The Golden Buddha

Alan Cohen

Photo by abhijeet gourav on Unsplash

Many years ago in Thailand was a temple with a huge Golden Buddha. Word came to this village that an army was about to invade, so they covered the Golden Buddha with mud and concrete so it looked like a stone Buddha and the invading army would perceive no value in it.
 
Sure enough, the army rolled in and passed by the stone Buddha and had no reason to plunder it. For many years, the army occupied the village with this temple and Buddha. And there was a time where nobody remembered that the Buddha was golden.
 
And then one day, a young monk was meditating at the base of the Buddha, and a little piece of gold chipped off. The monk excitedly told the other monks and they started hammering at the statue and realized it was a Golden Buddha.
 
The metaphor is that each of us is golden by nature.

We are born knowing everything. But then we go to school and learn a certain way to live, and put a 'casing of mud stone over the Buddha.' And we start to believe we are the stone Buddha, not the golden one.

Then something comes along that cracks our casing and knocks off a piece of our armor and in that moment, we look inside and see the gold. At that moment, all we want to do the rest of our life is pick away the stone because the gold is so much more fun!"