Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible

by Peter Manseau

Now in paperback -- the book that caused a religious and critically acclaimed stir. Publishers Weekly called it "the most original and insightful spiritual writing to come out of America since Jack Kerouac first hit the road." The Buffalo News hailed it as "one of the most eccentric and fascinating books of the year." O, The Oprah Magazine said "This collection proves that fear and trembling are human, but a sense of humor is divine."
Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet have created a work of calling that is as odd, moving, and inspiring as the people and the scriptures they encountered. Whether it is Manseau and Sharlet telling their "psalms" from outposts as unexpected as a strip club or a cattle-auction barn, Peter Trachtenberg unraveling the Gordian logic of Job via the Borscht Belt, Rick Moody finding a modern-day Jonah in Queens, or Haven Kimmel shocking and thrilling us with her Revelation, what emerges is not an attack on religion, but a quizzical, fascinating look at it from the inside. Killing the Buddha is a positively riveting look at the facets of true belief.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Philosophy, Sociology, Short Stories

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2003

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick background: Killing the Buddha was originally a weekly religious webzine—and still is, in a slightly different format—that is written for the sort of people who feel uncomfortable in churches or ashamed to be caught in the "spirituality" section of their bookstore (to borrow from the site's manifesto). Or, in their own words, "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." They collect news, articles, essays, stories, and other tid-bits from all corners of religion in America (and often beyond) and have a general policy of skepticism towards anyone who claims to have a definite answer, from evangelical Christians to faith-critical atheists because both have a tendency to stop asking questions.

Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible is a reimagining of the Christian Bible on these terms. Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet have written the core of the book, a religious travelogue that covers a wide swathe of territory, including a cowboy church in Texas and a pagan gathering in Kansas, among a wide variety of other manifestations of the search for God (or god, or gods, etc.) that they found on their nationwide religious roadtrip. They've called this section the Psalms. The rest of the book is comprised of essays, short stories, and memoirs written by a variety of authors, journalists, and poets. Each was given the task of rewriting, reflecting on, or in some way interpreting an individual book of the Bible.

The results are kind of uneven, but that is part of the point. Each author has a different style of writing (not unlike the Bible) and each has a different approach to faith and religion, from the openly hostile to the devout, with a few struggling agnostics in between. The result is some of the most exciting, vital, and honest writing about faith, religion, and God that I have read.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As for me: The Lessons I learned from Blind Joe Death made me a kinder person. But only for a little while. My father died; my mother died; my wife died: After each death, I became a more decent person. But it never lasted. After a while, I'd forget how close death really is, how vulnerable we all are, how short a time we have to breathe the air and stand in the light. How foolish it is, under these circumstances, to treat people cruelly or callously, or inattentively.

I keep trying to remind myself.

An excerpt from Leviticus by Michael Lesy
Killing The Buddha


My sin has always been inattentiveness. To everyone in my life, you deserve, require, and should receive more from me. I, on occasion, make a commitment to do more and be more for the people in my life. These are lessons I easily forget.

It's June so, of course, I'm fuckin' up.

And now I'm here trying to remind myself.

[Jeff Sharlet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a coauthor. I think it's pretty good, but it's not really for me to say.

[Sue · Rating 1 out of 5]

Based on an interesting & promising concept, but I didn't like the execution. I found the various essays too cynical, not to mention often incomprehensible. It's odd, because I've read one good book by each of the two coauthors:

. "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," by Jeff Sharlet, which I found interesting tho' not all that well-written, and

. "Songs for the Butcher's Daughter," by Peter Manseau, which was excellent.

But somehow this joint effort didn't work.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking for God in America

I always preferred the sanitized version of that very Zen-like bit of ancient Zen Master advice that is the central idea of this book, namely: If you meet the Buddha by the side of the road, kick him. It was always a bit too much for me to recognize that the actual injunction is to "kill him." What Lin-Chi I-Hsuan (?-867), who is recognized as the founder of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism, actually said was:

Kill anything you happen on. Kill the Buddha if you happen to meet him...Kill your parents or relatives if you happen to meet them. Only then can you be free, not bound by material things, and absolutely free and at ease. (from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, p. 398)

To get a feel for the shock of what Lin-Chi I-Hsuan said, imagine a Christian religious leader saying, "If you meet Jesus by the side of the road, kill him." Of course, that is what the Bible had us doing so long ago (although something is greatly altered in the interpretation). Or think of the experience of seeing the Buddha by the side of the road as similar to seeing Christ's face in the Shroud of Turin. We have done that.

The idea is that whoever you might meet by the side of the road is a fraud. He certainly is not the Buddha. If you follow him you will be following a false path. Therefore kill him.

Or, as the authors of this book have it: "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." (p. 1)

But I am compelled to point out that this is merely the beginner's understanding of what it means to kill the Buddha. What I-Hsuan was really pointing to is renunciation. The act of killing the Buddha is a symbolic way of renouncing the trinkets of this world and its delusional thinking. It is a way to dispel the false dichotomies, the bugaboos of good and evil; it is a way to throw off the heavy load with which the socialization process has burdened us; and also a way to challenge the biological imperatives of the evolutionary mechanism.

What this renunciation of the pillars and icons of the world leads to is the freedom that comes with nonattachment, sometimes referred to as nirvana or samadhi. As long as we are attached to this world we are not free. Once we are nonattached we can return to the world and draw water, cook rice, and live without delusion or fear. Renunciation, as it leads to nonattachment, paradoxically allows us to regain the world but in a way in which the gross material and biological desires of the world do not affect us.

The authors, along with thirteen contributors who write personal essays on various chapters of the Bible, try to get this point (or at least a similar point) across by looking at religion in America while exposing the absurdities and contradictions in the Bible. It is a little like Jack Kerouac's On the Road meets Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth.

I think Mark Twain would approve of the content, although I suspect he would like the prose to be more direct instead of so preciously wrought. A. L. Kennedy's piece on the "inexplicable" God of Genesis, which sets the tone and opens the book (after an introduction entitled, "Mortal, Eat this Scroll"), is beautiful rendered and intensely felt in a dreamy sort of way: the kind of prose much admired in literary magazines and writer's seminars. We all wish we could write so well. I also liked Peter Trachtenberg's quasi-logical take on the trials and tribulations of Job, to mention two of the essays.

Interspersed between the essays are chapters describing the trek across America taken by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. They begin in New York at a Puerto Rican Pentecostal church in the shadow of the towers that are no longer there, and end up in a bikini bar in Geneva, Illinois. (Seems right.) Their experience is filled with gritty Americana, reminding me in its way of Paul Simon's lyric, "They've all Come to Look for America," and Vladimir Nabokov's escape, and a thousand and one road novels inspired by Kerouac.

Their cause is noble. They want to go beyond "a God too small to be God"; that is, beyond a God that has a bellybutton and a bad temper, a God that plays silly games with His creatures, torturing some in hell, rewarding some in heaven, assigning some to purgatory, like some petty, sadistic bureaucrat in the sky

What Mark Twain did for the 19th century, and H.L. Mencken did for the early 20th, Manseau and Sharlet are attempting to do for 21st century America. They write that "killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving past the complacency of belief, for struggling honestly with the idea of God."

This is key: the idea of God. Such a notion. Is this the God of Swords, the Bronze Age God of Battles, or is this the God of the Vedas, the Ineffable, about which nothing can be said? Or is it the God of Taoism, defined as only a divine tendency, a Way of the World and the Ten Thousand Things? Or is it the God of Zen which we must forever laugh at and kill?

Bottom line: a little too showy in the writing, a little too young in the comprehension, but vivid, worthwhile, and refreshing.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Indu · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's basically like this: two religiously flippant intellectuals (Manseau and Sharlet), and send them on a yearlong road trip to discover the underbelly of America's religious culture. Make sure they interact with the most wild and weird of cult hangers, a philosophical stripper working out of a converted Baptist church in Nashville to a clan of bloodthirsty Jesus freaks in Florida and a cross-dressing terrorist from North Carolina badly in need of an exorcism. Take all these "true" stories, turn them into the "Bible's Book of Psalms," and alternate them with 13 freshly imagined "books" of the Bible, written by iconic American writers such as Rick Moody, Peter Trachtenberg and Haven Kimmel-and, voila, a heretic's Bible is born.
Very satiric, ironic, and blatantly hilarious writing. I am so glad this book was in my senior courses because it was truly and enjoyable read.

[Liz Dean · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has great reviews and likable, interesting authors/editors. Also, the cover and title are fabulous. I am just not particularly interested in religion in the way these authors present it. The authors are really interested in what it means to believe particular religious tenets. The book contains personal interpretations of the content & meaning of books of the Bible, interspersed with stories from the editors' road trip across the USA to meet/discover spiritually interesting and unusual people and places.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent little book has numerous authors, most of whom have produced beautifully artistic and compelling articles which alternate between contemporary bible exegesis and tales of the current weird-ass state of American religion. A couple of chapters are too arty and boring, otherwise this is a five-star book.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some absolutely brilliant pieces of writing in this extremely Jewish book. The writers they find to use essays and short stories to confront how religion relates to contemporary life are incredible. They all grasp at comprehension, organization, all the classic philosophical struggles but with that emotional connection that memoir and fiction can so dredge out of you.

The linking, interstitial essays of the editors' trip across America are by far the weakest points, blahing the book and serving as a comedown after each contributor's high point.

It definitely achieves its goal though: succeeding as a sort of long-form Buddhist koan to c0ntemplate the mysteries of existence with no sure answers.

[George Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but inconsistent. Some essays were excellent and others were dull and barely worth reading Fascinating glimpse as a travelogue on a vast range of the American religious experience from snake handling to pagan rituals. Sounds like an battalion of Army infantry soldiers!

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

there were a few gems I remember reading from the original blog post but overall, too much snark and faith deconstruction in one place is toxic.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyway, I can't stress to you enough how magnificent this book is. I keep trying to force various friends to at least read excerpts from the book, but the title seems to frighten people. My explanation of what it means never seemed to help any, so I'll refer you the authors' introductory essay, available on their website, www.killingthebuddha.com.

If you can't be bothered to visit the above links, here's the Sunday School version: Killing the Buddha is for people who are interested in religion but find the answers and explanations given in church to be a little too neat. This book is about the mess. It contains the work of thirteen different authors, each writing about a different book of the bible, and thirteen stories by the editors about their road trip around America looking for the face of religion. Most of the writing is brilliant, but of course some of the chapters are more brilliant than others. Before lending me the book, my sister raved on about Peter Trachtenberg's chapter, Job, which more than lived up to my expectations as a meditation on the nature of suffering. Samuel, by April Reynolds, strikes at the very heart of what has troubled religion since its very beginning: those who would use it as a means to gather power and glory to themselves. Though perhaps my favorite was Haven Kimmel's Revelation, which suggests, amongst other things, that basically John had gone off of his rocker when he wrote the last book of the Christian Bible. But maybe I'm just still bitter from reading (and discussing. over and over again.) that chapter so many times in Sunday School.

Then intertwined throughout are the tales of the people Manseau and Sharlet meet while driving around America. All of these stories are haunting, each of them moved me. But being a girl from Kansas, and more specifically, a girl who gets homesick when she watches Twister, it's not surprising that my favorite chapter was about storm chasers -- particularly, those who chase the super cells that create tornados. Swoon.

In short, Killing the Buddha is challenging, sickening, uplifting, and magnificent. Read it. Now.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have gotten way behind in my book reviews simply because I could not figure out how to approach a review of this book. It was, quite simply, the best book I have read in years. I picked it up a few years ago because I love the cover art - a cloudscape with a giant red X through it, as if to say 'NO PEACE FOR YOU' - and dropped off after the first few pages when school started. I picked it up again this summer and read it with veracity and exultation.
Manseau and Sharlet divied up the books of the old testament and shopped them out to various modern fiction writers, asking each of them to rewrite the book to reflect his or her own experiences of faith. In the meantime Pete and Jeff hit the road to discover where and how faith thrives in modern America, dividing their experiences into anecdotal parallels for thirteen psalms. The book itself is these two collections interposed - a psalmic story, a book of testament, a psalmic story, and so on. The continued insertion of Manseau and Sharlet's authorial voice keeps the reader from feeling disjointed or flung from one author to another, as well as giving a sense of continual timeline to the collection so that at the culmination in Revelations there is a sense of a destination reached.
This book is a bold contemporary look at the way we experience faith as a way of life and what bearing that has on our relationship to sacred texts written hundreds of years ago. Some of these stories stick closely to the examples set in the bible, changing only the setting and modernizing some of the circumstances, others are quirky departures from The Original that show faith as it is - evolutionary, interpretive, guidelines as opposed to cages. While my point of view is definitively non-Christian, I think this book makes a lot of really important points about religion in modern America without being what I would call sacreligious.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot to like, and even to love, in this eclectic collection of essays and ephemera. The short stories were almost all bad, but I loved the essays on Genesis and Exodus, as well as a few bits of the road trip memoir written by the two editors of the book. I dock a couple of stars for having their memoir end in a strip club, though. I mean really, guys--looking for religion in a strip club? Cliche!!! (This was also why I didn't like most of the short stories, as several were about some misunderstood doofus dude who gets to become a prophet. Yawn.)

[Mollie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the web mag..
but I found all of the essays in all the different styles to be a little bit tiresome after awhile.

Some essays were very accessiblee, some I had to work very hard to get and as they were one after another I had no idea how to gage my reading and felt bad when I just knew I was missing thigns because I was glossing over it.

it's a good read. and y'all should buy it if only to support the dudes who run the web mag. because they're pretty excellent.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, if for no other reason than it inspired me (a fundamentally non-religious person) to learn more about the Bible so I could actually understand the stories a bit better. At times, the essays were incomprehensible (so much so that I wondered why I was even reading the book), but there were other points at which I marveled at the spectacle. Definitely a must-read; whether you're a believer or not, I'm certain there is much to be gained from these explorations.

[Gini · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by the idea of this book as expressed in the introduction: kill the buddhas you meet, because they will keep you from getting to true religion and spirituality.
however, the stories are interesting, as are the author's experiences, but they don't live up to the intro.
if you are thinking of reading this book, skip it and just go read to the website killingthebuddha.com it has more good stuff on there anyway.

[Annemarie · Rating 3 out of 5]

great ambition for a book. i think my expectations were too high, and thus i was disappointed. some of these essays were really great. a couple of them were attempted polemics that succeeded only in offering the tone of an embittered and abandoned child. despite this, i think the book was absolutely worth reading, and the essays that were good i will revisit no doubt.

[Ann Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent essays with a Road Trip between chapters, entertaining and thought-provoking. Old stories told in fresh ways, with a journey of discovery as a counterpoint that adds immediacy and a sense of exploration of both life and the texts. This was my "Sunday School" text for the better part of three months.

[Bonnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A series of meditative (mostly negative) essays by different authors on various books of primarily the Old Testament, alternating with passages of a surreal road trip. Poor coherence overall of the two textual threads.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories/essays mixed with the authors' narrative of their encounters with some really interesting religious people. Not all stories are great, but most are really good and some are amazing. And it's not even that heretical!

[JM · Rating 3 out of 5]

Way different book than whatever it was I thought it was going to be. Has a modern writer write about a book in the Torah/Bible in a unique way. Virtually everyone in the book is at least extremely skeptical, but there's some good ol' American commentary throughout. Interesting read.

[Benjamin Sanfilipp-Cohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapters alternate between interesting first-hand looks into various religious expressions across America and rewritings of books of the Bible. A little over my head at times, but came away with a very cool, unifying picture of religion in America.

[Khaleed Ouafi-Zimmermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

All things considered, it's the most impressive book I've read in years. First, the cover gets you confused concerning its content, reason why I initially bought the book, secondly the story that goes on is purely a master work.

[Marjorie Hakala · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. More than lived up to the expectations built up by years of reading killingthebuddha.com.

[Adam]

The second book of the first book club I was ever in proved to be the second worst book I've ever read for the first time.

[Ryder · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the time I found this book remarkable and beautiful. I don't know what I would think now that I am enlightened.

[Marykate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book if you like reading about religions and religious sects.

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeff Sharlet is an alum of the college where I went/now work at, so this has been on my list for a while. I was not disappointed.

[Jacqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book full of prose and real life stories of the way religion is a disco ball