Kill the Buddha Whenever you See Him

Linji Chan master Yixuàn ( Rinzai Gigen)(臨濟義玄禪師) ( died circa 866 or 867) arrived at the Bear's Ear Tower (熊耳塔). The abbot of the tower asked him, "Should we worship ancestors or the Buddha first?" The Linji Chan master replied: "Neither ancestors nor the Buddha.". The Abbot asked: "Is there any unsettled issue between the Master and either ancestors or the Buddha? Why not worship them?" The Chan master was silent. At a later stage, he told his disciples: "If you wish to attain true Buddhist understanding, you should never allow yourself to be misled or mystified by others, whether you are facing outwards or inwards. Whenever you see the Buddha, you must kill the Buddha. Whenever you see ancestors, kill the ancestors. Whenever you see an arhat, kill the arhat. Whenever you see your parents, kill your parents. Whenever you see any relatives, kill the relatives. Only then shall you achieve true liberation." This is said to be written in the Records of Linji (Rinzi-roku). Linji's method is characterized by abrupt and harsh and unexpected reactions from him to his students. Linji learned from Master Huang PiShiYun who advocated the ideas that "the prajna shall be its roots; the nothing shall dominate being and that nothing and being shall merge into one another." 

This is one of the most famous Chan stories. A lot of people do not understand the meaning of this story and why the Chan master said or did what he said and did what he did. According to Dr. Chan Pui Yin, in his book "Biting Chan" (刁禪) (2006), a possible interpretation may be that the whole point of Buddhism is to teach people to be the master of their own fate. We do so by stages. First we realize that everything is an illusion in the sense that nothing lasts forever and hence can only be true provisionally. That includes not only material objects and images of important people in our lives like, in the Chinese society of that time, the paintings, busts or statues or ancestral tablets of  our ancestors and the Buddha. One of the hidden assumptions in the question of the abbot of Bear Ear's Tower is that both ancestors and the Buddha ought to be worshipped. The question he posed to the Chan master  related to the priority of who should be worshipped first. But the Chan master answered by questioning the legitimacy of the assumption behind abbot's question by suggesting that the concept of worship may itself be illegitimate because that goes against the principle of self-determination or the primacy of freedom and liberation from all forms of illusions and attachment which concept itself is a concept at the core of Buddhism viz. the idea that at the heart of existence is emptiness and the void . What is worshipped can be nothing but effigies, images, pictures or statues which are nothing but "representation" or "imitations" of the "real" beings (our ancestors or the Buddha), taken in a relative sense. In a true sense, our ancestors are dead. So is the Buddha. All we have are what has been reported about them, our own mental concepts of them. Why should we worship an image of an image, like a mirror image of an image in another mirror showing that first image?

At a deeper level, if one takes the act of worship as a symbolic act of respect of some people considered to be especially important in our lives then one can still question whether the values behind such an attitude or customs are conducive to the attainment of true freedom. Values are little but guiding principles for our action and may be learned or adopted by us and unreflectingly embedded or embodied in the actions we perform in our daily life. The values of according respect to our ancestors and for the Buddhist, to the Buddha are examples of such values. They are adopted by most people unthinkingly simply because it is the thing to do in the appropriate social contexts. The whole point of Chan practice is to make us mindful or aware of the true meaning of what we are doing at all time and to jerk us or shock or surprise us from the habitual stupor of our unthinking mind.  By giving a reply which questions the very basis upon which the question of priority of respect is grounded, the Linji Chan master is forcing the abbot to become more aware of what he is saying by turning his mind to a new angle of looking at old problems. Instead of answering the abbot at the level at which the abbot's question is posed, he turns his mind into a completely new and more fundamental level, the level of the need not to be guided by mere habits and accepted values and the normally or habitually but unthinkingly accepted "authority" of society or for the Buddhist,, even the "authority" of the Buddha himself. Ironically, it is precisely by questioning the need to worship the Buddha himself that the Chan master is following the teaching of the Buddha himself viz. his teaching that we should be aware or mindful of what we are doing at all times. One of the Buddha's teachings is that there are more than 8000 different ways of achieving enlightenment and that if one method does not work for us, we should have no hesitation in rejecting that method and adopt another and not to be attached to any one method. The Buddha wants to liberate us from our illusions, including the illusion that there are "authorities" whose words must be adhered to to the letter, even his own words. We should strive at all times to be the master of our own fate provided we are fully aware of the true meaning of what we are doing: that is the meaning of liberation or freedom from attachment because according to the Buddha, all forms of attachment are a source of stress and suffering.

Even in Chan theory, there are different levels of enlightenment. At the highest level, we should be free to do what may be prohibited under certain intermediate levels e.g the prohibition against alcohol, the prohibition against avarice, not saying the right word, doing the right thing and all kinds of so-called "moral rules". What we should keep at the top of our mind is the spirit of Buddhism and not its various specific embodied material forms. The Buddha advises us like Jesus not to stick to the forms or the letter of the law, but the spirit which lies at the heart of the law and for the Christian, that heart is the spirit of love and for the Buddhist, that heart of Buddhism is the spirit of non-attachment to mere forms based on its realization or insight that at the heart of the universe is nothingness or emptiness or the void. Jesus said something analogous. He said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Thus the true master of Chan can do anything so long as it conforms to that understanding of the ultimate illusionist character of reality, including so-called moral reality or values because he realizes that at the most fundamental level, so-called "distinctions" of values are little more than "mental" concepts which have no "reality" and can have nothing but relative values which must change according to the specific circumstances in which decisions must be made. We never know what reality or the "truth" is. All we see and are able to see are the forms of different "phenomena" which are like images of images of images ad infinitum. So it makes little sense to make too fine distinctions between them, at the most fundamental level, which remains unknown and are subject to constant changes and everything  has only a certain provisional reality or truth or rightness or appropriateness..