[S]uch a person [who insist the stories must be taken as true
lock stock and barrel], if religiously inclined, would likely
insist that it is only by interpreting the events literally that
one can be a faithful and true practitioner of that particular
tradition. Often, they will even claim to be better
practitioners than those who focus on the meaning of the story
and who discount the likelihood that the story’s more improbable
events occurred empirically. On the other hand, another kind of
literalist will reject the whole story outright as worthless
because it is pure fantasy. In both cases, the modern literal
interpreter may well be much more naive about the main messages
of such stories than are those who hear them in a traditional
manner. Religions, Buddhism included, are almost entirely about
symbolic meaning rather than facts. Indeed, to have religious
meaning, even a fact must become a symbol. Religious people have
always known this intuitively. But in the modern context, we
face a new and particular c