Why I Only Follow The Buddha’s Advice

Why I follow the Buddha’s advice and don’t believe it:
he said, “Test the truth for yourself”.
How else will we know?

This is in contrast to being told by Buddhist teachers, “Don’t make the Dharma up to suit yourself”. Of course, we shouldn’t cherry pick teachings to suit our behaviour by watering the teaching down; the Buddha obviously took that into account.

Book learning and hearsay are never the truth. The teaching is in the tasting, in the thorough investigation. When people say, “Read the ‘Book’; it is holy words”, then we are in for trouble, and will go the way of the extravagant dinosaurs, consuming everything and knowing nothing.

When we know, we become spiritual engineers
and everything in life – every moment – becomes our teacher.

The Buddha must have followed the Vedanta (they don’t talk about that 🙂 ) but on realising its essence, he saw everything in a fresh light. We have to do the same, to keep the Dharma fresh, alive and practical.

When life becomes our teacher, everything has possibilities;
we’re not just choosing one religion to believe in.
We have to be aware of what and who we follow, and why.

If we merely focus on key phrases to match our partial understanding, we will go the way of the terrible lizards.
Dinosaur: from Greek deinos ‘terrible’ + sauros ‘lizard’.

We should be Homo Sapiens – ‘wise men’ – rather than a tribe of monkey-minds.