When a faith dies, it becomes a church.
In other words, how long can an idea survive as a belief? The time of an epiphany, the time of speeches, the time of a wandering, the time of the life of a founder, the time before the first sectarian strife, the time before the first temple was built. After this, a material structure was added to the pure belief, belief materialized into religion, and the direct infusion and fusion of ideas into ideas transformed into the memory of the predecessors and the study through various media. What has been handed down from generation to generation is a religion and one or more theories, but it is not the cosmic perception obtained by the founder who experienced the spiritual experience (transcendence) of the unity of nature and man. All those agile and wonderful intuitive experiences that can only be understood by facing the leader himself are often the essence of a belief, but they cannot be conveyed to later generations of believers beyond the vast books. The believers are exhausted, and even though they interpret every profound meaning in the doctrine and are convinced by it, it is nothing but a rational acceptance, which cannot achieve the effect of "he is standing there, I see him". How many koans were written by later monks and how many monasteries were established, they could not figure out the aura when Sakyamuni smiled. In this sense, when the founder dies, faith also dies, but religion is established. Temples and churches are the tombs of faith, and the body of the leader is enshrined on the altar.
The church is quiet and silent, and the history of the church's growth is recorded on the branches and leaves. The leader on the altar is dead, the saints and prophets who support the four walls, the past popes, and maybe they can open their eyes to look at those who step into the church, but no one reads anything from the eyes waiting to die again.
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