The Art of Grit

(10 minutes)
Walking through the corridors of religious history, one encounters a curious phenomenon: nearly every major spiritual tradition branches into multiple streams, each claiming authenticity, each defending its particular interpretation of the original teachings. Buddhism offers perhaps the clearest example of this pattern, having evolved into three distinct vehicles—Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana—each with its own scriptures, practices, and understanding of the path to enlightenment.

The Theravada tradition, prevalent in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Myanmar, emphasizes individual liberation through mindfulness and ethical conduct, adhering closely to what practitioners consider the Buddha’s original teachings preserved in the Pali Canon. Mahayana Buddhism, flourishing across East Asia, expands the focus to include the liberation of all beings through the bodhisattva ideal, incorporating texts like the Lotus Sutra that emerged centuries after the Buddha’s death. Vajrayana, the “Diamond Vehicle” of Tibet and Mongolia, adds elaborate tantric practices and visualizations that would seem foreign to early Buddhist communities.

Standing at the intersection of these traditions, observing their differences, it becomes easy to fall into the trap of comparison. Which approach captures the “true” Buddhism? Which lineage maintains the purest connection to Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree? These questions have fueled scholarly debates and sectarian divisions for over two millennia.
Yet perhaps these are the wrong questions entirely.

When we step back from our immediate need to categorize and judge, a different picture emerges. The variations in religious expression begin to look less like corruptions or deviations, and more like adaptations—skillful means tailored to different temperaments, cultures, and spiritual capacities. The Buddha himself spoke of this principle, known as upaya in Sanskrit, suggesting that enlightened teachers adjust their methods according to what each student needs to hear.
Consider how a parent might explain the same moral principle to children of different ages. To a five-year-old, the message might come through a simple story with clear heroes and villains. To a teenager, the same wisdom might require philosophical discussion and personal examples. To a young adult, it might need to be discovered through experience and gentle guidance. The core truth remains unchanged, but its expression transforms to meet the listener where they are.

This pattern repeats across spiritual traditions. Christianity branched into Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant streams, each emphasizing different aspects of Christ’s message. Islam developed Sunni and Shia interpretations, alongside mystical Sufi practices. Hinduism encompasses devotional bhakti paths, intellectual Vedanta, and disciplined yoga traditions. Judaism ranges from Orthodox observance to Reform adaptation to Kabbalistic mysticism.
In each case, we find communities of sincere practitioners drawn to different expressions of what they experience as the same fundamental truth. The Zen practitioner sitting in silent meditation, the Pure Land Buddhist chanting Amitabha’s name, and the Tibetan monk visualizing complex mandalas are all working with the basic insights the Buddha offered about suffering, impermanence, and the possibility of awakening.

Our tendency to create hierarchies among these approaches reveals something uncomfortable about human nature. We seem compelled to establish that our way is not just different, but better—more authentic, more effective, more faithful to the original vision. This impulse appears so automatically that we rarely question it, even when we’ve dedicated ourselves to spiritual paths explicitly designed to dissolve such ego-driven comparisons.
The irony runs deep. We use the teachings meant to free us from attachment and identity to strengthen our attachment to religious identity. We employ wisdom traditions designed to cultivate humility to justify our sense of superiority. We take practices meant to reveal our interconnectedness and use them to reinforce separation.

This tendency suggests that the various forms of religious expression serve another purpose beyond their explicit spiritual aims. They provide containers for different psychological and cultural needs, meeting people at their particular stage of development and capacity for understanding. Some minds need analytical frameworks and detailed philosophy. Others respond to devotional practices and emotional surrender. Still others require direct experience through meditation or contemplation.
The enlightened teachers who originated these traditions seem to have understood this diversity intuitively. They spoke in parables and paradoxes, offered multiple practices, and encouraged students to find what worked for their temperament and circumstances. It was often their followers, generations later, who crystallized these flexible teachings into rigid doctrines and competing schools.

When we recognize this pattern, something shifts in how we relate to our own spiritual practice and to other traditions. The urgency to prove our path superior begins to feel less compelling. The need to defend our beliefs against other interpretations loses its grip. Instead, we might find ourselves curious about what draws others to different expressions of the search for meaning and awakening.
This doesn’t mean abandoning discrimination or pretending all approaches are equivalent in their effectiveness for any given individual. We each need to find practices that resonate with our nature and circumstances. But it does suggest approaching these choices with less attachment to being right and more appreciation for the diversity of human spiritual expression.
The mountain of spiritual realization remains the same, whether we approach it through the gentle slopes of devotional practice, the steep cliffs of intellectual analysis, or the winding paths of meditative discipline. Each route offers its own challenges and revelations. Each has helped travelers reach the summit.
Perhaps the deeper teaching lies not in choosing the “correct” path, but in walking whatever path we’re on with sincerity while honoring the struggles and insights of fellow travelers on other routes. This requires a particular kind of maturity—the ability to hold our own practice seriously while holding our opinions about it lightly.

In the end, the question may not be which tradition has preserved the most authentic version of ancient wisdom, but whether we can use whatever tradition we’ve inherited or chosen to do the work it was designed for: dissolving the very sense of separation that makes us think our way is the only way, opening our hearts to the possibility that truth is large enough to accommodate many expressions, and cultivating the humility to recognize that our perspective, however sincere, remains necessarily limited.

The unity we seek across traditions may be found not by minimizing differences or creating artificial synthesis, but by recognizing that the impulse to judge and compare arises from the same ego-structure that all spiritual paths aim to transform. In this recognition, the various streams of human spiritual seeking reveal themselves as expressions of a single underlying current—the universal human longing to transcend our isolated sense of self and discover our deeper connection to life itself.