Yes, I believe so. It's helpful to understand the Buddhist theory about the arising of a Buddha, the teaching time length, and universal time frame, eons, etc. By definition, a Buddha can only arise when there's no higher teaching, when there is no Dhamma teaching at all. There is teaching about concentration, and there is teaching about basic morality, but the wisdom practice, the Vipassana practice is not being taught by anyone. So the person who discovers this, we give the title of the Buddha. The Buddha then teaches a lot of people, and many people get enlightened and so on, but eventually the whole teaching, what we call Buddhism today, eventually has to disappear, because it's impermanent. It's impermanent just like our bodies are impermanent. It has to disappear. It will eventually disappear, then X amount of time goes by, and another Buddha will arrive, start teaching again. That will stay for awhile, disappear, and so on, and we have this cycle going on. Just like birth and death, we have this cycle of a Buddha's arising, people getting enlightened, teaching staying for awhile, and then disappearing. They have an estimated time frame of 5000 years of this particular teaching which we are living in at present. So we're possibly halfway through it, if you want to believe that as an estimate.
The question of why aren't people getting enlightened today has lots of different reasons, but one thing is that today people's minds are too cluttered. We've had so much stuff put into our mind that it's not very simple. You sit down and try to be aware of your breathing and what do you get? People two and a half thousand years ago, were they watching TV shows and movies every single night as a kid? The travelling theatre group might have come to their village once every two years or so and put on plays for two days, then off to another village. And grandma or granddad might have told stories once a week or whatever, but it's not like the vivid images that all of you have of violent movie scenes, videos, TV.
Music, for most of us as teenagers we often lived with a radio "attached to our ear" or something. People in the Buddha's days didn't do that. Their minds were more simple. They weren't so cluttered with world news either. You have got world news at your doorstep, you can know everything about everybody, just go onto the web nowadays, it's even worse than just forty years ago, when I was a kid.
The mind is bombarded with everything, so it's very difficult to concentrate, it's very difficult to be mindful. It's just simple in that way. We have found frequently that, within our practice, within all the 4000+ students and people we've talked to, that people who are more intellectual have more difficulty, because the mind's not as simple. People who like to write, people who like to read, they have more difficulty, the mind's not so simple. Musicians have more trouble. There's a different kind of a world that a lot of these people live in. Artistic people sometimes have more trouble, sometimes don't, depends on the art form. Depends on the basic art form.
It's basically a matter of how much a person has done with themselves to make their minds busy, busy, busy, and how much they're attached to that busyness. Yet whether or not your background has some of these qualities, it doesn't mean you have to stay attached to them. It is possible to let go of lots of these attachments, because we see that we just don't want this anymore, it's too much, it's too distracting, and so on. So when you think about your world and the world back in the Buddha's day, the people were much more simple, they had fewer distractions, they didn't live with a computer in their bedroom and other such things. It was just a lot easier in that way.
Now on top of that as far as theory goes, they say that when a Buddha is born and becomes enlightened, and during his lifetime, the people who have higher Kamma, have better Parami development, they get to be born then too, that's their good Kamma coming to fruit. That is what they get as a reward for all the good Kamma they have done in past lives, they get the chance to meet personally with a Buddha. The Buddha has the greatest teaching ability. According to the scriptures, nobody can teach as great as the Buddha, the Buddha could look at each one of you, and know exactly what to give you as a teaching. Rosemary and I can't do that, sorry! But the Buddha could do that, so these people who were born at the time of the Buddha, it's because their Paramis were so high that they deserved it. So if you'd like to be born with the next Buddha, get your Paramis really high!