There is a modern tendency to portray the Buddha ... - Dhamma by Ajahn Jayasāro


There is a modern tendency to portray the Buddha as simply a very wise and compassionate human being. Students of Buddhism with a scientific background are often most comfortable with this version of the Buddha. But to adopt such a view of the Buddha means to place more faith in what we perceive to be rational and reasonable than in the recorded words of the Buddha himself. I do not share this confidence. Looking back over more than forty years of practice, I see that I have been misled by my rational mind a great many times, but not even once by the teachings of the Buddha. When the Buddha says that he can remember in detail his post lives covering ‘many aeons of cosmic contraction, many aeons of cosmic expansion, many aeons of cosmic contraction and expansion’ I take the impossibility of imagining such a feat not as proof that the passage may be ignored, but as an indication of the limits of human imagination.

There is a modern tendency to portray the Buddha

Source:

https://www.facebook.com/jayasaro.panyaprateep.org/photos/a.318290164946343/1778297672278911/?type=3&theater