|
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible
by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet
with A. L. Kennedy, Francine Prose, Michael Lesy, lê thi diem thúy, April Reynolds, Peter Trachtenberg, Darcey Steinke, Charles Bowden, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Eileen Myles, Rick Moody, Randall Kenan, and Haven Kimmel
The Free Press, 2004, 292 pages
In late 2000, Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet launched a web magazine that provides a space in which “the supposedly non-religious” could “think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be.” They called the magazine “Killing the Buddha,” after a famous Zen story:
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. (Killing the Buddha Manifesto)
The first print book to emerge from the KTB endeavor, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, is a welcome sight in a world that has a serious need for Buddha-killers, a world in which everything from Jesus to the American flag are permeated by a members-only sacrosanctity and need some real cage-rattling. Mainstream Christians, for example, excoriate the scholars of the historical Jesus who challenge deeply embedded images and understandings that threaten to bring Christian faith to a state of spiritual bankruptcy. These scholars are Buddha-killers who, in stripping away centuries of detritus, may ultimately unveil a Jesus who is more than an expression of one’s longing and who will not stand in the way of the believer or the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God. Buddha-killers are, indeed, a discomforting lot. But we need them now, perhaps more than ever.
Manseau and Sharlet model their book on the Bible, “Because in America, the first nation founded on secularism, the Bible is always there, the book waiting for a sweaty-palmed rendezvous in every hotel room. There’s no refuge from the Bible’s reach.” They engaged the services of thirteen fine writers to riff and midrash on a number of biblical texts. Manseau and Sharlet themselves contribute a Psalter, interspersed throughout the book, chronicling a year-long car trip around the U. S. in which they unsystematically explored the many and varied expressions of spirituality to be found in this so-called Christian nation.
Killing the Buddha is thus an up-and-down ride in which peaks of insight coexist with valleys of uncertainty. “Like the original,” Manseau and Sharlet explain, “this Bible crosses freely between genres, between history and prophecy, confession and myth.” The contributors’ pieces include fiction along with nonfiction critique and rants. The most effective among these, for me, were Michael Lesy’s “Leviticus” and lê thi diem thúy’s “Ruth.” The former is a critical reflection born of the author’s recent raw grief -- “Every three or four years, someone in my family got sick and died and I buried them. No whispered secrets: just twelve years of death and dying” -- a surprisingly effective vantage point from which Lesy discovers the “insistent inquiry” that is “at the center of the Torah.” The latter piece, too, is enmeshed with death, the death of the author’s mother, and of the daughter’s journey to and from Vietnam to attend to that death. “Let the words be humble,” she writes, “let them know the world did not begin with words, but with two bodies pressed close, one crying, and one singing.”
With such variety among the voices and styles of the thirteen contributors, the Manseau/Sharlet Psalter provides a consistent authorial voice in the midst of diverse explorations. The boys (as I came to reference Manseau an Sharlet in my mind while I read) began their trip from a vulnerable place -- a rusty Ford they bought for a dollar -- and remained vulnerable through a series of encounters that ranged from charming to downright scary. Summaries will not do their journey justice, but by riding along with them the reader will see manifestations of Christianity, and the personalities associated with them, unlike any on The 700 Club or EWTN. Like “Two Foot” George McVay, a rancher/preacher who tells his congregation that growing in faith is “like being Michelangelo, carving David. You do it by not accumulating doctrine, but by shearing it away. It’s hard work, cuttin’ marble. You don’t get it done fast,” and then goes out into the bitter cold to attend to birthing cows. And Kennedy, a Calvinist stripper who dreams of tornadoes. We also meet earnest American followers of Tibetan Buddhism in a monastery in Maryland, and witness the Heartland Pagan Festival in the company of mother/daughter witches who have very different degrees of interest in offering hospitality to the authors’ curiosity. The boys are observers with no agenda but to see and hear and report. They have thereby honored their subjects; where a Daily Show-style snide remark might have been obvious and tempting, they have opted for eloquent empathy for which the reader cannot be too grateful.
Take and read.
|
