Killing the Buddha

As Captain Jack says, "Interesting"

Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the "spirituality" section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it.

Comments

[Fredrich Ulrich]

Why can't we discuss killing Jesus, or killing Moses, or killing Mohammed? The old Zen koan of "If you meet Buddha on the raod, kill him." reveals the self-transcendent nature of Buddhism. Thoe goals of the other religions, as I understand, is not to get to the place where you don't need them anymore. I see many Christians practicing Buddhism and quoting this koan as if they are saying something profouondly original, but they would never say it about their own tradtitions' founder. If Zen had developed in one of the other religious traditions, that is just what they would have said too. Why don't we feel free to say about other religious founders what we feel free to say about Buddhism? Why should the word "Buddhist" be used for organized religion in general?
Rev. Fredrich Ulrich, Manitobe Buddhist Church