The Dharma meets androcentricity and culture wars. How can we relate to views on gender without polarising? How do we bring the Dharma to bear on ours' and others' deeply-held views? And how do we hold some of Sangharakshita's conditioned views? Honest, nuanced, sensitive.

Back in the Buddha’s time, it’s thought that there were lots of people who were looking for meaning, going from teacher to teacher. Sometimes they were householders, sometimes royalty, but they were all shopping around - shopping for wisdom. The Buddha met many people like this. He also met people who’d achieved quite a bit by following other teachers, or those who had themselves become teachers. There were those who worshiped fire and those who practised austerities. There were nihilists and eternalists. And then there was Bahiya – Bahiya of the Bark Garment, as he was known. On Tuesday, Jayagupta will read his own story, 'Looking for Bahia' in which he reflects on his own quest for meaning, using that as a context for retelling and reflecting on the life and death of Bahiya and the simple teaching that he received from the Buddha. What was The Buddha really like? We are told that the Buddha broke through into a radically different state of being, transcending ordinary human consciousness. What might it have been like to encounter that? There was something magnetic, awesome, mysterious, and powerful about The Buddha. Some people even ‘WOKE UP!’ just by being in his presence. During this series we will go on a journey, where we will glimpse The Buddha by imagining our way into some of the brilliant stories handed down to us - stories of an Enlightened Being interacting with the people he met. We’ll be asking ourselves, what we can learn about The Buddha from these stories…and we’ll attempt to bring some of those qualities into the situations and people that we encounter in our daily life.