Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Not too far back I read about a monastery. It said, in 1957 an entire monastery in Thailand was being relocated by a group of monks. One day while moving a giant clay Buddha, one of the monks noticed a large crack. On closer investigation, he saw golden reflection emanating from inside. The monk used a hammer and a chisel to chip away the clay exterior until an image made of solid gold was revealed. Art historians believe that centuries earlier, monks covered an image of the Buddha made in solid gold with clay to protect it from attack by the Burmese army.

The news fascinated me because here was a perfect metaphor about life hidden in the discovery. Our Authentic Self (Consciousness, Presence, True Self) is the golden Buddha shining inside us. It is not out there somewhere, not in your spouse or children (they have their own Buddha nature to discover), or in a new location you are living at or somewhere in the future.

Your “golden Buddha” is within you and way closer than you believe. What happens over the course of your life is that your golden Buddha gets covered in layers of clay… layers of your own doing, layers added by external conditioning from parents, teachers, society, bosses, co-workers, and the media. Eventually you are so heavily soiled that you forget that you have the Buddha, your True-Self within.The secret to find your Authentic Self and your higher purpose with it, lies not in the future, but in breaking your own limiting beliefs that prevent you from following your dreams and fulfilling your potential. Something occurs in life (usually a loss or tragedy of some sort) and you start chipping away at the clay to discover or rediscover the gold within. We all have the Buddha nature but we simply fail to recognize it.