I spent the first half of my Buddhist years getting my dhamma from those who wanted to share it -- mostly via books (this being prior to the days of the internet). What I discovered was that there were lots of varying opinions about what the Buddha taught. How would I know which was accurate? I tried the method of applying the techniques explained in the books, and got some distance down the road, but not far; I really could not understand what all the teachers were trying to show me.clw_uk wrote:Why do Buddhists, at least on internet discussion forums, always revert back to the first Arahant in india (siddhartha gautama) instead of referring to modern day arahants?
IMO we can take the core teachings from siddhartha and gain better elaborations from modern ajahans (such as Ajahn Chah, Ajahn Sumedho and Ajhan Buddhadasa) since they communicate via our modern languages and use our modern terms and concepts
The answer, for me, in straightening it out, has been to go back and learn from the master himself. It's a daunting task -- lots of texts, very different style of speaking. So I take your point, clw, that learning what it's about from someone who speaks the same tongue we do could be a very good thing. But my personal experience has been that, until I understood how the Buddha was framing his arguments -- what he was arguing against, and why he used the language he did the way he did -- I was not going to be able to sort out which modern teachers were making sense and which were not.