This video is sponsored by the book summary service blankest. The first 100 people to use the link in the description will receive one week of free unlimited access plus 25% off a full membership. What does it mean to live well and be virtuous in a world of suffering, chaos and deterioration? What does it mean to go on living in a consciousness that is inevitably bound to the struggle of it only becoming more confused and tormented as it becomes more capable and aware? Generally speaking, most religious and philosophical concepts are spurred out of these sorts of challenges and questions.

They represent humanity's attempt to overcome or deal with the deficiencies and difficulties bestowed into each pair of unrequested human hands. One perhaps especially unique example of such an attempt is the philosophy and religion of Buddhism. Somewhere between sixth and fourth century BC, in what is now southern Nepal, a boy named Siddhartha Gautama was born. He was born to an aristocratic family, his father, Shoto, Donna, being the king of a growing state in the Indian subcontinent. When Siddhartha was born a holy messenger and prophesized that he would become one of two things, either a great king, or a great religious leader.

When receiving this prophecy, being the conservative King that his father was, he determined that he would ensure that Siddhartha would become the former, he would ensure this by completely sheltering Siddhartha confining him within a massive palace he had configured away and walled off from the rest of the world, rigidly filtering what was allowed in by a standard of perfect health, beauty and luxury, constantly cleansing the palace of any signs of imperfection, discomfort, misery, ugliness, illness and death, preventing Siddhartha from ever knowing they existed.

Download Transcript