I'll deal with the second part of the question first, as it ties into something I was mentioning the other day about near enemy and far enemy.
We cannot always harmonize with other types of spiritual practice. Theravadin Buddhism cannot always harmonize with Mahayana. In the same way, a person who wants to play folk music with a guitar that's not electric, the old six string thing that you hardly see anymore. A person who wants to do folk music with a guitar cannot always harmonize with somebody who has a modern synthesizer or a super computer outfit who wants to do all sorts of weird stuff. Techno music, is that's what it's called? Okay, they can't harmonize. One can be a great musician in one field, and one can be a great musician in another field, but they are not going to harmonize easily.
In the same way, we can't always harmonize with other spiritual practices, in particular, Theravadin Buddhism and Mahayana. There are some major differences. I can't go into depth with all of them. One of them has to do with the Buddha himself. Theravadin Buddhism says, he was a real human being who existed, lived and died. Mahayana tradition do not believe that he was a real human being. He was in the heaven realms and just manifested a body down here to pretend that there was a human being who did it. That is a major difference in itself. We have an example of a human being who gives us inspiration, we as human beings can do it. If the Buddha was another god, well that kind of takes it away from us a bit. A god can do it yes, but we can't.
What's the biggest problem with Christianity? There's this huge separation between their founder, Jesus, and themselves. He was the son of God, they are not, therefore they can never purify fully. Theravadin Buddhism in particular, says no because the Buddha was a man and he did it. We as men and women can also do it. That's a major difference.
There's also a lot of differences in the theoretical side, a lot of other issues involved about other gods and heaven realms, about other Bodhisattvas, beings who are going to one day become a Buddha as our Buddha used to be, before he had achieved it. There's differences in what a person can actually achieve in this lifetime. There's differences in the world ending and all sorts of other things. There's a lot of differences in basic practice.
Theravadin Buddhism is grounded, very much down to earth. What can you do right now to end your anger? How can you develop your compassion right now?
Once I researched the Mahayana tradition and I was especially concerned with what sort of techniques they had for developing compassion. This was before we were teaching. I really wanted to know. They talk about compassion a lot. They are supposed to be famous for their compassion. I wanted to know what the techniques were. What were the actual tools? I read twenty two books in three weeks, I listened to some tapes as well. There was only one technique I found in all that and that was a belief technique. This was to believe that everybody has been your mother, brother, father, or sister, daughter, or another relative in a past life. Therefore you should automatically have compassion and love for them because you used to be related to them.
It was the only technique I found. I read some of the best teachers, the top ones. They base their compassion on the fact that we should always remember everyone been our past mother, father, brother and so on. Now you think about this belief type teaching being given to a Westerner who hates their mother. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't work at all. It's a belief that doesn't work. Now if you believe it fine and if you have loved your parents and your siblings fine.
But what we give you here are solid tools. We are teaching you how to see Dukkha. We're teaching you how to see the Dukkha of other people. We are teaching you how other people are getting trapped in their Dukkha and because they have that sickness, we will open our compassion and Lovingkindness for them. We also teach you how to see your own pain. When you have anger, we don't tell you to just throw away your anger because that person used to be your mother. We teach you that when you've got anger you've got a problem, and out of compassion for yourself you want to let go of anger.
This is a major difference between the two schools as far as I learned. We've got solid techniques here and many of the techniques that they teach are based on a theory or a belief that you simply have to believe or else you can't do it.