One time I went to a place in the country, I could see from a distance a thick forest on the side of the mountain and I was able to make out the roof of a large temple hidden among the trees. I asked a local villager about it, and he told me that this temple used to be much larger, but it burned down and the present building was put up on a much smaller scale. Guided by the villager, I climbed up a long stone stairway. When I finally reached the top and had a look around, the temple, far from being small, was a magnificent structure that didn't seem to have been built at all recently. I began to wonder but what my guide had said, and I asked him just when the temple had burned down. He told me it happened during the Kamakura period in the thirteenth century! I burst out laughing, because his aggrieved tone of voice had implied that the temple had burned down recently, certainly during his lifetime. These villagers handed down to each successive generation a sense of personal loss about something that had happened hundreds of years before. Living near this handsome imposing temple, they didn't really enjoy it because they were busy lamenting it wasn't some other way.
On second thought, a thing that happened seven hundred years ago as undoubtedly a recent event for many people. Most religions encourage believers to "remember" events written in their holy books, events that may have happened thousands of years ago, and to act as if these things happen to them personally. On the basis of these "memories" they wage wars and kill each other in masse. This is not limited to mythological or sectarian religions, either. It is exactly the same among all the many doctrines and ways of thought. Instead of looking at the fresh and vivid reality of life with their own eyes, people end up stifling that reality in the name of justice, or peace, or some fixed dogma.
page 37-38 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama
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