From 'Reflections on the Path' by R.M. Meiten Mcguire
The Buddha taught :
Do not believe anything because I say it to you. Make it true for yourselves.
We learn this through practising, not simply by thinking about the teaching. The cliche 'practice makes perfect" aptly applies here. That we can touch the perfect is the gift we give ourselves when we train wholeheartedly .Again, this is something no one else can do for us. As the Buddha said : You , yourself must make the effort; Buddhas can only point the way.

Thus Right Effort, the sixth factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, is all-important to the Buddha's Middle Way-his prescription to help us bring the purity of awareness into every corner of our lives. Awareness is another term for meditation, mindfulness, concentrated focus, right attention, heedfulness, carefulness. As Dogen writes in Rules for Meditation, "The means of training are thousandfold but pure meditation must be done." He is saying that we must make the right effort to break through the shackles of the conditioned mind by seeing them for what they are, something we can do only by means of the mindfulness the Buddha spent forty-five years teaching. The shackles are three, according to Buddhism: greed, hate, and delusion. We really can't free ourselves from suffering until we see how it arises from conditions that trigger these deep - seated habitual reactions. So the Buddha said that his teaching, the Buddhadharma, was simply to see the way things are. We don't want to do this as long as we are blinded by our attachments to beliefs hidden from our view; attachments that form the very premise on which this life is built. Our wonderful practice allows us to chip away at that which obscures our being in touch with the truth of who we are, the great truth of oneness in which everything is embraced.

This truth can only be experienced, not taught, because words and ideas are for the convenience of living this life. This is not to say that words are not useful. They are. But our mistake is to let the rationality of words and ideas take over every aspect of life. We burden ourselves trying to understand that which goes beyond what the heart just knows-the Unborn that is beyond language and ideas


"Reflections on the Path"