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the older monks, "What to do now? If I don't put the bamboo there, the incense... nobody knows where it goes. It goes to all kinds of buddhas; but I am offering it to my buddha. And now because of this bamboo, the nose and a part of the face have become black. What should I do?"
The monk she was asking laughed and said, "You are an idiot woman! You don't understand the simple fact that all the buddhas are the same, they are statues of the same person. You have become attached to your buddha, and the whole teaching of Buddha is non-attachment.
"It is perfectly right; Buddha has shown you that attachment makes you dirty. So beware of it! Just go to a goldsmith so he can clean and polish your buddha. But from now onwards, just think of THE Buddha. Any buddha, whichever buddha gets the incense... perhaps he deserves it! And you should be happy that it has reached to somebody, because all those statues represent the same person."
Buddhists, the followers of Buddha, did not hear his last words, "Don't make statues of me. Let me represent the formless; only the fragrance, not the flower."
And there has been another extreme. Mohammed was against statues, because if you worship a statue... it is a stone, and worshipping a stone is a barrier to the worship of God. So all barriers have to be removed.
It was perfectly okay if somebody was willing to remove it, but Mohammedans started removing other people's barriers. They forgot all about God. Their whole history became a destruction of statues.
Neither by worshipping a statue can you reach to the buddha, nor by destroying statues can you reach to the buddha. You have to go withinwards; outside there is nothing that can give you the eternal, the ultimate, the truth that can quench your thirst.
"TO SIT YOURSELF INTO BUDDHA IS TO KILL THE BUDDHA. TO BE ATTACHED TO THE SITTING POSTURE IS TO FAIL TO COMPREHEND THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLE."
The essential principle is never objective; it is your subjectivity. The essential principle has no form; it is absolute emptiness. The essential principle is a mirror; it only reflects, it does not make any judgment of good or bad, of beauty
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