Continuing with this lecture, we have then the earliest known material being the Veda. Very, very little actually has arrived in the western world of any of this work, either the Vedantic, Bodhistic, any of these works. Very, very little of them have been translated. There's as I said, between a hundred and twenty-five thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand sacred books. That would take somebody a long time to get through, so lord knows exactly what is in these books.

But the Veda itself means simply knowingness or sacred lore. And don't think that that is otherwise than a synonym. Knowingness has always been considered sacred lore. It has never been otherwise than sacred lore. And it's only been in the western world, which is just growing up just now, where you had sacred lore hanging on so long as a superstition. But we will get into that in just a moment.

Now the Veda, should you care to look it over, is best read of course in a literal translation from Sanskrit. And there are four major divisions of the Veda. They're all of them quite worth while, as much as you could pick up of them. And as I say, a great deal of our material in Scientology is discovered right back there. So this makes the earliest part of Scientology sacred lore.

Alright, now the next written work, which is supposed to be the oldest written work, according to various friends of mine, is a book called The Book of Job. It is an Indian book, and it is quite ancient. It probably predates quite a bit that is called early Egyptian. And we discover that this book of Job contained in it simply the laborings, sufferings and necessity for patience of one man faced with a somewhat capricious god. Now other such works like the Book of Job are scattered on along the time track, and are known to us here in the western world as sacred works. They are thought to have come to us from the Middle East, but that would be a very short look. That is something like your preclear who can only see with certainty a spot in the room, but not a spot out in the street. It would just be the distance tolerable.

Actually we're looking at the Middle East as a relay point, and as we think of wisdom we have to think for the western world of the Middle East as a relay point. A relay point by the way, from India and from Africa into Europe. And as you see, it follows a trade route in both directions. And so you have the roadways of the world, you might say, crossing through the Middle East. So we would expect such things as the Book of Job to turn up in the Middle East as holy. You would expect such things as the Book of the Dead of the Egyptians to turn up in the Middle East as part of the New Testament. And so on. There could be a great deal of argument about this. Someone who is passionately devoted to practice, rather than wisdom; there are two different things here that embrace religion; would argue with you. But you're not interested in arguing on that line, because we can make this very, very clear differentiation right here and now. The word religion itself can embrace sacred lore, wisdom, knowingness of gods and souls and spirits, which could be called with a very loose use of the word, a philosophy. So we could say there is religious philosophy and there is religious practice.

Now religious practice could take the identical source, and by interpretation put it into effect, and so create various churches, all dependent upon the identical source, such as Saint Luke. If we think of the number of christian churches there are, and we look at this one book, Saint Luke, and realize that just this one book, Saint Luke was productive of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, and here we go. We have this tremendous number of practices basic upon one wisdom. So let's get a very clear differentiation here when we talk about religious philosophy, and religious practice. And someone who comes to you and says, "So and so and so and so and so is actually the way you're supposed to worship god," you can very cleanly and very clearly and very suddenly bring him to a halt by merely mentioning to him that he is talking about religious practice, and you are talking about religious philosophy.

Now just coming down the track in a little more orderly fashion we get now to the Tao Teh King, which is known to us in the western world as Taoism in China. And we may have heard of this religious practice in China. Well Taoism as currently practiced today may or may not ever have heard of the Tao Teh King. See, it may or may not ever have connected, but we are certainly talking about religious philosophy when we mention the Tao Teh King.

Now it was written by Lao Tse in approximately, oh I'd say probably about 530 or 529 BC. Something around that period. He wrote it just before he disappeared forever. And his birth and death dates are traditionalized as 604 born to 531 died, BC both cases. Now this is the next important milestone in the roadway of knowledge itself. And we have there the Tao.

Now what was the Tao? It meant the way to solving the mystery which underlies all mysteries. This was the way to resolve the mystery of mysteries. It wasn't simply the way. The western world thinks of it as the way, and they don't know quite whether we're talking about the way of life of something like that, but I would suppose this would only be the case if they were unfamiliar with the book itself. It is a book, and it was written by this man, when ordered to do so by the gatekeeper before the gatekeeper would let him leave the city. Lao Tse was a very obscure fellow, very little was known about him. His main passion was obscurity, and he started to leave town one day, and the gatekeeper turned him around and told him he could not leave town until he went home and he wrote this book. This book is a very short book. It's about, I don't know how many characters I've seen. I've seen it in Chinese, it must not be more than maybe five thousand, six thousand characters. A very short book, and he merely wrote down his philosophy on this, and gave it to the gatekeeper and disappeared. And he went out the gate. That was the last we ever hear of Lao Tse.

But the pronunciations I'm giving you by the way are the pronunciations which I heard around me as a boy. They are not necessarily the proper western pronunciation, since we have agreed to mispronounce, and so has everyone agreed to mispronounce on ten thousand years of track.

Well, when we have this book, we begin to see that somebody is trying to go somewhere without going on something. We have the western world defining this as teaching conformity with the cosmic order, and teaching simplicity in social and political organization. Well this in essence was what it laid down. And this would be a very finite goal for it, but this was actually not the Tao. The Tao simply said you can solve the mystery that lies behind all mysteries, and this more or less would be the way you might go about it. But of course what you're trying to solve itself does not possess the mechanics which you believe to be inherent to the other kinds of problems which you solve. It says that a man could seek his Taohood in various ways, but he would have to practice and live in a certain way in order to achieve Taohood.

Now there's no reason to belabor this any further, but it would amaze you that this book is a very civilized piece of work. It would be the kind of civilized work which you would expect maybe to appear from very, very educated, extremely compassionate, pleasant people of a higher intellectual order than we're accustomed to reading. It is a very fine book. I mean, it's not; it's worded simple, it's sort of naive, and it tells you that you should be simple and economical, and should do this and that. And that is, by the way, about the only flaw there is in it from a Scientological point of view. That you must be economical. That one is a little off the groove. But the rest of the way, who knows but what if we took the Tao, just as written, and knowing what we know already about Scientology we simply set out to practice the Tao, I don't know but what we wouldn't get a theta clear. I'm not sure about this, but it actually is merely a set of directions on how you would go down this way, which itself has no path and no distance. In other words it teaches you that you had better get out of space and get away from objects in order to get any consciousness of the beingness as things are. And it tells you that if you can do this then you'd know the whole answer and you'd be all set. And what do we do in Scientology?

Now Tao means knowingness. That is the literal translation of the word, if you want to translate it that way. In other words it's an ancestor to the word Scientology, just as such. Scientology is also a study of how to know. It's the science of knowing how to know. The Tao is the way to knowing how to know, but it isn't said that way, it's inverted. It said it is the way to achieve the mystery which lies back of all mysteries.

Now however crude this might seem to somebody who was specialized in the Tao, that's really all we need to know about it, except this one thing. There is a principle known as Wu-Wei. Now it could be called Wu-wai, but I've heard it mostly Wu-way, which is odd because it goes right in with the Tao, which also means the way. Alright, it's Wu-Wei. Now as you are probably vaguely familiar with a practice known as judo or jiu jitsu, this is a principle which crudely applies to action more or less in that fashion. But let's take a look at this and let's find out that it's non-assertion or non-compulsion, and that is right there in the Tao. Self determinism. You let them use their self determinism. A little later on with judo they found out that if you let a man be self determined enough you could lick him every time. Well, that was outside the scope, actually, of the Tao. But that's an interesting fact to find sitting there as one of the practices which emanated from the Tao. That's the Tao Teh King. You would call it probably normally Tao Teh King. I don't know why they spell it with a T, I've never heard it called anything but Tao.

Well it must have been that there were a lot of very, very clever people on Earth at that time because we find in the lifetime of Lao Tse one called Confucius, of whom you have heard so much. But unfortunately Confucius evidently never wrote a single word. Confucius is reported by those who were around him, his disciples. And he, he took most of his material, or gave credit to some ancient Chinese works, and one of them if I remember rightly; oh they have very poetic names. What are they? One of them I think is the Book of the Winds. And these are very, very ancient. And I have seen some fragmentary translations of them. Well of course Confucius himself was the great apostle of conservatism. And as such has ever since been the very, very model philosopher to have in a government. He is worshipped today by many, many levels in China. You can buy his statue with great ease. And with great ease. In fact you have to beat people off with a club who are trying to sell you statues of Confucius throughout north China.

Now the amount of superstition which has grown up around Confucius is considerable, but we have in both Lao Tse and Confucius two people who never otherwise than pretended to be human beings, who were simply pointing out a way of life. Now Confucius is of no great interest to us. He is not of any great interest to us because Confucius was codifying conduct most of the time. And the great philosopher of that day, if less known, was Lao Tse.

Alright we come into the main period of the Dhyana, or Dhyana. Now the Dhyana has as a background almost as legendary a distance as the Veda. It is something which comes up in India, in its mythological period. It's legendary in its basics. Dharma was the name of a legendary Hindu sage whose many progenies were the personification of virtue and religious rites. Dharma. He's a mythological figure, and we have the word Dharma almost interchangeable with the word Dhyana, as Dharma is Dharma. But whatever you use there, you're using a word which means knowingness. That's what that word means. Dhyana, that's knowingness. It means knowingness, it means lookingness and so forth. In other words we are again on pounding down the line, and there's just no, no liberal interpretation of mind, you see, that has called the Veda, the Tao, the Dharma knowingness. I mean, this is what they go in for. And these are all religious works. This is the religion we're talking about now we're moving in to the religion of about two-thirds of the population of Earth. It is a tremendous body of people that we're talking about when we start to talk about this. This is the biggest religion on Earth today, and we erroneously know about it and call it Buddhism in the western world. And it has very little to do with Buddhism, I mean Buddha, as I will tell you in a moment, that's something else. What we're talking about there is the Dhyana. The Dhyana is what the Buddhists talk about. That's their background. Alright?

We first find this word called; this Buddha actually is Bodhi. And a Bodhi is one who has attained intellectual and ethical perfection by human means. That's a Bodhi. Well that probably would be a Dianetic release or something of this level. Now there is another level that was mentioned to me, Arhat, with which I am not particular familiar, but it's said to be more comparable to our idea of theta clear. But Bodhi, that's a very interesting word. There were many Bodhis, Buddhas, you might say. And the greatest of these was a fellow by the name of Gautama Sakuamuni. And he lived between 563 and 483 BC. Now I won't go so far as to say he'd ever read the Tao Teh King. I won't go so far as to say that, 'cause there's absolutely no evidence to that effect at all, except that they certainly were writing on the same pathway. So much so that when the Taoists turned into Buddhism later on, they never abandoned the Tao. And Taoist principles became Chinese Buddhist principles to a very large measure. And what we have just talked about in terms of knowing the way to knowingness is very, very closely associated here with Buddha. We call him Buddha. It would be Lord Buddha or Gautama Buddha, or the blessed one or the enlightened one, or almost anything. But he is looked upon, and this according to my belief in the line, erroneously actually, as the founder of the Dhyana.

I think that this was in existence for quite a long time before he came along, but he pumped life into it. He gave it codification, he straightened it up, and made it run on the right track. And it's kept running in that direction ever since. He did such a thoroughly good job, he was such an excellent scientific philosopher, and he himself was so persuasive and so penetrative in his work that nobody has ever managed to pry apart Dhyana and Gautama Buddha. This is an identification, which is a very close one. And in areas that have no understanding whatsoever of the principles laid down by Gautama Buddha, we find him sitting there as an idol. Which would have been a very, very amusing thing to Buddha, because he never said that he was otherwise than a human being. He never pretended to be anything other than a human being, like Lao Tse.

Now he didn't ever have any revelations from supernatural sources, there were no guardian angels sitting on his shoulders preaching to him, and so on, as in the case of Muhammet and some other prophets. Nobody was ever giving him the word. But he went around giving people the word, believe me. He walked from fifteen to twenty miles a day, and you could always find him in a new place talking to some new people. And he was a very, very compassionate, as a matter of fact the stories which are told about him with his compassion for life itself and his ability, you might say, to grant beingness, these were very great. Also other stories.

They tried by the way, once upon a time, to discredit him by raping and murdering a woman in a grove, near which he was speaking. And tried to discredit him, but later on the ruffians who did it got drunk in a tavern and were apprehended, and appropriately disposed of. Some other various things occurred which are not very far out of line. He taught a chap, who then set up a school of his own, and who became violently incensed because Buddha continued to be successful, and he himself was not successful. So he had a large stone rolled down from a mountain while Buddha was walking on the road, and the stone accidentally split in half, and the two halves of it passed on either side of Buddha, and didn't hit him. And there was another incident about a roaring elephant who was mad, who was turned loose on Buddha, and he took one look at Buddha and calmed down. In other words, these however, don't, to us at least, border on the supernatural. I mean, a man could conceivably do something of this character if he had any ability to grant beingness whatsoever. Stopping an elephant in his tracks isn't very difficult. He never intended to be anything but a human being, and he was a teacher. Now, a tremendously interesting man.

Now we find however, some of the things that were written by Gautama , find them very significantly interesting to us. Very, very interesting to us, completely aside from Dhyana, could be literally translated as Indian for Scientology, if you wanted to say it backwards. And that is simply this. This was in Dharma Pada. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded upon our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts." Interesting, isn't it? The next line of, the next verse you might say is, "By one's self evil is done. By one's self one suffers, by one's self evil is left undone, by one's self one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to one's self, no one can purify another." Well it's just as you say, you can't grant beingness to the preclear and overawe him, you've got to have him working on self determinism or not at all, if you wanted to give that any kind of an interpretation. In other words, you've got to restore his ability to grant beingness or he does not become well. And we know that by test. And we go here into the next verse, "You yourself must make an effort. The Buddhas are only preachers. The thoughtful who enter the way are freed from the bondage of sin." The thoughtful. Now the next one, "He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, he, though young and strong is full of sloth, whose will and thoughts are weak, that lazy and idle man will never find the way to enlightenment." The common denominator of psychosis and neurosis is the inability to work. And the next verse, "By strenuousness, his strenuousness is the path of immortality, sloth the path of death. Those who are strenuous do not die, those that are slothful are as if dead already." Now this is some of the material from that. By the way, a little bit later on in his work, in a discourse with Wanananda, we discover him announcing the fact that you have to abstain from the six pairs of things, in other words twelve separate things, and we in Scientology would recognize them as the various parts of things such as space, making and breaking communication, and so forth. They're all just named, one right after the other there, but he said you had to abstain from them. And the main difficulty is of course, the interpretation of exactly what he said. What did he say, what was written? Because the truth of the matter is that abstaining from these things would mean that you had to get into a position where you could tolerate them before you could abstain them, and that is the main breaking point of all such teachings. Is, one did not recognize that one simply didn't negate against everything, and then become pure. And the way it's been interpreted is, if you run away from all living, then you can live forever. That's the way it's been interpreted, but understand, that was never the way it was said.

Alright, the religion of Buddhism carried by its teachers brought civilization into the existing barbarisms as of that time, of India, China, Japan and the Near East, or about twothirds of the Earth's population. This was the first civilization they had had. For instance Japan, written language, her ability to make lacquer, silk, almost any technology which she has today was taught to her by Buddhist monks who emigrated over to Japan from China.

The first broadcast of wisdom which resulted in very, very high cultures, the cultures which ensued from Buddhism were very easily recognizable from those superstitions which had existed heretofore. No light thing occurred there. It was just some people who had the idea that there was wisdom. And having that wisdom you went out and told it to people. And you told them that there was a way that you could find a salvation. And that way was by becoming your own mind essence. And if you lived a fairly pure life, lacking in sensuousness and evil practices, in other words overt acts, why probably you could exteriorize and break, which they knew very well in those days, the endless chain of birth and death. You could break that endless chain.

Now all this material, all this material up to this point was given to a world which was evidently clearly cognizant of the manifestation of exteriorization, and was cognizant that one was living consecutive lives. Twenty-five hundred years later you would expect a race to be plowed in far enough below that so they would no longer be conscious of consecutive lives, but only single ones. And the hope of Buddhism was to reach salvation in one life time. That was the hope of Buddhism. That hope, by various practices, was now and then, here and there attained. But no set of precise practices ever came forward which immediately, predictably, produced a result. You understand that many of the practices would occasionally produce a result. But it was a religion which to that degree had to go forward on hope. A hope which has extended forward over a great, great many years.

Now the material which was released at that time is cluttered with a great many irrelevancies. A great deal of it is buried, you have to be very selective, and you have to know Scientology actually to plow it out and get it into the clear, but much less than you would believe. It was wisdom. It was really wisdom. And is today the background of the religious practices, 'cause you don't, you don't think for a moment that a Buddhist in the western hills of China knows the various words of Gautama Sakuamuni. He doesn't. He has certain practices which he practices. The basic wisdom is thin. And with that as a background however, they have certain religious rites, and they follow these religious rites. So even in China, very close to India where this came forward, and it was sent directly into China from India, we have the immediate division from wisdom into the practice. And we have almost all of China in one fashion or another bowing down to some form of Buddhism, and a very little of the intellectual world knowing actually the real background of Buddhism. But we have there a civilization, where before Buddhism we didn't have one, which is quite important to us.

Now there, so far, is your track of wisdom, which merely brings us up to the beginning of two thousand years ago, which we will have to take up subsequently.