Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

What Does It Mean to Kill Buddha?

13 June 2025 · 4 min read

To kill the Buddha, to kill the Buddha.1 An oft repeated phrase, some call it a koan, but what means? Important first to understand that it situates itself within the Chan/Zen lineage of Buddhism, the line of Bodhidharma2.

To understand what is meant here by 'Buddha' we must understand Bodhidharma's Buddhism. Within this special branch of Buddhism, the idea of 'Buddha' is played with tremendously, many koans revolve around3 "What is a Buddha", and these all have varying levels of koanic and serious answers. Most of them revolve on either the paradox of nirvana and samsara being one yet differentiated4, but also on the idea of everything being the mind, and thus, the Buddha is the mind too. It must be understood that at this point in Buddhist history there is the concept of the Tathagatagarbha5, the 'Inner Buddha', which for ease of explanation can be considered essentially the same as the Vedic atman, or just in English, the human soul. Yet neither of those capture it fully, and may lead one to misunderstand, if you want to get a better picture, I recommend reading the Tathagatagarbha Sutra yourself (I will be putting a version of it on Tianmu soon).

The whole point of Bodhidharmic Buddhism, or Chan/Zen is a radical acceptance of upaya6, skillful means, most famously discussed in the burning house parable of the Lotus Sutra7, but taken to its furthest possible conclusion here. If a house is burning, this is your mind, and you tell someone a lie to leave the burning house, is it a lie if they would have burned to death without the lie? In Buddhism the answer is no, this is not a lie, this is skillful means, it is compassion. Maybe this is horrifying to Christians who value objectivity, but this is not a concern in Mahayana Buddhism.

So to kill the Buddha we must ask first. What is the Buddha? Chan masters tell us quite simply, the Buddha is not Siddhartha Gotama the Shakyamuni, no he simply was the first to become enlightened in this era8 AND spread the message on how. So what is the Buddha? It is the mind. Okay, what is the mind? Everything. In Buddhism the entire universe is considered to be like a near eternal fire9, always burning, always transmuting, always changing, yet all born from the first spark. This is why keen Buddhist scholars who become Buddhist see very easy and obvious parallels with Panpsychicism and Animism10, because Mahayana, especially Chan, is essentially Animist in this regard.

If you are on the road, what is the road? The road is the path, the pay, the river that must be crossed. Upaya is the boat that gets you11 to the other side. You discard it when you reach the other side, yet on the other side you realize you need to help others get there, so once again you take up the boat once more. You tell people, "this boat will save you" yet it was not the "boat" that saved them, it was crossing the shore, which was made possible by the boat and the compassionate being who guided them (we call these people Bodhisattvas).

So now imagine the kind of society that Buddhism inhabits during this time. People are praying to the Buddha like he is God12, they worship him, they lose sight of the practice, they believe that the boat -is salvation-. This is super important to understanding the phrase, and it has quite a lot of relevance to this day and age as well, and other religions. Think of this flipped, "If you see Christ on the road to Jerusalem13, crucify him". This should make perfect sense, because even though Jesus is the savior, without his sacrifice his duty would not have been fulfilled, not only that, but we would be unsaved. Yet even then, this does not explain the koan completely, as Jesus is considered an actual savior human (or at least seemed human-like) figure, while Buddha is much more complicated.

So. If you see the Buddha on the road kill him. I will summarize it like this: If you are practicing Buddhism which is not a religion but simply the natural way14 of the mind (this is what Mahayana Buddhists believe), and you see the Buddha impede you on this road towards enlightenment, you are not meant to leave your wagon and get on your knees and pray, you are meant to carry on, thereby 'killing the Buddha'. The Buddha is that which removes obstacles, not which creates them. Thus it cannot be the true Buddha, so you must kill him. Any fruit that is sweet is considered the fruit of the Buddha, this is essential in understanding Buddhist epistemology. This is why you must kill the Buddha, because the Buddha is also empty, just like everything else. And emptiness is the Buddha, because Buddha is the mind, which is emptiness. Did Gotama need the Buddha to become the Buddha, the answer is no, so neither do you.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. The line is attributed to the ninth-century Chinese master Linji Yixuan, founder of the Linji (Japanese Rinzai) school: meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Sources give it a traditional attribution, so read the exact wording as the tradition’s. It reached a wide English audience through Sheldon B. Kopp’s If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! (1972), a book on psychotherapy, whose title made the saying a catchphrase for dropping borrowed authorities. source ↩
  2. Bodhidharma was a semi-legendary monk of the 5th or 6th century, traditionally credited with bringing Chan to China as its first patriarch. Legend says he meditated nine years facing a wall at Shaolin. Japanese: Daruma. Chan master after master, Linji included, is placed in his lineage, which is why a saying of Linji’s can be called a saying of ‘the line of Bodhidharma’. source ↩
  3. The best-known answer to ‘What is Buddha?’ is Mazu Daoyi’s ‘This very mind is Buddha’ (Gateless Barrier, case 30). Mazu later said the opposite, ‘Not mind, not Buddha’, and explained that the first saying was to stop a baby from crying and the second what he said once the crying had stopped. That is skillful means in miniature: the same teacher gives a lure, then takes it back. source ↩
  4. Her own church puts this in the same terms: in What the Ghosts Actually Are the doctrine of two truths, conventional and ultimate, is how the church says samsara is nirvana while still telling them apart. She makes non-duality a shield and duality a weapon in The Mind Is My Doctrine. ↩
  5. Tathāgatagarbha (‘Buddha-womb’ or Buddha-nature) is the Mahayana teaching that every being holds the potential for Buddhahood. The Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, dated about 200–250 CE, likens it to a small Buddha seated inside each being. Whether it is a self in disguise is an old fight: the Japanese ‘Critical Buddhists’ Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō called it non-Buddhist for smuggling in an ātman, while defenders say it means emptiness, which is her warning about misunderstanding. source ↩
  6. Upāya, ‘skillful means’, is the Mahayana idea that teachers adapt methods to the listener, even when a method is provisional rather than ultimate truth. In Chan it goes furthest, because the whole of the doctrine, Buddha included, is treated as a tool to be used and then set aside. She uses the same idea of a means that is dropped on arrival in Buddhism in the United States. source ↩
  7. In chapter 3 of the Lotus Sutra a father lures his children from a burning house by promising three carts, goat, deer and bullock; outside, he gives each one great carriage drawn by a white ox. The Buddha asks Śāriputra whether the father lied, and Śāriputra says no. The father is not guilty of falsehood, because he saved their lives and gave more than he promised. Her question about a lie that saves is this chapter’s question. See note 6. source ↩
  8. In the Mahāpadāna Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 14) the Buddha names six earlier buddhas, Vipassī, Sikhī, Vessabhū, Kakusandha, Koṇāgamana and Kassapa, and tells Vipassī’s life in detail. Gotama is the seventh in that line. That fits her ‘in this era’: the title Buddha is a function that recurs and not one man’s name, so Gotama himself was no more the final authority than any of the others. source ↩
  9. The image is the Buddha’s own. In the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 35.28) he says everything is burning, and goes through eye, ear, nose and the other senses in turn, burning with the fires of greed, hatred and delusion; the disciple who sees this grows disenchanted and is freed. In her cosmos the fire is a creative ‘transmuting’ flame, and in The Immolation of God the burning is what gives the world its life. source ↩
  10. She reads Chan as animist because mind is the whole of things. In What the Ghosts Actually Are the church’s name for this is Allmind: awareness is the ground of everything and not something that appears once matter gets complicated enough, which philosophers call panpsychism and the old world called animism. In 2025 Everyone Is a Shaman follows the same thread back to Lake Baikal. ↩
  11. This is the raft of the Alagaddūpama Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 22) in its Chan form. The sutta’s raft is the Dhamma itself, built to cross over and not to hold. Her added move is the one the bodhisattva makes: having crossed, you take the boat up again for those still on the shore, which is why Mahayana can keep its teachings and still call them provisional. source ↩
  12. Chan had its own enactments of this. Danxia Tianran (739–824), a pupil of Mazu, is said to have split a wooden Buddha statue and burned it to warm himself on a cold night. When the temple’s caretaker protested, he replied that he was burning it for relics, and that if wood yielded none, there was no harm in burning more. It is the story that most often illustrates Chan’s iconoclasm. source ↩
  13. The Christian mystics have their own version. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) is reported to have prayed to God to rid him of God, in Sermon 52 on spiritual poverty: the God of concepts and images has to be given up for the God behind it. Wording varies by translation, but commentators agree it asks for detachment from every idea of God, which is the force of her ‘flipped’ saying. source ↩
  14. This is the thesis of Buddhism in the United States, where Buddhism is described as an ontological framework without epistemology: a view of reality, with the religious apparatus around it meant to be discarded. Her parenthesis, ‘what Mahayana Buddhists believe’, marks the claim as the Mahayana self-understanding and not a neutral definition; compare her wider argument about what counts as a religion in Is Rationalism a Religion? What Is a Religion?. ↩