wrathful

The speaker discusses the concept of wrathful practices, which may appear negative or aggressive. They mention the Zen saying "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" as a shock tactic to emphasize the need to abandon anything that hinders personal growth. The speaker also mentions similar ideas in other religions, such as the idea of hating injustice in Islam. They caution against taking teachings out of context and using them for political ends. They also mention how ancient systems of analysis, like the Tarot, have both positive and negative interpretations that depend on the context. The main message is to understand these practices with compassion and not to misinterpret or misuse them. Hi everyone, I thought I'd talk today a bit about wrathful practices, and I call them wrathful because they seem to be negative, or they seem to be aggressive, or they seem to be hateful, all kinds of ways of looking at them, and that is the most mundane. So, for example, something you may have heard from the Zen tradition is, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Now, this does not mean that you should go around killing Buddhas, or people that you know who are Bodhisattvas. That is not the way it's meant. It's meant as a shock tactic, and what it actually means is that if something gets in the way, and that includes the practice of meditation, that includes the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, however, the sitting against a wall, staring at it, which is one of the main practices of Rinzai Shakyamuni's meditation, if that gets in the way of you as a person, then you should either do something else, or take a different path, or abandon that path. So the killing of the Buddha is really quite an advanced idea or practice, and you'll see it in other religions as well. For example, I can't remember which name it is, but one of the 99 names, the camel, incidentally, knows the 100th name of Allah, but one of the names of Allah is hate. But, of course, you're hating injustice, you're hating any form of negative behavior. It's really about jihad. It's like jihad, the idea of holy war. This is an inner battle. It's nothing to do with the external Islamist, let's kill everyone who's in some way affecting us badly. You know, Muhammad himself, they kept saying, you know, we're going to get wiped out in the early days of Islam. We're going to get wiped out. We need to be more aggressive. We need to be more aggressive. And he refused to do it. And, of course, eventually things were pushed into a corner, and he developed ideas of warfare. He developed ideas around warfare that made it something that was, you can't say, warfare is never reasonable in the external world. But he did develop that system, and, you know, there it is. The thing is that people just take parts of it, and they use it for political ends. It's just like taking the Old Testament and saying, well, you know, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but we will give three and ten and five hundred teeth for every one tooth that is taken from the just and the good. This is nonsense. This is taking a teaching and reducing it to its absolute most horrible and most useless form. So you have to understand these things, how they're meant. They're not meant as absolutes. They're meant to be understood with compassion and understanding, and all the other teachings have to be taken into account at the same time. So, or we might look at another place where it exists, is in the systems, ancient systems of analysis, whether those are pagan. Let's take, for example, the Tarot, which I'm quite familiar with. This is a system of fortune-telling, and it has some very negative, let's take the Major Arcana. It has things like the lightning-struck tower and death, and really, you know, quite horrendous, and some of these cards can be reversed, they can be reversed, and any card can have that negative or that positive meaning. The point is, if you reverse the death or you reverse the tower, it becomes building. You destroy something, it's built up again. Death is a rebirth, and so on and so forth. So the meanings are always something that are interpreted. So this is why, for example, Tarot reading, forms of paganism, are a form of choice, where you choose the bits and the useful bits, the pragmatic bits. So this is the important thing, is not to just take these teachings and try and present them in a way that is actually hurtful to yourself and towards others. Anyway, that's a brief introduction to the idea of wrathful or so-called negative practices. I hope that's useful. Bye now.