If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him
Today is celebrated as Buddha Purnima. Purnima means full moon in Sanskrit. For Buddhists, today is thrice blessed. It is believed that three important events in the Buddha’s life took place on the Purnima in Vaisakh(sometime between April and May): his birth, his attaining enlightenment, and his death, Paranirvana.
The first teachings of the Buddha are considered to be the Four Noble Truths — these are timeless.
The first one says: all beings experience pain and unhappiness during their lifetime. “Birth is pain, old age is pain, sickness is pain, death is pain; sadness, grief, ache, sorrow and anxiety are pain. Contact with the unpleasant is pain. Separation from pleasure is pain. Not getting what one wants is pain. In short, the five aggregates of the mind and matter that are subject to attachment are pain”.
The second one says: the origin of pain and misery is due to a specific cause. “It is desire that leads to rebirth, accompanied by pleasure and passion, seeking pleasure here and there; that is, the desire for pleasure, the desire for existence, the desire for non-existence.”
The third noble truth is that the cessation of pain and suffering can be achieved “By the complete non-passion and cessation of this very desire, by abandoning it and giving it up, by being released and free from it”.
The fourth noble truth is the modus operandi to stop pain and misery — the “Eightfold Path”. That is: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.
To me the most important teaching of the Buddha is “Appo Deepo Bhava”, meaning “be a light unto yourself”.
Osho interprets it very well: Be a light unto yourself. Do not follow others, do not imitate, because imitation, following, creates stupidity. To that end, the peripatetic philosopher-guru, J Krishnamurti, also said the same thing: truth is pathless.
The problem arises with the followers. They create a larger than life of an individual they idolize. As Henry Miller says in Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch: Christ was a carpenter. But he never built a church of stick and stones.
The Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan told his disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The statement aims to confound people. Its purpose is to jolt them from complacent ways of thinking. Linji Yixuan also means that those who think they’ve found all the answers in any religion need to start questioning. Isn’t it very relevant in today’s times?
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