"Did you ever find yourself inside a church, and there's a person behind the pulpit telling you on a Sunday morning you have to change?" the Buddhist priest asks. "And this person behind the pulpit doesn't even know you! How can someone who doesn't know you tell you to change?"

Brian, the Buddhist priest, continues: "My advice is that you don't change. That you look inside yourself and find your true nature. Be that person, and you won't find any need to change."

This was just one of many thoughts Brian shared last week when we were filming some video for his blog, Buddhism Today-Brian Vaugh. He says these things, I take them in and think about them, I find myself challenged, and I discover new ways to look at some old things.

Brian wasn't preaching the Gospel of Moral Relativism but saying that the source of morality is the enlightened self. To be enlightened is to see the suffering in the world for what it is and to respond to it with compassion, to wish to see the end of all suffering. Brian was therefore preaching the same Gospel as Jesus Christ but in a compassionate way.

The Gospels are full of words attributed to Jesus telling us to be nice to even the lepers of the world, to embrace children, to feed the hungry, to share what we have, to love one another. This is not wisdom that is put on like Sunday clothes but discovered through living.

Taking Brian's words to heart means changing, of course. It means foregoing the authority of strangers--the church--to tell me what's good and bad, right and wrong, and to be that authority. Let the truth be, and it will speak for itself.


Brian's lessons are my blessing.