Learning From the Buddha’s Choices Before Awakening

Date: 2024-12-05 Thursday

As we enter the sacredness of the Christmas season, it’s also a time to explore the inner qualities of the Buddha.

Our Eastside Insight tradition is to explore some aspect of the Buddha’s life, or that of his chief disciples, before Christmas. This year we’re going to break this into two sections, the first about the Buddha’s life before awakening, and the second about the time after.

Thus for this 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec.  5 session we will explore the Buddha's life before awakening, and what we can learn from the situations he faced, and the choices he made, which support and inform our own spiritual journeys.

Remember the Buddha before he awakened perhaps wasn’t that much different from anyone in our sangha. He was  living a life of sensory pleasures and comfortable conditions, although he also was increasingly nagged by questions about the meaning of life, and the transience of everything he was doing.

Let’s see what we can learn from his journey forward 2,600 years ago, and what we can apply to our journey forward into 2025.

Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.