Killing the Buddha
Excerpts from this website
The idea of "killing the Buddha" comes from a famous Zen line, the context of which is easy to imagine: After years on his cushion, a monk has what he believes is a breakthrough: a glimpse of nirvana, the Buddhamind, the big pay-off. Reporting the experience to his master, however, he is informed that what has happened is par for the course, nothing special, maybe even damaging to his pursuit. And then the master gives the student dismaying advice: If you meet the Buddha, he says, kill him.
Why kill the Buddha? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way.
Killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving past the complacency of belief, for struggling honestly with the idea of God. As people who take faith seriously, we are endlessly amazed and enraged that religious discourse has become so bloodless, parochial and boring. Any God worth the name is none of these things. Yet when people talk about God they are talking mainly about the Buddha they meet. For fear of seeming intolerant or uncertain, or just for lack of thinking, they talk about a God too small to be God.
The idea of "killing the Buddha" comes from a famous Zen line, the context of which is easy to imagine: After years on his cushion, a monk has what he believes is a breakthrough: a glimpse of nirvana, the Buddhamind, the big pay-off. Reporting the experience to his master, however, he is informed that what has happened is par for the course, nothing special, maybe even damaging to his pursuit. And then the master gives the student dismaying advice: If you meet the Buddha, he says, kill him.
Why kill the Buddha? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way.
Killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving past the complacency of belief, for struggling honestly with the idea of God. As people who take faith seriously, we are endlessly amazed and enraged that religious discourse has become so bloodless, parochial and boring. Any God worth the name is none of these things. Yet when people talk about God they are talking mainly about the Buddha they meet. For fear of seeming intolerant or uncertain, or just for lack of thinking, they talk about a God too small to be God.
posted by Arun Nair at 8:19 AM
5 Comments:
Or worse, they talk of a god which may exist only in their imagination...
Well it's a debatable topic. Once couple of my friends and me ( 4 in total) went on a biking trip with a planned night over.
That night we spent around five hours proving the existence of god as we know it.
The conclusion of the discussion was "think of god as our current limitation of not knowing the reason of our existence".
The moment a individual knows the reason of his existence.He/she moves to a next level where compared to the other individuals he/she can be considered as god.
Hence,the term "God" will always be relative to our own limited knowlegde.
Well, that was a fair argument. Or we can put it this way...why not accept that we don't know certain facts instead of creating beings like god?
However, does existence have to have a reason? Sartre says that existence has no reason...it is accidental.
I am firm believer on every existence has reason.
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