The Buddha's Life

That was an absolutely fantastic course! It did exactly what it said on the box. It gave me an understanding of the Buddha as a person that was quite different from the Buddha of stories and legends that I have been reading and hearing all my life. The person presented in this course is considerably more interesting and more compelling than the sanctified, hagiographic Buddha.

On top of that, the course was interesting as a piece of history. I felt I had a bit of a sense of the context of these events. You also repeatedly addressed questions that you raised with an engaging delay. I'd find myself with questions like, "But how did they go about memorizing these texts?" or "Doesn't denying soldiers entry raise a moral question?" only to have the issue addressed later. I'm sure that was no accident. That sort of skillful narrative technique drew my through the course so that I never lost interest.

And I'm a hard sell. Many people are strongly interested in questions of authenticity and literalism but I am not. To my mind, Buddhist theories and practices have utility, first and foremost, in their predictive power and practical results, regardless of who laid them out, and how and when that happened. I see them as know-how or, if you like, technology. Who said exactly what when has, to me, no more bearing on liberation than Lord Kelvin's lab notes have on the value of absolute zero. My interest in this course was really about curiosity. So it is all the more impressive that the course actually deepened or even changed my view of the teachings. There were things that came clear and things that I had never considered.

I really would not change this course in any way but if you were doing another one that was also historically focused, a graphical timeline and some maps might be nice at the beginning, Separately, you might have mentioned in the first lecture that there was this discussion section at the bottom but I didn't notice it until this last lecture where you mentioned it at the end. It might be worth reminding people that this is here a few times at different places in the course.

Thanks again. I know more today than I did a few weeks ago, and that's a nice feeling!

- Martin Cross