it's now that we get a sense

of the compelling charisma of the man.

Because what the Buddha had to tell them was mind-blowing

in its insight and clarity.

The Buddha shared his discoveries,

known as the Four Noble Truths.

The first truth was the inevitability

that all life is suffering.

But by suffering, the Buddha didn't just mean illness

and old age, but the persistent disappointments

and insecurities of life.

The second truth was that suffering was caused by craving.

The third was that since suffering has an identifiable cause

it could have an end.

But it was the fourth truth that offered the critical,

practical answer.

This truth was a path, what he called the Eightfold Path.

And it offered up an end to all suffering.

(pensive music)

With the Buddha's guidance, his small group of disciples

made quick progress; they'd gained wisdom,

practiced ethical conduct, and achieved mental discipline

through meditation.

Finally, they experienced nirvana for themselves.

But whilst liberation was, in theory,

open to everyone, in practice,

many couldn't afford the time and the effort.

The Buddha, however, had a message of hope for those

who remained trapped in the cycle of death and rebirth.

By completely reformulating the long-established concept

of Karma.

Traditionally, Karma referred to significant action,

which, it was believed, could improve the quality

of our rebirth in the next life.

In the early days of Brahmanism,

Karma was synonymous with ritual action,

performed by priests on behalf of the higher castes.

The lowest castes had little prospect of improving their lot

through the ritual form of Karma.

Buddha changed Karma from ritual action

to the thought of that action.

So the intent of that action

was more important than the action itself.

If you thought well, if you had good intentions,

then you could change your destiny, you know?

Not necessarily in this life, but in future lives as well.

That's a key shift, isn't it?

That is a very major shift in the understanding

of the notion of Karma, you know?

From ritual action to an individual's choice

of doing good, you know, they have to be good human beings.

And that's a fundamental thing about Buddhism.

So that's no just a kind of philosophical shift,

but that's a change in society.

Absolutely.

He took it out of the hands of the priests

who were empowered to change the destiny of men,

and gave it in the hands of people

who were practicing Buddhism.

So it doesn't matter what class you're from,

actually, or what gender.

You could be anyone, you could belong to any caste.

It didn't really matter; everybody had the choice,

and the freedom, to improve, to become a good person.

(dramatic music)

The Buddha's take on Karma was liberating.

Everyone stuck in the cycle of Samsara

had the chance to improve the quality of their rebirth.

Now, you were no longer good or bad dependent on class

or gender or some kind of ritual expertise.

The Buddha sought answers that had the potential

to benefit everyone.

Just think what a radical development that is.

(uptempo music)

The Buddha's democratization of Karma attracted

the attention and support of one class, in particular.

The merchants and traders who'd fueled the rise

of Indian cities.

According to the conventions of Brahminism,

contact with anyone outside your caste

resulted in contamination.

But of course, by definition, merchants were interacting

with different people and different cultures the whole time.

Now, Buddhism didn't have any kind of a problem with that.

Some merchants felt disadvantaged by the caste system.

The Buddha's inclusive message gave them

the greatest sense of place in society,

and channeled their aspirational instincts.

The wealth of merchants, like good Karma,

was by its very nature meritocratic.

It wasn't in some way preordained,

it was won and accumulated for your own efforts.

(uptempo music)

The Buddha's take on the ancient ideas of Karma

offered ordinary people a way to a better moral life.

He helped to create the belief

that action and intention in our everyday lives

had real consequences.

Coins like these were a brand new common denominator,

just as Karma was now a kind of moral currency for Buddhism.

It's easy to imagine how, with things like these

in your pocket, you could understand how you could secure

future benefits by building up merits.

The Buddha had revolutionized ethics.

We could no longer blame any external force,

like a god, for our decisions.

We were entirely responsible for our own moral condition.

The buck stopped with us.

In essence, this is the same rallying cry

that we hear from those other great philosophers

of the age, Socrates and Confucius:

to find answers to the universe, first look within.

Be your own lamp, said the Buddha.

Seek no other refuge.

These are exciting thoughts.

The idea that you don't just have to be a victim,

but a master of your own fate.

(siren wailing)

The Buddha forged ahead with his potent message

of personal liberation.

It's said he criss-crossed the central Indian plains,

giving public talks in cities and the country

to anybody he thought ready to hear his message.

And the community of disciples who shared his mission

and wandering lifestyle acquired a name.

The Sangha.

At this stage, the Sangha was dispersed

and only loosely organized.

But according to traditional accounts,

when the Buddha came here to a forest on the outskirts

of Rajagriha, the Buddhist order would

take on a whole new direction.

The king of the city, Bimbisara,

heard that the Buddha was camped outside,

and went to visit him with 120,000 Brahmins.

On hearing him preach, we are told that each

and every one of them, including the king,

begged to be received as lay followers.

We know that, with people, when we meet some people,

we immediately feel a sense of reverence,

you know, a sense of humility, in their presence,

and yet, they don't seem inaccessible.

He was, I feel, very charismatic.

People were, in a way, entranced by him.

I think he was able to understand the psychology

of the person, he had a sort of intuitive sense

of what the person needed.

He was not saying: I'm the one who knows.

He said: you try it.

And this spirit of free inquiry,

that was really encouraging, was quite revolutionary.

Following their meeting, Bimbisara was said

to have donated a bamboo grove on this very spot

as a retreat for the Buddha's growing community.

Winning over wealthy patrons would be crucial

for the future of the Buddhists' message.

The establishment of permanent bases

in places like this saw the Sangha develop

from a group of like-minded itinerants

into a settled institution.

The Sangha at Rajagriha became the model

for something entirely new.

Soon, a network of monasteries,

the first known monasteries in the world, sprang up.

Places where the Buddha and his traveling disciples

would stay during the monsoon season.

The movement was changing,

and the Buddha's role would change, too.

He taught that each monk was an island,

and responsible for themselves, but now he's believed

to have created a comprehensive set of guidelines.

In early Buddhism, there's only few monks.

So there was no need of rules,

because those who become monks were very highly intelligent

and highly inner-spiritual.

They have the clear intention, comprehension,

for why I am become a monk.

So they never done anything wrong.

But, gradually, you know, when the number is growing up,

to maintain the excellence, peace and harmony,

he prescribed the different rules and the discipline.

An amazing thing that two and a half millennia later,

you're still living by those rules.

I think we need more rules.

To me, because in the modern times,

we have to face so many things.

That time, only India.

Now there is the whole world.

There are 227 rules for monks, enacted every day.

And it is amazing to think that in these words,

we could be getting a glimpse into the mind

of the Buddha and his early followers.

The Buddha is thought to have adopted his rules

in an ad hoc way.

He was a pragmatist, not above changing his mind

and listening to reason, even when it came

to the thorny issue of including women.

At the very beginning, they were regarded

as a bit of a burden, because they needed protecting,

but the logic that liberation should be available to all

meant that really, they had to be included,

and we're told that the Buddha himself eventually declared

that nuns should be part of the Sangha.

The rules of the Sangha are eminently practical.

Self-discipline and resourcefulness are enshrined

into daily life; they dictate what you can own,

and what you must give up.

Monks are allowed to have eight possessions.

They are three robes, basically.

It is to look ugly, not too beautiful.

We have to have a small needle and thread,

but you know, nowadays you don't stitch,

because we have ready-made robes.

This is the razor.

It is very troublesome to keep hair,

so we leave it, every day.

This is the bowl.

The begging bowl.

The begging bowl of the monks.

So this, you collect food and drinks,

alms from other people. Every day.

And why do you get your food from outside?

Why don't you produce it yourself?

Because monk has to depend on the people, the society.

So, we have gratefulness and gratitude.

So what we return to them, our compassion and wisdom.

Monks can be a guide to the people,

to the society, to show the path to wisdom,

to show the path to peace,

and to show the path to happiness.

Apart from that, monks have no other connection,

relations, to the lay people whatsoever.

But you've had to leave your family

in order to become a monk?

Yes, in fact, family life is always full

of that kind of miseries, that kind of obstacles

and troubles, so many.

So living in the family life,

one cannot practice a simple, holy life.

In order to achieve the spiritual heights.

(ritual singing)

When monks leave home,

it can be hard for those left behind.

The Buddha is said to have acknowledged

the grief he'd caused his family, and proclaimed

that monks needed parental permission to join.

Buddhism is a philosophy or religion that is sometimes

criticized for only benefiting the practitioner,

that rather coldly sees social and family bonds

as attachments to the world,

and therefore a barrier to achieving nirvana.

But what I get the sense of here

is a real commitment to collective wellbeing.

The Buddha hadn't shut himself away after his enlightenment.

His insights had heightened his concern for others,

and he'd spent over half his life helping those around him

to alleviate their suffering.

The Buddha's insistence on the absolute value

of compassion is something that really impresses me.

Just listen to these words of his,

some of the very earliest ever written down:

let no one deceive another, nor despise anyone, anywhere.

As a mother protects her child, with boundless,

loving kindness, cherish the world.

Love without limit.

How can you argue with that?

(pensive music)

By tirelessly expressing and explaining his ideas,

the Buddha had nurtured a committed following.

Dedicated to his principles of intellectual rigor

and deep humanity.

But the Sangha couldn't rely on the leadership

of its founder forever.

We're told that when the Buddha reached his 80s,

thoughts turned to the continuation of his message.

His faithful attendant Ananda asked what would happen

to the Sangha after he died.

He said: the Sangha doesn't need a leader.

It just needs my dharma, my teaching.

After accepting a meal at the house

of a humble blacksmith, it's believed

he contracted food poisoning and quickly became very ill.

Yet, having achieved nirvana,

the Buddha had no fear of death.

His suffering had ended

with the moment of his enlightenment.

He would not be reborn.

And what followed death was, like nirvana,

beyond comprehension.

Just before he died, he told his fellow monks

to simply keep seeking enlightenment.

It is the nature of things to decay.

Be attentive and you will succeed.

(hissing)

(somber music)

The Buddha's death robbed the Sangha

of their founder and leader.

With this vacuum, there was a real danger his ideas

would be lost or corrupted.

The Buddha had encouraged the Sangha to reach consensus

on day to day concerns by holding regular meetings.

And now the monks did as they'd been taught.

They're said to have convened a council

of 500 prominent monks here, to this cave,

to determine the content of Buddhist doctrine.

Ananda recited the sermons and the teachings of the Buddha.

Another monk, Aparli, recited the monastic rules.

They now had a definitive account of the Buddha's ideas.

For the next few centuries, the Buddha's message

was kept live by the Sangha.

But ironically, Buddhism's expansion to the wider world

would come courtesy of a despot.

(ominous music)

200 years after the Buddha's death,

most of what is modern India was ruled

by the ruthless Emperor Ashoka.

This well in Ashoka's ancient capital, Patna,

is believed to have been his purpose-built torture chamber.

We're told that here, Ashoka's sadistic head torturer

would prize open the mouths of his victims

and pour molten copper down their throats.

But then, around 262 BC, following a particularly pitiless

and bloody victory, Ashoka suddenly had a sickening

realization of all the suffering that he'd caused.

And his change of heart could not have been more dramatic.

Invoking the nonviolent teachings of the Buddha,

and declaring his heartfelt remorse for all

of his murderous actions, he vowed that from here on in,

he would govern righteously.

The reformed emperor set his new beliefs in stone.

He sought out sights associated with the Buddha's life

and erected pillars up to 15 meters high.

In doing so, he marked them out for the benefit

of future pilgrims.

He had inscriptions like this carved into stone,

right across his empire.

But these edicts didn't lionize his victories in battle.

Instead, they declared his revulsion of violence,

and urged his subjects to live moral

and compassionate lives.

(ringing)

Ashoka gave up conquest, and abolished the death penalty.

He liberated slaves, set up free hospitals.

Animal sacrifice was banned in the capital,

and a wide range of animals, including parrots,

tortoises, porcupines, became protected species.

He sent missions out of India,

taking Buddhist principles to Sri Lanka,

the Middle East, and across Asia.

Buddhism would continue to dominate the Indian

subcontinent for the next one and a half millennia.

Wealthy patrons donated generously.

Stupas containing what were said to be relics

of the Buddha, and sculptures depicting his life

emerged across the landscape.

But to my mind, the greatest legacy of this time is here,

at Nalanda.

It is just such a treat to be here,

because this place has a claim to be

the oldest university in the world.

We know there was a serous educational establishment here

from at least the fifth century AD,

and you have to try to imagine it in its heyday.

It would have been buzzing with international scholars

who came from as far afield as Indonesia, Tibet,

China, Turkey, and Japan.

It had a huge campus, with thousands of students.

200 villages supplied the students' practical needs.

Maths, politics, literature were all studied here,

but there was particular emphasis on Buddhism.

Thousands of Buddhist manuscripts were housed

in a nine-storied building.

It was the envy of the Medieval world.

One Chinese scholar clearly adored it here.

There are richly adorned towers and fairy tale turrets.

Roofs covered with tiles that reflect the light

in a thousand shades.

There are observatories, and the upper rooms

tower above the clouds.

These things add to the beauty of the scene.

Renewed interest in Nalanda's legacy of inquiry

has been led by Nobel Prize-winning economist,

Amartya Sen.

Do you think that the Buddha would have approved

of what went on at Nalanda?

I would think he very much would have approved.

It was inspired by his ideas, it was inspired by the idea

that we have to solve problems by reflection,

by knowledge, by critical examination.

You know, he tried fasting and it didn't do anything for him

and he decided that by torturing the body,

you don't improve your mind.

You improve the mind by cultivating the mind.

Some people might think it's counterintuitive

that Buddhism is being taught at Nalanda,

alongside maths and science and grammar.

But it's part of that kind

of practical understanding of the world, isn't it?

It's part of a Buddhist understanding of the world, too.

Namely that you have to be concerned with those issues

that move people, within the mortality,

disability, morbidity, it won't be seen

in any kind of conflict with Buddhist study,

because Buddhism is also about human life.

What would you say the Buddha

has to offer the world today?

One of the things that Buddha identified

is that it's possible for you to agree on good action,

without necessarily agreeing on a bigger,

metaphysical view of the universe.

When I was fortunate to get the Nobel,

I gave the bulk of that money

to help elementary education,

elementary healthcare, and gender equity.

At the same time, I don't have any great belief

in religion and god.

But it was the Buddha who changed the question from:

is there god?

To questions like how to behave,

no matter whether there is god or not.

And I think that's a game-changer.

(pensive music)

Buddhism had been in the ascendancy.

But from the seventh century, changes in patterns

of patronage began to affect big institutions like Nalanda.

Gifts from rich benefactors ebbed away.

Brahminism had always remained a strong presence,

and people drifted back in greater numbers.

It began to dominate state governance,

at Buddhism's expense.

Muslim conquerors in the 12th and 13th centuries

sacked monasteries and temples.

Nalanda is said to have been put to the torch,

and to have burned for three days.

The Buddhist way of life all but disappeared

in the land of its birth.

(dramatic music)

But Buddhism was already on the move.

It had already traveled at a furious pace throughout Asia,

and would continue its journey

to become a truly global religion.

With no single, sacred language,

no inflexible dogma, Buddhism was ripe for export.

It's an adaptable philosophy

that's become a diverse belief system.

As it spread, it cross-pollinated with other cultures

in numerous, unexpected ways.

For some, there is life after death

and the Buddha is a figure of devotion.

Since the 20th century, it's even been implicated

in violent nationalist struggles.

But at its heart, the Buddha's message remains the same.

That whilst change is inevitable,

we all have the power to direct that change.

By gaining wisdom, we can reduce suffering.

The Buddha's life is a fascinating one,

from an age that made history.

But we can relate to him on a very personal level.

His need to find answers to the human condition

in the here and now is one that I'd argue,

deep down, we all share.

(sonorous chanting)

He offers practical solutions to help overcome

the desires and delusions which fuel hatred,

jealousy, and greed.

And arguably, his greatest gift is deceptively simple.

That it's compassion, empathy, and knowing who we truly are

that makes both us and the world better.

Whether you're a Buddhist or not, the humanity and hope

of that message still burns bright today.

(dramatic music)