Ninth-century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan famously told his disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Upon first hearing these words, you might picture devoted practitioners utterly perplexed—wide eyes, dropped jaws—as they struggled to make sense of their teacher’s shocking command. But as Chris Pacheco unpacks in this piece for Lion’s Roar, Linji Yixuan was not referring to any literal Buddha. He was using his disciples’ own delusions as an opportunity to wake them up.
At its heart, the teaching is about releasing attachment—to teachers, to fixed ideas, even to our own sense of spiritual progress. Killing the Buddha means killing our conceptualizations, the belief that we understand it all—and returning to what Zen practitioners call “beginner’s mind.”
Read the full article at Lion’s Roar.
Know Thyself 