Recounting the events of November 14, 2022
N. was leading the Monday night sit. He’s a methodical but gentle meditation guide. It feels like an American Zen approach but with a broader knowledge base that allows everyone to feel accommodated by him as he leads the sit.
At some point his prompt brought to mind the old Zen saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, Kill him.” Quick thoughts about “that’s not really what it means.” “Well, not exactly.” Then I started to explain it to myself. In detail. Very wordy.
The guidance from N moved to pointing us toward not-judgmental awareness, right as I was moving into getting “judgy” about the obnoxious need to explain to myself, verbally, in my head, something that I already knew. Who was I explaining it to? So as one voice in my head was saying, “just sit with the experience of knowing what you know instead of explaining it to yourself, you goofball.” There was another voice that piped up with the negative shit.
This darker voice likes to pop up and remind me that I suck, that I’ll never accomplish anything, get anywhere in my practice, my life, etc.. You probably know what I’m talking about. It’s likely that you have one too.
Mine’s doing it’s usual and suddenly this goes back to the “meeting the Buddha on the road”. I am now visualizing a version of me, body slamming the dark, negative version and I/he starts to choke out the dark one. He/me is killing that negative SOB. Another me comes in and stabs dark-me. The dark version of me is dead.
Another voice chimed in and started to say something about, “you know he’s just gonna pull that Freddy Kruger shit and come back” when the version of me that had just murdered my dark side gave a look that said “the same thing will happen to you if you start that negative crap. We’re not having it here anymore.” The late arriving only slightly negative voice shut up pretty quickly.
That old Zen koan doesn’t mean you actually kill someone. It’s telling us that the buddha, that part of you that’s buddha-nature, is inside not outside. If you see the buddha outside, that’s not really the buddha. It says, all the work is inside and there’s nothing to seek outside.
When we engage with this practice, eliminating the hindrances, quieting those negative aspects of ourselves, replacing unwholesome with wholesome, it might get a little rough. Obviously, what I saw in that meditation was just a visualization of a metaphor and no one was hurt . . . but that dark voice hasn’t popped back up yet.
“If you meet the buddha on the road, kill him.”
Ninth-century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan
Here’s a short article that explores the koan above with more depth.
https://www.lionsroar.com/if-you-meet-the-buddha-on-the-road-kill-him/
