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In one of those cock-eyed theaters that are in New York, on 42nd and Broadway, I saw advertised Fire Women from Outer Space. That was a mythological idea. In Tibetan Buddhism these are called docheles—fire women from outer space! And in their spiritual powers they can excite you a little bit. And so I thought, Well, we’re getting back to the old days in a very funny way. Whenever the human imagination gets going, it has to work in the fields that myths have already covered. And it renders them in new ways, that’s all.
No experience can be taught; all that can be taught is the way to an experience. Hence Buddhism is something that is implicit in ourselves and is to be achieved through experience but cannot be delivered to us like a package. No sooner did [the Buddha] have this illumination than the deities themselves came down and they said, "Teach." So he said, "For the good of man and the gods I will teach." But what he teaches is not Buddhism; what he teaches is the way to Buddhism; and this is called the Middle Way
One characteristic of Buddhism, in contrast to Christianity, is that Buddhism does not eliminate deities. Rather, they are seen as manifestations of Buddha-consciousness in the mode of a given culture and are kept. When the MacArthur people took a census of religious beliefs in Japan, they found that there were more religious believers than there were people, because everyone was both a Shinto and a Buddhist.

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