Buddhist Audio Books

From chapter 5: Symbols of Life and Growth

The quality of impartiality is particularly drawn out in the parable of the rain-cloud. The word which the Buddha uses to describe the rain is ekarasa (eka meaning 'one', and rasa meaning 'taste', 'juice', or 'essence'). This same word is used in a similar connection in another parable, one which occurs in the Pali scriptures: the parable of the great ocean. The Buddha says that wherever you go in the great ocean, you can scoop a handful of water and it will have the same taste: the taste of salt. Likewise, whatsoever part of his teaching you take up, it will have one taste: the taste of freedom. In other words, whatever aspect of the Buddha's teaching you practise, it has one essence, one purpose, one effect - to help you to get free from your conditioning. There are many different presentations of the Buddha's teaching. There are the lists: the Eightfold Path, the Five Spiritual Faculties, the Three Refuges. There are the teachings about suffering, impermanence, and no-self. And there are all sorts of methods of practice: the mindfulness of breathing, the metta bhavana, the contemplation of the impurities, the brahma viharas. But all these many teachings, traditions, and practices have just one aim: to help individual human beings to become free from their conditioning.

From this the important corollary follows that the Buddha's teaching is not to be identified with any one formulation. It is not possible to say that the Buddha's teaching is the Noble Eightfold Path and just that, or the contents of the Pali Canon and just that. The Buddha's teaching is not just Zen, or just Theravada, or just what Professor so-and-so says it is. Buddhism cannot be identified with any one individual formulation, much less with any one individual school or sect. The Buddha's teaching or message can only be identified with that spirit of liberation, of freedom from conditionedness, that pervades all these formulations, just as the taste of salt pervades all the waters of the ocean. Whether it is the teaching of the Eightfold Path or the teaching of the Bodhisattva Ideal, whether it is this meditation practice or that, if it helps us to become free from our conditioning, it is part and parcel of the Buddha's teaching.