Once, the young Prince Gautama Siddhartha was out with his cousin when his cousin shot down a bird with bow and arrow. Siddhartha reached the fallen bird first and out of pity wanted to nurse the bird to health.
His cousin wanted it as he was the one who shot it. Prince Siddhartha was adamant not to surrender the bird. He refused and in the end, they brought their argument to the elders.
By conventional thinking, the bird belonged to the one who shot it but the young prince retorted that it should belong to the one who wanted to save it and not to the one who try to kill it.
Siddhartha won the hearts of the elders and he had the bird. He nursed it to health and freed it to fly again.
This story illustrates how the thinking of the Buddha to be was very different from the others. In fact he later said after his enlightenment that the dharma or doctrine is against the flow of thinking of society. One has to go upstream against the current.
When he left his palace one day, he decided to lead the life of the holy ascetic after seeing that life was unsatisfactory with pains of birth, disease, old age and death.
He followed the norms of holy men then by not eating and denying life thinking that this would lead to enlightenment. But he was famished and reduced to skin and bones.
He had then five disciples after excelling from what he learnt from two teachers or gurus. As he was worst off, he decided that the prevailing ways then simply won't work.
He decided to eat enough to care for the body and regain his health. He avoided luxury of princely life at one extreme and denial or mortification of life at the other. The latter that is self mortification or denial of life was the normal flow for spiritual life then, but it did not work.
Ascetic Siddhartha went against the flow or current and went his own way which was to balance between the two extremes of indulgence and mortification. He succeeded and became the Buddha.
This principle of striking the balance between extremes became known as the Middle Way. Like the bird incident, it is very much against the norms or flow of society expectations.
To be at peace with life be it spiritual or otherwise, one has to forgo the two extremes and neither indulge nor deny life. Both ways are the ways of society even today. Both bring no peace in life.
To be at peace with life, spiritual or mundane, one might have to be different and not go upstream when every one is going downstream. One has to be different from the crowd.
To be at peace, one has to go against the current or flow of society. One has to be different and not be in the rat race...
Likewise for a temple to succeed, it cannot be doing nothing or doing only what other temples have been doing for ages but not making the difference to the core spiritual good of men - in fact pandering to the opposite which is the worldly needs of men.
One cannot be having concrete building and no activity. One cannot also be having hive of non spiritual activities (welfare and social work) which can of course be better done by community and grass root organisations.
For a temple to succeed as a temple, it cannot be going along with the normal downstream flow of grass-root organisations but has to do what they don't do - spiritual activities not found in community organisations. This should be the main focus even for a temple in the name of the good lord Lord Bo Tien
