Here is one reaction to that at Quora:
[b]Ben Rode, The King’s Council at The Rode Institute
People who don’t truly understand this statement think that it means to resist charlatans who claim they are enlightened. Crucify the teacher…
Here’s the trick: In order to see the Buddha, you have to BE the Buddha. If you aren’t the Buddha, you can’t really understand the Buddha. Once you understand the Buddha, you can let him go. Not before.
Once you stand nose to nose with the Buddha (you “meet him on the road”) then you have no more to learn from the Buddha. At that point, holding on to those teachings becomes a crutch. an identity. No teaching is meant to be held onto. They are meant to provide an experience for where you are at in the moment. Hear the same thing later, and it will provide a new meaning, and a new experience.
Each teaching is a stepping stone to take you to the next level of understanding. Holding onto a teaching keeps you in place. It holds you into an identity.
“Kill the Buddha” doesn’t mean the Buddha is bad or wrong. It means you don’t need him anymore. In order to be done with him, you must first use him up.
Each teacher can only show you what they know. Once you know that, you will add to it what you know and transcend those teachings. Use the truths AND untruths of teachings to help you find your own truths. Then let go of the teachings. Then kill the Buddha. Not before.[/b]
Or, perhaps, as Michael Beraka at Quora suggested:
Like all Zen tropes, this famous dictum is multifaceted and highly dependent on context.
So, what’s your assessment? How multifaceted is it in any particular context of your choice.
And, more to the point [mine], how is this sort of assessment reconfigured from a “general description intellectual contraption” into an assessment of the behaviors one chooses on this side of the grave as that pertains to what one thinks one’s fate will be on the other side of the grave given the religious values that one holds near and dear here and now.
In other words, the part that you ever and always wiggle out of addressing by turning everything here into a discussion of me instead.
My kind of “objective religion”? In what [detailed] sense do you ascribe this to me?