# Engaging with Holy Texts

Holy texts from various traditions are seen as repositories of spiritual wisdom, each offering unique insights into the nature of the divine, humanity, and the universe. However, UPL reads these texts not as literal truths but as symbolic representations and teaching tools. This interpretative freedom allows for a broader understanding of the texts, fostering a more personal, contemplative engagement with the sacred. For UPL, truth transcends the boundaries of any singular holy text, existing instead as a unifying thread woven through all expressions of spiritual wisdom.

The traditions themselves teach something of this way of reading. The Buddha advised the Kalamas to test a teaching for themselves: not to accept it because it is handed down, or written in scripture, or neatly argued, but to ask whether it is skilful and leads to welfare, as people of good sense would judge it. He likened his own teaching to a raft that carries a person over a river and is then left on the bank. Among the early Christians, Origen taught that scripture has a body, a soul and a spirit, and Augustine warned against taking a figure of speech literally, and equally against taking the literal for a figure. In the Upanishads the teaching comes as dialogue, a teacher answering a student's questions.

UPL's reading is freer than any of these. None of them held that every sacred text is symbol, and UPL does not claim their authority for its own view. What it takes from them is that a text is a means and not an end, and that it asks to be read with judgement.