The Buddha is our skillful guide, our teacher of the way. The Buddha gives us just one path, One Vehicle, to arrive at universal wisdom. But when we have gone only halfway we are already worn out. So the Buddha created a magical city – nirvana – the goal of the Hinayana path. Tasting the fruit of individual nirvana, we like it so much that we decide that it is quite enough for us and we do not want anything more.

Underlying this attitude is a kind of inferiority complex. We do not believe that we ourselves can become a Buddha because only such a great being as the Buddha could attain perfect wisdom. Mere humans are not capable of this. In terms of the historical dimension, the Buddha was a human being, like us. But after the Buddha’s parinirvana, people very much missed his presence, his personality. Even though he repeatedly warned his disciples, “Don’t take refuge in anyone, in any person – take refuge only in the Dharma and in yourselves,” the Buddha had been a refuge for the Sangha. So they began to envelop him in many layers of mysticism and made him into a deity to worship. They began to believe that the Buddha was unique, and he lost his status as a human being. The human dimension of the Buddha is more accessible to us than the deified Buddha that was created after his parinirvana.