Good is it to see the Noble Ones, such a man is called “One Bound U p- stream

After Buddhism: A New Idiom for a Pragmatic, Ethical Culture Based on the Teachings of Gotama
An Interview with Stephen Batchelor
 http://www.bcbsdharma.org/

 Buddhism Without Beliefs (awake person) 

Hunger is the worst disease, conditioned things

the worst suffering. Knowing this as it really is,

the wise realize Nibbana, the highest bliss.

Stephen Batchelor: I’ve been working on trying to reconstruct the Buddha’s life and social-political-economic world for more than 10 years now. This project actually started out as the foundation for a screenplay. Reading Majjhima 89, the Dhammacetiya Sutta: Discourse on the Monuments to the Dhamma, which is the final meeting between Pasenadi and Gotama, I had this odd experience of suddenly seeing how the whole life held together, almost like “your life passing before your eyes.” That sutta provided me with the missing link, and suddenly I figured out how it all worked. Since then I’ve been trying to bolster that understanding by getting more and more data. The screenplay never came to anything. Then I worked on a six-part TV miniseries with the same material; that didn’t go anywhere. In between doing those two things, I wrote it as a novel: the life of the Buddha from the point of view of Ānanda, as he recalls it on the eve of the First Council. That took me a year or more; that didn’t go anywhere either.  Nobody wanted to publish it.



the five groups of factors into which the Buddha analyzes the living being–material form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.