 Good morning, and I want to thank Peter our wonderful hosts here the donors that have made this event possible and all of you who have decided to come out on this beautiful Thursday morning and to be in a basement and I want to Say that will eventually be paying attention to this picture But if you get a little bit dreamy you can just try to figure out what's going on there And I've chosen four narratives part of a larger project that I hope to bring to fruition soon and These narratives arise from the earliest upon a shot from one of the earliest animal collections known to the planet the punch of Tantra From the Jadaka stories as well as from the giant canonical literature And we're going to begin with what may be the oldest one the story of Satya Kamma Jabala and he was a young man Who asked his mom one day? Who am I? Who is my daddy? He was being raised by a single mom and she said well when I was a young woman I went from this place to that place. I don't really know who your dad is so there's something very contemporary about his search for self identity and his need for reassurance and He having received this information from his mother then seeks out one of the great teachers of his time The gentleman known as Hari Dramata Gautama and he goes to Hari Dramata Gautama and says I seek Self-understanding I seek wisdom and this Guru said to him well very well young man But first tell me who you are Who is your mother? Who is your father? And he says my mother's name is Jabala. She has called me Satya Kamma Jabala. I Do not know who my father is Now this could for many people be a source of great embarrassment, but he just spoke the truth and Because of that Hari Dramata said you speak With the insight and the assurity of a Brahman Yes, I will take you on as my student. However first You must tend my cattle and again, this is one of the great Motifs that recur all the way up to the time of Mila Rapa where the Guru gives An austere task to be performed usually service to be rendered so 400 head of cattle are Turned over to this young boy and he takes them off into the wilderness Now as Lou Lancaster at Berkeley and many others have pointed out India at the time of the Upanishads at the time even later at the time of the Buddha was in fact a vast forest With an occasional settlement here and there so we have to imagine this young man rather bravely going out into a vast forested area with these 400 cows needing to manage them and This young drover as he's leaving says to his guru says to Hari Dramata I will not return Until the herd has increased to a thousand fold and According to the text he's gone into the field gone into Seclusion within the forest for a period of years and then the lead bull comes to him and says Young man, I've taken count. We are now a thousand fold your time for return has come and First Before we all return. I will give you your first lesson and he teaches Satya Kamma Jabbalah about the north about the south about the east and about the west and from this bull Satya Kamma Jabbalah learns his place in space and Then the bull having concluded this lesson says tonight watch carefully The fire because the fire will give you your second lesson and that evening as he sits with the fire He learns about and this is the great formula from the Upanishads Carried over really from the Vedas and he learns about Buhur. He learns the nature of earth He learns about Bhuvah. He learns the nature of atmosphere He learns about swa. He learns about the vastness of the sky and He learns about Samudra. He learns about the depths of the oceans and as the fire burns down that night It says be vigilant Because the swan will give you your next lesson and Sure enough the next day this radiant white swan appears to set you Kamma Jabbalah and tells him look carefully at the nature of light Observe and find within Fire itself Observe the rising of the Sun observe the phases of the moon and in that time of the monsoon Take heed of the importance the significance of lightning Satya Kamma Jabbalah Interiorizes these great teachings and then as the swan departs the swan says watch carefully for the diving bird Now one of the things that we really enjoy in California is going to the beach and Watching the pelicans The pelicans that have been restored taken back from the brink of endangerment and now proliferate all up and down our coast and the diving bird comes and Instructs Satya Kamma about breath About the power of the eye to see the power of the ear to hear and the power of the mind conceptual to conceptualize and at the conclusion all 16 components of what it takes to live the good life Have been imbibed by Satya Kamma Jabbalah and he proudly leads the head bull by his side all a thousand cattle back to Hari Dramata and Hari Dramata as he approaches said you shine With a glow of one who knows brahman You now Have accomplished the wisdom That will qualify you in order yourself to become a teacher So with these teachings not from a human voice, but these teachings From the mouth of a bull From the glow of a campfire From the brilliance of a swan and from the profundity of a bird that dives deep He became one of India's earliest and most renowned teachers Second story the Panchatantra story very close to my heart in preparing this I went through the whole Panchatantra Dozens of stories and I said not this one not this one not this one and then finally toward the end The story of a Rishi and a mouse and this Rishi is walking one day down by the river When all of a sudden he looks up and he sees a falcon release its prey from its talons and this Mouse falls into the river where the Rishi is doing his ablutions and the Rishi wades out and Rescues the mouse drives it off puts it on a leaf lies it down by the shore Looks up as the falcon flies away and starts home to be with his wife And he gets about midway home, and he says oh my gosh. I just left that mouse exposed It could be taken up by some other bird of prey or some other predatory animal So he goes back and he Recollects the mouse, and he says a special mantra and this mouse Transforms into a baby girl. He wraps it in swaddling brings it home to his wife And they'd been together many years, but it remained childless and for the next 12 years They devote all of their love all of their attention to this baby girl that they raise She comes up to be a beautiful young girl, and then he realizes that ah My job as a father is to arrange for her marriage But who could be her equal? She came from the sky. I rescued her from the waters. We have given all that we have to her No common man could ever be her equal. I Must find the best suitor possible And that morning as the Sun rises he goes up to Surya himself and says I have an appropriate spouse to you who has no equal and The Sun says ah, I'm very flattered sir Rishi however, I Am not the best of all that can be in fact the cloud is Better than I because the cloud can come and we know here in England the clouds do come and they take away That radiant power of the Sun Says approach the cloud better than I the cloud will be the equal qualified to marry your daughter So sure enough the next day the mist rises up and the Rishi goes to the clouds and says come down You are the one to marry my daughter And yet when the clouds speak back to the Rishi they say Yes, it is true. We do have the power to occlude the warmth of the Sun However, we may seem all powerful, but there is one being that takes us and splinters us Into a million pieces drops of rain or just makes us disappear and that being is the wind So the next day the Rishi goes to the wind and says great wind power above power of the breath within You are the candidate to become my son-in-law and the wind says yes, it's true We go all places. We have great power However, there's one thing that stops us and that one thing that stops us is the power of the mountain We just go straight to the mountain and the mountain is the best of us So the next day the Rishi stands at the base of a gigantic mountain Covered with forests Studded with gleaming granite boulders and says to the mountain I have the daughter for You who will become your wife and the mountain very humbly says ah, I may seem big I say may seem powerful, but look very closely And he looks very closely and he noticed all of these little bumps on The complexion of the mountain and he noticed these little pock marks and the mountain says No matter how much I try and I know this from being a homeowner myself No matter how much I beg them to just go away and not come back These mice they just always get the best of me So the Rishi goes to a mouse hole and shouts down Send me your best. Send me the king of all of the mice and this little mouse comes out And with his little whiskers he looks up And he says what do you want and then the Rishi presents his beautiful daughter and says this is The most beautiful young woman in the world. Please she and she alone is qualified to be your wife And the mouse rather comically looks up and says well, that's very nice. She's very lovely But how's she going to come in here and go to sleep at night? So the Rishi reverses his spell His daughter goes back in the form of the mouse and every time you're disturbed by a mouse Just remember that she or he at one point was the best there ever has been The third story we don't have time for which is the story of the great big blue bear up in the mountains But the final story that I'll share and then I'll do a little bit of an analysis of the progression of these genres of animal narratives is the story of Meg Kumar and Meg is cloud Kumar is Prince and he had been born to a royal family Actually and Rajgirha the capital of Magadha before the time of the Buddha and When he was born his mother had had this dream that an elephant Rather much like the story of the Buddha, but that an elephant had entered her mouth She'd become pregnant and then while she was pregnant She had a dream that she went riding on an elephant on a cloudy day and Her husband arranged for that to happen and then in fact After all of that had taken place she gave birth and they named because of the the elephant Having come out of the clouds to make her pregnant and because of her desire to go riding on an elephant on a cloudy day They called him Meg Kumar the cloud Prince and he grew up to become a fine young man and they enraged his marriage to eight beautiful princesses and Everything is going very very very fine and well and the king and the queen are very happy because they've raised their son to take on the Responsibility and Magadha, of course very very powerful important kingdom so what happens is that Bhagavan Mahavir has Come to the kingdom to lecture and as he tells the teachings of Jainism Meg Kumar falls under the spell of a deep religious conversion moment and Begs to be admitted to the order of Jain monks and And Mahavir agrees his parents at first grieve But then they rejoice and they in fact to maximize the impact of their son's renunciation They arrange for him to become king for a day So he goes through the full coronation ceremony takes his seat upon the throne and Then the next day goes through his initiation his diksha into the life of a renuncia and That evening his hair gone his robes and his jewels exchanged for the simple White garments of a Svetambara monk or of a monk at that time before any separations of the faith had taken place And as the lowliest and is the newest initiate that evening as they lie down to sleep in the nearby shelter He gets the position right near the door and all night long his brother monks get up and they Shuffle out to go in the fields and pee and He just keeps on getting woken up again and again and again He's cold and he's uncomfortable and he just can't sleep and he says oh my gosh. I made a terrible mistake I'm really a prince. I should be in charge of this kingdom. I'm gonna go back to Mahavir, and I'm gonna tell him I just simply was wrong and Reverse My renunciation of the world so he goes to Mahavir and Mahavir looks at him penetratingly and says Your name was Meg Kumar Think Where did that name come from and then Mahavir proceeds to tell The young monk that he received this name because and his prior birth He had been an elephant and in fact, he'd been an elephant the birth even before that and in that very Second birth ago when he was an elephant There had been this horrible forest fire and all of the elephants had raced toward this pond But by that time his name was Sue Meru Prabhu and he had stumbled and fallen and had gotten admired in the mud around this pond and this younger elephant and come and killed him and That that he then was reborn and in his immediate past life He had been not a white elephant is in the prior life, but he'd been a red elephant with four tasks And that he grew up to become the king of the element of the elephants called Meru Prabhu and that he had the wisdom of recalling what had happened to him in his prior life And he had organized all of the elephants to create an eight mile meadow in which All of the living beings could take protection Against the wildfire and that in fact that summer a wildfire had come and all of the animals from the forest assembled in this meadow away from the dangers of the fire and that he as king stood proudly With all of his fellow elephants and all of the deer and all of the rabbits of the forest and then he began to itch himself and he Raised his leg to itch himself and a rabbit scampered under his leg, and he stood there for two and a half days And then the fire died down and all of the animals went back, but his leg Was asleep and he fell over and no one could help him and he sat there lying there Helpless for three days and then ascend it to heaven and when he ascended to heaven he then Took new birth in this human form that sits before me today said Mojaveer And he said remember the wisdom that you had to create that meadow Remember the compassion you felt for all of the animals and particularly for that little rabbit and this heartened Meg Kumar To adhere to the lifestyle of a giant monk and after many many years of good service. He was reborn in a heavenly realm Now Four stories. I got through three of them The first two Were before the teaching of reincarnation actually came about so for the first two We can really look at these animals as animals as the bull stood with his devotion to the young Satyakama as the swan Presented itself in its full radiance and as the diving bird penetrated the depths of what it means To have a body and a mind and the senses That we have a sense that animals on their own hold great power and wisdom and in fact the power to initiate shamanically people into greater and richer in deeper self-knowledge and similarly with the Panchatantra we can just visualize in these spare few words the power of that falcon the vulnerability of that mouse and the Delicate description of the relationship between animals and humans and the elephants then in the Jataka tales we see the introduction of the reincarnation teaching and Had I had the time to tell it we would have learned about this wonderful great blue bear Who with his gravitas is able to give a lesson to the king and is able just through his sheer presence to set straight an errand hunter who had betrayed him and That very bear later takes birth as Siddhartha Gautama who becomes the Buddha and Again as with those prior stories who holds great wisdom? Animals hold great wisdom that becomes instructive for human beings Similarly in the story of Megkumar we see that its memories of our connections with past lives That bring us to an understanding of what is proper what is to be done in this current life and from each of these stories we Can find a different path of ethics a different path first of self-discovery in Satyakama Jabala who learns about his place in the universe and the story of The Rishi and the mouse we see a wonderful instruction about dharma the dharma of what it means to be a parent and Swadharma the fact that the daughter needs to find her own path Her dog the daughter needs to return and recapture her own essence her mouse essence and in the story of The great great blue bear we have a fabulous teaching about compassion about a mature form of Realized spirituality and again with Megkumar's story We get a sense of what it is to be an elephant and we get a sense of a Greatness in animals that can exceed our own greatness and we know from being with elephants And I was talking to Michael about George Schaller One of the great animal specialists in the world and we were together a couple of months ago in India And as we were riding on a bus in search of the Dalai Lama It was really quite a little narrative, but we see an elephant in the street and this elephant of course is in bondage and serving human needs and the feeling of Connection and the feeling of empathy the feeling as Carol Gilligan put it of great care That arose on the part of those of us who were dedicated to Really the protection and the uplift of animals that the lessons learned By animals and from animals It was just a great inspiration for us to think about how We all could be Brought forward a little bit by heeding these traditional tales of wisdom, but even more importantly by learning from our direct encounters of the many animals that bless us with their presence Every day if we care to pay attention So thank you. I think we have time for a couple of questions Thank you very much for this lively and enlightening Speech and we I think we have about five minutes for questions So please if somebody wants to ask a question there is a microphone over there at the railing Please speak into that You can Okay, with a Jane story what we find is that Okay, I'll share what I've read about what I wrote about this that The lucky elephant of the John narrative Learns one lifetime to the next how to be gentle and earns a reward in heaven In the process of leaving behind his kingship Meg Kumar enters the wild path of renunciation filled with discomfort and again in a sense Leaving the city to retreat into a place over which he has little control in a sense retreating to a lifestyle that is a kin to the dreaded lifestyle of living in the forest and Through this he accumulates great merit and I think it raises the question about Raises the question really about what is the nature what is required for asceticism and just as the young boy found in the forest his true nature so also Monasticism in effect is giving up all of the comforts of the city giving up all of the comforts of a settled life and Engaging what Gary Snyder would call really the practice of the wild Going back to the very bare essentials of what it takes to live fully within a human birth and that for me it's about those rigors of Monasticism and renouncing the comforts placing oneself in Really the cauldron of tapas the cauldron of this purifying heat that then allows people to reconnect with those those true Things that are the most important which would be as we know from Satyakama Jabala an understanding of the body an understanding of the breath an understanding of the senses and an understanding Of the mind and without the rigors of returning to the wild Otherwise, we're just always covered over with our our comforts and unable to Undergo the austerity that's required to find that innate spiritual nature So that's how I would work with that story Please I think you have I think you should argue a bit more They're not live they do not live in the wild they have to collect arms and therefore live in the midst of civilization Right and but however if we see the metaphor for the forest as a metaphor from the very beginning of a place of danger and Recall in the Ramayana where Rama begs Cita not to follow him and he gives this amazing discourse about how scary it is in the woods That when one enters a monastic path You're going to a really very scary place because you don't have your name with you anymore You don't have your family with you anymore. You don't have a place to Reliably place your head every evening You have to gather your food like a honeybee gathers food and Although yes, the lay people have made it as comfortable as possible And yes, there is a life of reciprocity Still metaphorically, there's a there's this abandon to a wildness and an abandon to The unexpected that I think is yes, obviously, they're still living around people But they're living a life of the unpredictable rather much like the forest Thank you. Any other question. Yes, I do. I mean I have again, you know What you said about India in those times that it was covered with forests with small pockets of civilization or Small villages, I mean it's difficult for us to imagine But what I have heard from many academics is that actually the complexity of the Jane philosophy Has survived through its narrative literature and I guess, you know when you recite these stories We can get that sense, but I wonder if you can speak a bit more about the whole oral tradition within the Jane Community and how it helped to preserve the philosophy to this day and its intricacies and its complexity and depth Yeah, the tradition of Qatar the tradition of story and I Purposefully wanted everyone to see that this story is told very very nicely within an illustrated comic book and that this is part of Really the sentiment tradition of the narrative tradition of the performance tradition and that most We could we could interview the summaries But I'm sure it was stories that they heard in their youth that implanted the seed that caused them to take up the monastic life And that when we hear say from professor Tobias and we're going to hear from professor Bekoff About what we have learned about the consciousness of animals that these types of of stories and More in terms of story than fact that this is what moves the human soul and that the narrative The story is what causes people to want to change their own story