Buddhist-Meditation-Systematic-and-Practical

obstacles. Such persons cannot help meeting demons,
and then must stop meditating. Their mistake is in
thinking that the Buddha denied the existence of all
gods. He did reject the theory of a creator-god or an
omnipotent, absolute godhead—these are false and
ignorant ideas. Certainly the Buddha knew that millions
of beings superior to us in lifespan and happiness (the
devas) exist in birth-and-death (samsara) and to them he
frequently preached. Many deities then became
protectors of the Dharma; for instance, it is recorded
that the great gods of Hinduism (Brahma, Vishnu, and
Siva), all worshipped at the feet of the Supremely
Enlightened One. Powerful forces such as these are
available to protect the meditator and it is a great
mistake to totally reject belief in them, and in the help
they can give us.
8. Some say, "Buddhists teach the extreme doctrine of
no-soul," and so they reject the existence of a
conditioned "soul" (the mind and its everyday functions)
along with the absolute "soul" (atman) taught in other
religions. But the Buddha, while denying the existence
of the latter, did not preach that the former was untrue.
It is a wrong view, he taught, to speculate about uniting
the absolute "soul" with an absolute god, but a
conditioned "soul" (understood as the continuity of
oneself as a person) was not rejected by him who
always taught the Middle Way and avoided extremes.
If we cannot meet this conditioned "soul," the eighth
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