Dirt covered golden Buddha

Back in 1957 a group of monks from a monastery had to relocate a clay Buddha from their temple to a new
location. The monastery was to be relocated to make room for the development of a highway through Bangkok.
When the crane began to lift the giant idol, the weight of it was so tremendous that it began to crack. What’s
more, rain began to fall. The head monk, who was concerned about damage to the sacred Buddha, decided to
lower the statue back to the ground and cover it with a large canvas tarp to protect it from the rain.
Later that evening the head monk went to check on the Buddha. He shined his flashlight under the tarp to see
if the Buddha was staying dry. As the light reached the crack, he noticed a little gleam shining back and thought
it strange. As he took a closer at this gleam of light, he wondered if there might be something underneath the
clay. He went to fetch a chisel and hammer from the monastery and began to chip away at the clay. As he
knocked off shard of clay, the little gleam grew brighter and bigger. Many hours of labor went by before the
monk stood face-to-face with the extraordinary sold-gold Buddha.
Historians believe that several hundred years before the head monk’s discovery, the Burmese army was about
to invade Thailand (then called Siam). The Siamese monks, realizing that their country would soon be attacked,
covered their precious golden Buddha with an outer covering of clay in order to keep their treasure from being
looted by the Burmese. Unfortunately, it appears that the Burmese slaughtered all the Siamese monks, and the
well-kept secret of the golden Buddha remained intact until that fateful night in 1957.
As we flew home on Cathay Pacific Airlines I began to think to myself, “We are all like the clay Buddha covered
with a shell of harness created out of fear, and yet underneath each of us in a ‘golden Buddha’, a ‘golden Christ’
or a ‘golden essence’, which is our real self. Somewhere along the way, between the ages of two and nine, we
begin to cover up our ‘golden essence’, our natural self. Much like the monk with the hammer and the chisel,
our task now is to discover our true essence once again.”
Jack Canfield