Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it.
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.
Why Killing the Buddha ? For our purposes, 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.
Killing the Buddha is about finding a way to be religious when we’re all so self-conscious and self-absorbed. Knowing more than ever about ourselves and the way the world works, we gain nothing through nostalgia for a time when belief was simple, and even less from insisting that now is such a time. Killing the Buddha will ask, How can we be religious without leaving part of ourselves at the church or temple door? How can we love God when we know it doesn’t matter if we do? Call it God for the godless. Call it the search for a God we can believe in: A God that will not be an embarrassment in twelve-thousand years. A God we can talk about without qualifications.
Killing the Buddha insists that if religion matters at all it matters enough to be taken to task. We believe it’s high time for a new canon to be created, and that the Web is just the place to collect it. We refuse to accept the internet as a world wide shopping mall. We know intuitively it can be a sort of Talmudic cathedral, a tool of transcendence made of words. We’re here to build it. If the end result looks more like Babel than the City of God, so be it. Babel, after all, came close.
Thanks for reading.
7 Comments
September 14, 2007 at 1:56 pm
I came to your site for the brilliant essay by Ali Eteraz on “moderate Islam,” but stayed for everything else. What a table you lay out! It gives me hope for the future.
Yalhak
October 2, 2007 at 11:02 pm
how empathetic is Buddha be not flinching when we say Kill Him!
Just think of the wrath God would bring is we proclaimed: kill Jesus!
October 7, 2007 at 12:24 pm
For your consideration…
http://lhooqmagazine.blogspot.com/
October 30, 2007 at 1:56 am
Your internet City of God is an admirable goal. But I’m curious why God must always be connected to religion? You aptly describe the failures of religion, but maybe these failures are messages that we should seek God in other places, in every other place; in our relationships with other people, in the soil, in our illnesses and defeats as well as our joys. The failure of religion is a gift, showing us how to move from a communal experience of God to a personal experience. I look forward to reading your future blog entries.
December 3, 2007 at 8:14 pm
I wanted to comment on sybila’s comment was well as the manifesto.
I think it is clear that religion has failed. It has divided us as a people. It casts doubts on the validity of biblical canons, on gods such as Jesus or the god of Abraham.
A strong Atheist denies the exhistance of a divine Creator. A weak Atheist is also called an agnostic. An agnostic acknowledges the existance of God, but denies all established religion and tradition.
I could make a good case that Jesus had a great deal of weak atheistic teaching. At least the Jesus we think we know.
We don’t know anything.
Except that meekness is better than hostility, but not always.
I think it is time to throw all religion and theology away. Cling to the teachings of Jesus as wisdom but not law. Use the core beliefs each of us have to enhance the understanding of the Creator.
January 2, 2008 at 8:23 pm
I stumbled across your blog looking at my tag surfer and I have to say the idea intrigues me. As someone that has put his faith in Christ but has not put his faith in “church” I can understand what you are doing here.
I will be going back and reading the old posts and I hope to see more from you soon. Thanks.
October 25, 2008 at 3:10 pm
what a pleasure it is to find your KtB blogmagazine here. I especially like the premise, I will say that the dealbreaker for me with religion is that it seems a separate entity from the spirituality from which it was born. However, our children are separate individuals even though perhaps we birth them and we must accept that. I will be coming around often, ad I would like to add you to my bloglisting, thankyou