Page 70 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

Usually we are very shaky and shoddy even on this level. Very

few people really practice accuracy of narration. We usually like
to make things a little bit different. We like to pad out, we like to

exaggerate, or to minimize, or to embroider. It may be just a
poetic streak in us which makes us do this, but we do it even in
the best of circles, even at the best of times.

I remember, in this connection, once attending a little Wesak

celebration, i.e. a celebration of the anniversary of the Buddha's
Enlightenment, at a certain Buddhist centre in India. There must
have been seventy or eighty people there, but the write-up

which I saw later on in a Buddhist magazine spoke of a
'mammoth meeting', with thousands of people present. You

might think you are propagating the Dharma, and stirring up
faith and enthusiasm, in this way, but really you are detracting
from what you are supposed to be doing. You are not being

truthful in the sense of being factually accurate.

We all tend to twist, or' distort, or at least slightly bend facts in
the direction in which we would like them to go, so we have to
be extremely careful here. If we say, for instance, that it was a

lovely day, it must have been a lovely day. We must neither
exaggerate nor minimize. If we say that there were ten people at

the meeting, let us be sure that there were ten. If there were a
thousand let us say that there were a thousand, but if there
were only fifty let us not make it one hundred and fifty. Or in the

case of somebody else's meeting, if there were a thousand let us
not make it one hundred and fifty! Thus we must pay strict

attention to factual accuracy, though it must again be
emphasized that truthfulness in the real sense, in the deepest,
the fullest, the most spiritual sense, is something very much

more than mere factual accuracy, important as that is.

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