As Zen Master Dae Kwang once said, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you meet a Patriarch, kill the Patriarch". This saying usually draws a weird response out of westerners. We would never say something like this about Jesus. Along the same lines Alan Watts once said, "I think the Bible should be ceremoniously and reverently burned every Easter". I imagine to most this statement seems perplexing and disrespectful, but is there something else that these two writers meant to convey, and what do they have in common?
In Zen Buddhism, it is the practitioners goal to recognize his own thought patterns and concepts in order to see reality as it is, free of illusions. When Dae Kwang says "Kill the Buddha", what he's really saying is kill your own conception of Buddha. Attachment is the issue here. If you are attached to a concept, creed, or belief you start to mistake your own idea for the real thing, and this is what ultimately causes our deepest anguish in life. We feel disconnected, always seeking for that explanation, that answer that was never there to begin with. This process is especially tricky for people who have thought they knew the answer all along, and suddenly find that it was never there in the first place. This is exactly the disillusionment I have experienced in my life with christianity, and I'll tell you now, it is not an easy thing to discover and even harder to dispel.
It is often forgotten that the books of the bible were written in the east, therefore you can expect a lot of different outcomes by reading it with a western mind. When the ten commandments say, "thou shalt have no other gods before me", I think we've missed the boat entirely on what this is actually saying. This usually evokes the memory of the 1950's movie where Moses comes down from Mt. Sinai, and finds all his followers worshiping a golden calf. OK, I can see it happening in a simpler time, but not in the post-modern world. It just doesn't occur this way in our society anymore. You may also think about money, sex, and drugs as being objects of worship. Getting warmer, but not quite there yet. The concept that we seem to miss is the contemplating of our own ideas, and how we may be misconstruing them for the world itself. So what does this have to do with bible burning?
A christian that becomes too attached to his bible is akin to a pharmacist who stays home and reads his index instead of actually knowing and practicing his own profession. When a pharmacist finishes his studies, he starts using that information in a practical way. On the same note, when new information comes to light, he doesn't take offense and cower back to his crutch. He uses it to become better at what he does. So what Alan Watts says is more in the spirit of "We need it no longer because the spirit is with us". Quite a profound thing to say.
I will be the first to say, as Richard Dawkins puts it, "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." But I can also appreciate how it has effected our cultures literature, and the good messages that it sometimes can inspire in people. My beef has been, and always will be, with Fundamentalist Religion in ALL its forms. If I have found any purpose in my life, it is to see to it that I do everything in my power to undermine this reign of terror.
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