PART FOUR: If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!

Learning to learn.

"... He[disciple] learns, once he is willing to give up being taught, that he already knows how to live, that it is implied in his own tale. The secret is that there is no secret..."

"... Everything is just what it seems to be. This is it!..."

"... The Zen way to see the truth is through your everyday eyes. It is only the heartless questioning of life-as-it-is that ties a man in knots. A man does not need an answer in order to find peace. He needs only to surrender to his existence, to cease the needless, empty questioning. The secret of enlightenment is when you are hungry, eat; and when you are tired, sleep..."

"... The Zen Master warns: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" This admonition points out that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real..."

"... The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring them..."

"... We must each give up the master, without giving up the search..."

"... We must learn that each of our lives can itself become a spiritual pilgrimage, an exiled searching without end. Our only comfort on this lonely journey is that for each man it is the same..."

"... Each accomplishment, itself, becomes the next obstacle to be overcome..."

"... And the brujo-sorcerer himself is never fully beyond his own follies. But he has learned to act with controlled folly..."

"... In a sense, nothing really matters, in and of itself, because the importance of things lies in the ways you have learning to think about them..."

"... The Man of Knowledge has come to see that any efforts on his part to try to control the nature of things, or to change others, is useless..."

"... Seeing through the eyes of a Man of Knowledge results in our finding ourselves alone in a world filled with folly..."

"... Controlled folly allows us to look at the world sometimes, so that we may laugh..."

"... So it is that there is nothing to be taught, but yet there is something to be learned. There is something we may come to understand, but not if we demand that it be explained to us. There is something that may happen to us, but not if we await its coming from outside or ourselves..."

"... Enlightenment and the freedom it brings are always imminent but our very efforts to catch hold of what we are seeking may prevent us from discovering what is already there..."

"... On our pilgrimage, we are defeated not only by the narrowness of our perspective, and our fear of the darkness, but our excuses as well..."

"... I see that there is no prison except that which I construct to protect myself from feeling my pain, from risking my losses..."

"... Whatever I gain will not change my life, and whatever pain I may have to endure, I will be able to survive..."

"... Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose..."

"... A man, after all, is only a man. He stands somewhere between absolute freedom on the one hand and total helplessness on the other. All of his important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data..."

"... It may not be fair that a man gets to have total responsibility for his own life without total control over it, but it seems to me that for good or for bad, that's just the way it is..."

"... This dilemma of living a life of total responsibility, within an existence of only partial knowledge and partial freedom, reflects the suffering of "Mankind drowning in the Great Sea of Birth, Death and Sorrow"[Christmas Humphreys]. A man who lives in a world without appeal, a world in which God has died, has no one else to forgive him. He will be "punished by his sins, not for them"[Ibid]. And so, each day he must forgive himself, again and again. He is subject to his own personal limitations, in a changing world, designed by a lunatic..."

"... New solutions breed new problems..."

"... A man can strive to grow, but this pilgrimage is merely an "unceasing journey from what we seem to be to what we are"[Christmas Humphreys]. Each day, each situation brings with it new uncertainties with which to cope. The world is essentially arbitrary in its movement, predictable only in the least important ways..."

"... The growing edge eats away at itself, and in a sense we have come no further than we were when we first started out. And yet, to be a man, in the best sense, is to be willing to keep moving, though we make no measurable gain..."

"... The most important struggles take place within the self..."

"... His[patient] truth lay, not in some distant place, but within himself..."the Sage arrives without going"[Arthur Waley]..."

"... Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free. Condemned to this freedom, it is difficult for a man to face the fact that he feels like a misfit in this life, difficult until he discovers the secret that "all men, finally, are misfits"[Melvin Maddock]..."

The Pilgrimage of the Young.

"... Each generation of adolescents makes its own sort of search for meaning..."

"... The way must not be sought by putting ecstasy into my body, but by finding it within my Self..."

"... trusting the young is the only hope of each aging generation..."

My Pilgrimage to the Sea.

"... Yet this part of why I return to the sea, to put myself in touch once more with my terrible loneliness, to learn again that I must bear this. To remember that this pain is the same for us all, that it is each man's weakness and his strength..."

"... surrender to things as they were..."

"... And should my body be battered even more, then I will live as I can, enjoying what I might, having what joy is available to me, and being what I may to the people whom I love..."

"... Along these way, like everyone else, I must bear my burdens. But I do not intend to bear them graciously, nor in silence. I will take my sadness and as I can I will make it sing. In this way when others hear my song, they may resonate and respond out of the depths of their own feelings..."

 

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
Dr. Sheldon B. Kopp