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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Fri May 16, 2003 11:00 am
Subject: Kill the Buddha on the Road

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=59322
:What does this phrase mean?

"If You Meet the Buddha On the Road, Kill Him"

=================================

This old Zen saying was used for the title of a very interesting book by
Sheldon Kopp

"If You Meet the Buddha On the Road, Kill Him"

Sheldon Kopp was a psychotherapist. His book is a collection of accounts
of the cases of some of his patients.

One of Sheldon's patients, after several years of therapy, and nearing the
end of therapy, asked "What will I do after therapy ends and you are no
longer there for me to talk as we do?"

Dr. Kopp answered, "When that time comes, you will have internalized me
sufficiently so that you do not need me, you may carry on such
conversations alone."

The meaning of "kill the Buddha" is simply this:

Do no idolatrously embrace some personality, such as Muhammad, or
Buddha, and use it like a crutch. Should you encounter such an "idol" on
the road, then "kill it", namely, destroy it by ignoring the seductive
temptation to place it upon a pedestal as the ultimate pinnacle of virtue,
holiness, perfection, etc.

Instead, be your OWN psychotherapist, Buddha, Prophet. Stand on your
own two feet. Do not bow and crawl and grovel on all fours with your ass
in the air like a donkey. God did not create you to be such a spineless,
gutless, gullible buffoon.

Instead, recognize and cultivate your own God-like nobility and freedom.

===============

http://www.siu.edu/~matthew/quotes/kopp.html

Sheldon Kopp writes in If You Meet the Buddha on the Road,
Kill Him! (p. 187):

Whether pilgrim or wayfarer, while seeking to be taught the Truth (or
something), the disciple learns only that there is nothing that anyone else can teach him. He learns, once he is willing to give up being taught, that he already knows how to live, that it is implied in his own tale. The secret is that there is no secret.

Everything is just what it seems to be. This is it! There are no hidden
meanings. Before he is enlightened, a man gets up each morning to spend
the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed,
makes love to his woman, and falls asleep. But once he has attained
enlightenment, then a man gets up each morning to spend the day
tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes
love to his woman, and falls asleep.

The Zen way to see the truth is through your everyday eyes. It is only the
heartless questioning of life-as-it-is that ties a man in knots. A man does
not need an answer in order to find peace. He needs only to surrender to
his existence, to cease the needless, empy questioning.

All of the significant battles are waged within the self. - Sheldon Kopp

http://freedomlaw.com/SheldonK.htm

From Sheldon Kopp's third chapter entitled "Disclosing the Self" in his
book If You Meet The Buddha On The Road Kill Him

The guru instructs by metaphor and parable, but the pilgrim learns
through the telling of his own tale. Each man's identity is an emergent of
the myths, rituals, and corporate legends of his culture, compounded with
the epic of his own personal history. In either case, it is the compelling
power of the storytelling that distinguishes men from beasts. The
paradoxical interstice of power and vulnerability, which makes a man
most human, rests on his knowing who he is right now, because he can
remember who he has been, and because he knows who he hopes to
become. All this comes of the wonder of his being able to tell
his tale.

When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening
the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to
meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the
miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.

Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezricth, had occasion,
for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same
place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know
how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again, the
miracle would be accomplished.

Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Lieb of Sasov, in order to save his people once
more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the
fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be
sufficient."

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his
armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light
the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the
forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it
was sufficient.

God made man because He loves stories.*

When God lived, and man belonged, psychology was no more than "a
minor branch of the art of storytelling and mythmaking." Today each man
must work at telling his own story if he is to be able to reclaim his
personal identity.

Should he start out on a psychotherapeutic pilgrimage, he sets out on an
adventure in narration. Everything depends on the telling. The "principle
of explanation consists of getting the story told - somehow, anyhow - in
order to discover how it begins." The basic presumption is that the telling
of the tale will itself yield good counsel. This second look at his personal
history can transform a man from a creature trapped in his past to one
who is freed by it. But the telling is not all.

Along the way, on his pilgrimage, each man must have the chance to tell
his tale. And, as each man tells his tale, there must be another there to
listen. But the other need not be a guru. He need only rise to the needs of
the moment. There is an old saying that when ever two Jews meet, if one
has a problem, the other automatically becomes a rabbi.

* as originally told by Elie Wiesel, The Gates to the Forest, 1966 Holt,
Rinehart, & Winston, the unnumbered pages preceding the text.

==============================================

http://www.illuminatedlife.hawaii.edu/abelist.htm

Sheldon Kopp's Escatological Laundry List (learned on life's rocky road)

1. This is it!

2. There are no hidden meanings.

3. You can't get there from here, and besides there's no place else to go.

4. We are all already dying, and we will be dead for a long time.

5. Nothing lasts.

6. There is no way of getting all you want.

7. You can't have anything unless you let go of it.

8. You only get to keep what you give away.

9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.

10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and
there is no compensation for misfortune.

11. You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless.

12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.

13. You don't really control anything.

14. You can't make anyone love you.

15. No one is any stronger or any weaker than anyone else.

16. Everyone is, in his own way, vulnerable.

17. There are no great men.

18. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.

19. Everyone lies, cheats, pretends (yes, you too, and most certainly I myself).

20. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation.

21. All of you is worth something, if you will only own it.

22. Progress is an illusion.

23. Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new
problems.

24. Yet it is necessary to keep on struggling toward solution.

25. Childhood is a nightmare.

26. But it is so very hard to be an on-your-own,
take-care-of -yourself
-cause-there-is-no-one-else-to-do-it-for-you
grown-up.

27. Each of us is ultimately alone.

28. The most important things, each man must do for himself.

29. Love is not enough, but it sure helps.

30. We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that's
all there is.

31. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it.

32. We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and
partial knowledge.

33. All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.

34. Yet we are responsible for everything we do.

35. No excuses will be accepted.

36. You can run, but you can't hide.

37. It is most important to run out of scapegoats.

38. We must learn the power of living with our helplessness.

39. The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.

40. All of the significant battles are waged within the self.

41. You are free to do whatever you like. You need only to face the
consequences.

42. What do you know . . . for sure . . . anyway?

43. Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again. . . .

==============================

http://www.humanistsofutah.org/19...eBuddhaOnTheRoad_DiscGrp_4-96.htm\
l

Don Quixote and the Sage

"I prefer the madness of Don Quixote de la Mancha to the sanity of most
other men," says Sheldon B. Kopp, author of the book discussed at our
March meeting.

Cervantes' Knight of the Rueful Countenance was alleged to have become deluded by the brain-addling effects of his continued immersion in the
reading of
chivalric tales. Ignoring the dissuasions of family and friends, this country-
village gentleman sallied forth as a knight-errant on an adventurous quest to
set right whatever wrongs he might encounter; all in the name of social justice
and for the attainment of personal glory. The world which he was to encounter
was really, like our own, unjust. Perhaps it demands such a holy fool as he was
to take the evil of the world seriously enough and to imagine himself as
willing to dedicate his life to improving the suffering of others.

Don Quixote's family and community were upset to learn that he had chosen to
believe in himself. His madness and loss of contact with reality are played off
against the down-to-earth sanity of his squire Sancho Panza. Sancho goes along
with Quixote's mad sallies into the illusion of adventure because he is driven
by greed. He wants worldly power, to become governor of an island that Quixote
promises as a reward for Sancho's service. Time after time Sancho is unnerved
by Quixote's impulsive challenging and attacking of swineherds, mule drivers,
innkeepers, and windmills, whom he mistakes for enchanters, evil knights, lords
of the manor, and lawless giants.

"...in a world in which true madness masquerades as sanity (or Islamic
Fundamentalist Theocracy), creative struggles against the ongoing myths seem
eccentric and will be labeled as 'crazy' by the challenged establishment in
power."

After his zany misadventures, Don Quixote also achieved sanity. On his death
-bed, he endured the admonishments of his deadly sane housekeeper: "Stay at
home, attend to your affairs, go often to confession, be charitable to the
poor."

And so, safe from further threat of madness, he died "having gained his reason
and lost his reasons for living."

In many cases psychotherapy patients are seeking some hidden order to be
discovered that will provide the key to happiness, to perfection, to a problem-
free life. If we are to live our own lives, we must trade the illusion of
certainty for the holy insecurity of never knowing for sure what it is all
about. As we gain a deeper sense of our own identity, a sense of self based
upon knowing our own wishes and trusting our own feelings, we may develop a
framework of situational ethics. Rules will come to serve as tentative
guidelines.

The Zen Master warns: "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him!" This
admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside ourselves is real.
The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize
it. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything
outside of ourselves can be our master. We must each give up the master without
giving up the search. The importance of things lies in the way we have learned
to think about them. How often we make circumstances our prison and other
people our jailers! At our best we take full responsibility for what we do and
what we choose not to do. The most important struggles take place within the
self.

"Once, in the Orient, I talked of suicide with a sage whose clear and gentle
eyes seemed forever to be gazing at a never-ending sunset. 'Dying is no
solution,' he affirmed. 'And living?' I asked. 'Nor living either,' he
conceded. 'But who tells you there is a solution?'"

=========

http://www.firstu.org/Sermons/Sermon_010603.htm

Unitarian Outlook

“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road.”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill

Delivered at First Unitarian Church Wilmington, DE

June 3, 2001

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At the time of the account, 2,500 years ago, it was excitedly whispered from
town to town across the Ganges Plain of India when the Buddha was coming. It
was considered a marvel to see an Awakened One and hear his teachings.

“More marvelous,” writes one scholar (Jack Kornfield), “his ancient and wise
understanding has lasted and is still with us. We now have the teachings of the
Buddha translated into nearly every language, and in the past generation they
have spread throughout the world. Today there are hundreds of thousands of
Buddhist monks and nuns, and hundreds of millions follow this path of
awakening. The teachings of compassion and generosity, of quieting the mind and
opening the heart are as relevant today as they were in the community around
the Buddha.. They illuminate the universal questions of human suffering and
find our own Buddha nature in response.” (Jack Kornfield in Before He Was the
Buddha: The Life of Siddhartha, by Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Seastone Press,
Berkeley, 1998.)

His story, such as we know it and such as scholars have pieced together from
ancient writings and from the legend of the centuries, is that one night toward
the end of the sixth century before the birth of Christ, a young man called
Siddartha Gotama walked out of his comfortable home in the foothills of the
Himalayas and took to the road. We are told he was twenty-nine years old,
though we have absolutely no historical basis for any of the facts of his life.
He lived and died a full century before any writing of his life was recorded.
And as with the legend of so many other holy men and prophets in history, his
life story is embedded with legend and tales of miraculous happenings meant to
illustrate his unique standing as a human incarnation of divine enlightenment.

At the time of his birth, holy men and seers were said to recognize this baby
as the “perfect one, the greatest human being ever born.” As a child growing
up, his complexion was said to “shine as golden metal, his eyes a radiant blue,
his intelligence and athletic ability causing him to stand out above all other
children.” His mother died while Gotama was still an infant, and his father,
shaken by the prophecies of the seers concerning his gifted son, protected the
boy throughout his growing years, keeping him confined within the idyllic
setting of his palace, where the child would never be touched by the harsh
realities of the outer world. So long as he was innocent of knowing about the
real world, Gotama was content to live the life his father had chosen for him.
He married a princess who had been chosen for him, and they had a young son.

But eventually there came the day when, restless, the young prince ventured
forth from the palace and saw four sights that forever changed his
consciousness. He saw for the first time the realities of old age, sickness,
death, and enlightenment - the first three being the universal and inescapable
lot of all living creatures, and the fourth condition, enlightenment, being a
vision of human possibility that was attainable by all those who were willing
to pursue it through practice and discipline.

Gotama left his wife and a son only a few days old, and renouncing all his
worldly goods and possessions, and donning the yellow robes of a monk, he took
up the life of an itinerant ascetic. Dependent on the alms and charity of
others, he would wander the countryside as a teacher and holy man. For the
first six years of his wandering, Gotama engaged the rigorous practices of
extreme fasting and meditation to a point where he nearly died. And finally
came the day, when sitting under the Bodhi tree and facing the East, Gotama
began the great seven-day trance from which he was said to emerge as a Fully
Enlightened One, a Buddha. He was thirty-five years old when he attracted his
first followers. His ministry as a teacher would last more than forty years.

Princeton scholar Karen Armstrong, who has recently published a wonderful study
of Buddha’s life (Buddha. Viking Penguin Books, New York 2001) explains how
Buddhism emerged during an amazing historical era called the “Axial Age,” which
extended from about 800 to 200 years before Christ. During this period of time,
for whatever reasons, she writes, “an impressive array of prophetic and
philosophical geniuses” addressed the human condition and offered unique
insights that changed the course of history and have continued down to our
time. “Gotama would become one of the most important and most typical of the
luminaries of the Axial Age, alongside the great Hebrew prophets of the eighth,
seventh, and sixth centuries; Confucius and Lao Tzu, who reformed the religious
traditions of China in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the sixth-century
Iranian sage Zoroaster; and Socrates and Plato in the third century BC, who
urged the Greeks to question even those truths that appeared to be self
-evident.” (Armstrong, p.11)

”The Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we know it,” says Karen
Armstrong. “During this period,” she says, “men and women became conscious of
their existence, their nature, and their limitations in an unprecedented way.
Their experience of utter impotence in a cruel world impelled them to seek the
highest goals and an absolute reality in the depths of their being. The great
sages of the time taught human beings how to cope with the misery of life,
transcend their weakness and live in peace in the midst of this flawed world.
The new religious systems that emerged during this period - Taoism and
Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in Iran and
the Middle East, and Greek rationalism in Europe - all shared fundamental
characteristics beneath their obvious differences.

Thus, during this one era spanning only a few centuries, the Chinese, Iranians,
Indians, Jews, and Greeks all experienced new religious horizons and embarked
on a quest for enlightenment and salvation. It was a general movement forward
from the ancient age of magical religion to an age of ethical religion. “In the
Axial countries,” Karen Armstrong says, “a few great teachers sensed fresh
possibilities and broke away from the old traditions. They sought change in the
deepest reaches of their beings, looked for greater inwardness in their
spiritual lives, and tried to become one with a reality that transcended normal
mundane conditions and categories.” (Armstrong, p.12)

The basis of the Buddha’s philosophy is the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble
Truth is that life is full of suffering because of illness, aging, discontent,
and the awareness of death. Second, the cause of this suffering is desire, or
attachment to the world in such a way as to become liable to suffering - i.e.
desire for sensual pleasure, desire to go on living, etc. Buddha’s Third Noble
Truth is that therefore, the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate desire.
The Fourth Noble Truth reveals the way to achieve this removal of desire:
Buddha called it the Middle Path.

The Middle Path, Buddha explained, is the avoidance of the two extremes of self-
indulgence on the one hand, and self-mortification on the other. The Middle
Path is an eight-fold path of Right Understanding - seeing life as it is, Right
Thought - a pure mind, Right Speech - speaking in a truthful, kindly, tolerant
manner; Right Action - charity and kindness in all things; Right Livelihood -
earning your living in a way that does not conflict with the conduct of your
life; Right Effort - fostering noble qualities of generosity, wisdom, and
patience; Right Mindfulness - developing awareness of what is highest and most
important; and Right Concentration - the practice of meditation that leads to a
full understanding of the impermanence of things. This meditation requires
discipline and training.

The Buddha taught very clearly that this eight-fold path, the great Middle
Path, was available and attainable for all who would practice it. It is the
practice, the journey itself and not the destination, that is the heart of his
teaching. It is in the practice of the Middle Path that individuals attain the
fullness of being, the state of Awakeness or “Buddhahood” that frees the human
personality from being mired in suffering. The Buddha never professed belief in
a great overarching Divinity and never preached the existence of the human
soul. And therefore it is questionable whether Buddhism should properly be
considered a religion in the formal sense at all. Nor is it strictly speaking
an organized philosophy of life.

The Buddha abhorred such categories themselves as being diversions from the
path to individual enlightenment. Nor did he ever claim for himself any status
of divinity, just the opposite. He preached avoidance of any cult of
personality, especially the kind of divinization that arose around such
prophets as Jesus in Christianity. No authority, he taught, should be revered,
however august. Buddhists must motivate themselves and rely on their own
efforts, not on a charismatic leader. One ninth-century Zen Master went so far
as to command his disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” to
emphasize the importance of maintaining this independence from authority
figures. Karen Armstrong says that “Gotama might not have approved of the
violence of this statement, but throughout his life he fought against the cult
of personality, and endlessly deflected the attention of his followers from
himself. It was not his life and personality but his teaching that was
important. He believed that he had woken up to a truth - a dharma - that was
inscribed in the deepest structure of existence.”

Buddhism, as one scholar puts it, is not for those who like to be told how to
order their lives (Islam), who look constantly for guidance to an outside
authority (Muhammad); whether in the form of priest, scripture, or ritual.

Throughout the Buddha’s teaching, along with his insistence on balance and
common sense, there is an implied obligation on each individual to think things
for oneself, for each to make up his or her own mind and own moral decisions.
We are each ultimately responsible for our own karma, our own salvation. I
suppose this the reason Buddhist teachings have a fair amount of appeal to
Unitarian Universalist sensibility. Many UU’s have found in Buddhist practice
and meditation a method of access to the inner life that honors their
individuality and encourages their search for inner peace and meaning. It is a
rich pathway for the sincere searcher. A pathway worthy of your exploration.

========

http://www.metalandmagic.com/Pages/Galleries/Oddities/buddha.html

The Samurai

There's an old Zen parable that a samurai goes to a Zen master and asks, "How
may I become enlightened?" The master says, "Set out on the road to Edo (a
city.) If you meet your parents on the road, kill your parents, if you meet a
patriarch, kill the patriarch, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

Now, this is a bit cryptic, but to try and explain, as best an unenlightened
white chick in her mid twenties can: The Zen master is saying that a person's
path through life cannot be defined by the beliefs and teachings of others,
even those we love and respect. You can't walk a road defined by your parents,
or society, or even the Buddha, you can only walk your own road, wherever it
may go. (For the record, I love my parents dearly, and they're pretty damn
cool, but I'm extremely lucky in that regard.) So anyway, this painting is a
self-portrait, set in the weird gear-and-concrete world that I paint--I'm the
short woman there, in samurai gear, spending a lot of time killing Buddha.

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