Killing the Buddha
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.
The idea of "killing the Buddha" comes from a famous Zen line, the context of which is easy to imagine: After years on his cushion, a monk has what he believes is a breakthrough: a glimpse of nirvana, the Buddhamind, the big pay-off. Reporting the experience to his master, however, he is informed that what has happened is par for the course, nothing special, maybe even damaging to his pursuit. And then the master gives the student dismaying advice: If you meet the Buddha, he says, kill him.
Why kill the Buddha? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way.
Why Killing the Buddha? For the ezine's purposes, killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving past the complacency of belief, for struggling honestly with the idea of God. Killing the Buddha insists that if religion matters at all it matters enough to be taken to task. They believe it’s high time for a new canon to be created, and that the Web is just the place to collect it. They refuse to accept the internet as a world wide shopping mall. They know intuitively it can be a sort of Talmudic cathedral, a tool of transcendence made of words.
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