Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode

number 81. I am your host Noah Rasheda and today I'm talking about stories. The

stories we have about ourselves and the stories we try desperately to ensure

that others have about us too. As always keep in mind the Dalai Lama's advice

do not use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist, use it to be a better

whatever you already are. Before jumping into this podcast episode I do want to

address a couple of housekeeping items. The first one is regarding use of the

term secular Buddhism. What is it? What separates it from other forms of

Buddhism? And it's kind of stemmed from a conversation that I saw taking place

on the Facebook group and the secular Buddhism Facebook group. Asking about

secular Buddhism is secular Buddhism a form of self-help and kind of the

accusation that secular Buddhism as a as a bigger movement is not equivalent to

what I'm doing in this podcast and in some ways what I'm doing with the podcast

has nothing to do with Buddhism. So I want to address this a little bit. I read

specifically this comment that I don't teach Buddhism. So I want to share a

couple of my concerns with Buddhism in general. I feel as I've mentioned before

that whatever the original teachings were of the Buddha they have evolved

into the teachings about the teachings. That is to say that over time what we

tend to focus on more than anything is what is Buddhism? How should it be

interpreted? What was taught? What did the Buddha say? To me all of these things

are by large just the teachings about the teachings. And the problematic part for

me is that it was hundreds of years from the time that these teachings however

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