“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”: a vital hermeneutic proposal around Nietzsche

Abstract

This article seeks to elaborate a proposal for a vital hermeneutic interpretation of the out of doctrine interpretation of Linji’s kōan: “if you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him”. Although it is questionable to freely uproot its original meaning within the doctrinal body of Zen Buddhism, here it is proposed as possible to transfer this expression, endowing it with new meaning, as a matrix of interpretative order. At the same time, the transfer of this koan takes place around two interpretative keys. First, the figure of Buddha is taken here as a master, that is to say an authority, a doctrine, an interpretation or a truth to kill in order to express the inner voice. Second, the shelter of this expression in the properly human interpretative life as it can be deduced from a hermeneutic reading of Nietzsche’s work. In the present work it is also proposed that such a vital hermeneutic exercise throws us to hermeneutic and existential limits on which there is no definitive thing as absolute truth.