The Gold Buddha
I was lucky enough to travel to Thailand for my 40th birthday, and I got to see the giant Golden Buddhas. They are astonishing and beautiful and left me fairly speechless.
I heard this story that left me equally astonished. Long ago, word came to a particular village that an army was about to invade and they were stealing and pillaging things all long the way. The people of the village wanted to protect their giant Golden Buddha, so they covered him with mud and clay so it looked like a stone Buddha. The army would see it, and keep moving, thinking there was not any value in it.
The army did come, and they overlooked the stone Buddha like the monks had hoped. For many years, the army occupied the village, and eventually, people kind of forgot that that the Buddha had ever been golden.
Eventually, part of the clay chipped off, and someone noticed the gold glimmering under the clay of the Buddha. So they started pealing the mud away, and they uncovered this astounding gold buddha that had been covered for such a long time.
Here’s what I take from this story. We are all gold. We are born gold. We are gold because we are here. We showed up for this life, all glimmering and valuable. But in the process of life, we get covered in mud. It’s just inevitable. Other people throw mud at us, then we cover ourselves in mud. It happens. We get disappointed and lost and sad and tired and we lose sight of our own brightness. We allow ourselves to be dimmed. Maybe it started with someone else who decided we were worthless, and we decided they were right. We decided that we were the mud, we belonged in the mud. We got weighted down with the challenges of life and we forgot to look for anything more. We forgot that we are golden.
But the gold never goes away. It stays there, under the mud, just waiting. Waiting for us to pick up the chisel and get to work, removing everything that is no longer serving us. The gold is waiting for us to remember who we really are, under all the mud.
It’s easy to stay mud and decide that being anything more shiny is selfish. But it’s not selfish to reveal who you were meant to be — it’s actually our responsibility. It takes courage to chip away at what has been there for such a long time. But shining is your birthright, and when you shine, that’s when you can be a light to others. That’s when you can encourage and inspire and support and help to light their path.
So it’s our job to figure out how to chip away the mud. What makes you feel like you can let the gold shine through? Is it creativity? Is it helping others? Is it learning? Is it exercise? Is it connecting with your community? What returns your heart to its most true self? What washes away the parts that were never meant to be there?
Some days we all feel so covered in mud that it could drown us. But the world needs the gold more than ever.
So let’s find it.