It had been a long day at the monastery. The monks had been asked to conduct the celebrations of the birth of the village headman's great-grandchild. They had risen before down and had been kept busy all say travelling and performing the appropriate rites and rituals. To make matters worse, they were now obliged to keep an all night vigil in the temple.

Halfway through the night the young monk, Sariputra, looked up from his reading of the Sacred Buddhist Texts and saw that all his brother monks, save the abbot, had fallen asleep. This annoyed the learned Sariputra who was a dedicated and devout scholar of the texts.

"Venerable, sir" he whispered to the abbot, "some of my brothers never bother to read the Sutras, and none of these sleepers opens his eyes or raises his head. You would think that they were all dead." To which the abbot replied, "My beloved Sariputra, the Lord Buddha never read the Sutras either, yet he became enlightened. As for these sleepy-heads, I would rather you too were sleeping like them than slandering."

The Jesuit priest, Anthony de Mello, tells this story of the Zen Master and the Christian in his book 'The Song of the Bird'... A Christian visited a Zen Master and said, "Allow me to read you the Sermon on the Mount." "I shall listen with pleasure," said the master.

The Christian read a sentence and looked up. The Master smiled and said, "Whoever said those words was truly an Enlightened Man."

This pleased the Christian. He read on. The Master interrupted and said, "These words come from a Saviour of mankind."

The Christian was delighted, He read on to the end, The master declared, "That sermon was pronounced by someone radiant with Divinity."

The Christian's joy was boundless. He left, determined to return another day and persuade the Master to become a Christian. On his way back home he found Jesus standing by the roadside. "Lord," he said excitedly, "I got that man to confess you are divine!"

Jesus smiled and said, " And did it do you any good except inflate your Christian ego?"

The philosopher, writer, diplomat, Andre Maurols, once asked an elderly village priest if he believed in hell. "My son," he replied after quiet consideration, "as a Priest I must believe in hell. But as a man I know there is nobody in it."

Learning about God from 'Holy' Books is like being an armchair traveller. no matter how much borrowed information you acquire, it is sill second-hand knowledge. No one world of any religious book is valid unless it leads you to unitive knowledge of God, and that can be only through direct, personal experience. All else is just words, words, words. Most people say they love God, but they sure as hell seem to hate each other.