Product Description

Gautama the Buddha has given to the world the most psychological religion. It is
incomparable; no other religion even comes close to it. Its heights, its depths, are
tremendous. And the reason why Buddha succeeded in giving such a beautiful vision of
life is very simple: he did not believe; he inquired, he explored. He did not believe in
the tradition, he did not believe in the scriptures, he did not believe in the priests.
This was one of his fundamentals: that unless you know, you don’t know. You can
borrow knowledge, you can become knowledgeable, well informed, a scholar, a pundit,
a professor, but you will not be a seer. Deep down the ignorance will persist and will
affect your life. Deep down you will remain the same childish self, immature,
ungrounded, uncentered, unintegrated. You will not be an individual, you won’t have
any authenticity. You will be pseudo, false, phony.
It is a quantum leap into the unknown. When you don’t believe in the tradition, when
you don’t believe in the scriptures, when you don’t believe in anything except your own
experience, you are going into the unknown all alone. It needs guts, it needs courage.
And only a courageous person can be truly religious.
Cowards are there in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques in millions, but they
don’t create any religious beauty, any religious fragrance in the world. They don’t make
the world more beautiful, more alive, more sensitive. They don’t create anything. They
only go on doing formalities, rituals. They themselves are dead and they go on
deceiving others; they themselves are deceived.
Borrowed knowledge creates great deception because you start feeling as if you know —
and that “as if” is a big “as if.”
Truth liberates, belief binds. Truth liberates because it has to be yours; it has to be an
inner experience, an encounter with that which is.
Buddha is a nonbeliever.