Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible
by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet
Free Press

If you were asked to kill the Buddha you meet on the road, which method would you choose? Mercy stealth? Tarantino dismemberment? Supreme mental exertions?

Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet, unassuming and quick-witted seekers both, have opted for vehicular manslaughter. The Buddha is roadkill.

This is all a metaphor, of course. The Buddha is a symbol of man's vision of spiritual truth and his demise represents liberation from superficial truisms. "Show us the truth and we'll show you a lie, prove God is dead and we promise a resurrection," proclaims the preface to "Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible." But there are some actualities in this metaphor. The car is real, the roadtrip happened and the stories that come as dispatches from this talented pair of spiritual skeptics are, they say, "110 percent true."

Manseau and Sharlet spent a year on the road investigating some of the nation's wackiest religious eccentrics. They witnessed an attempted exorcism, a pagan fire festival and a sacrifice of Fig Newtons. They spoke with a possessed hermaphrodite, a cowboy preacher and a holistic tornado chaser — nuts on parade before a live, wry audience. This is a book of anecdote, not allegory, and if there are lessons to be learned, they are anthropological, not theological.

"Theology gets ignored in the way religious stories get told," Sharlet said recently, mopping his brow after a reading cleverly disguised as a tent revival meeting.

Manseau and Sharlet can hold their own as theologians and storytellers (judging from the valiant "tent revival," though, their strength is in writing, not in reading aloud). Both come from practicing religious families, the components of which sound like a bad joke (a priest, a nun, a Jew and a Hindu Buddhist), and their credentials as religious writers are solid — including winning an Utne Independent Press Award for their online magazine. Together, they appear to have absorbed the canon of theology and pap necessary for a retort to religion today. Ask about Thomas Merton and they'll give you "Chicken Soup"; mention Deepak Chopra and you're liable to hear some Talmudic scripture. These are smart boys, but, as Sharlet said, "we're not buying."

Often, that zeal to slay the Buddha overpowers any sympathy that might be felt for some of the seemingly silly practices the writers witness. Take the cult of Meher Baba, for example. Theirs is an exceptionally warm and fuzzy belief system, orbiting around a dead Indian guru whose external appearance, write Manseau and Sharlet, favors a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Ganesh. With great facility, the authors dispatch this hapless "Buddha" merely by reciting a children's book circulating in the community that conveys Baba's ubiquity in rhyme: "Baba, Baba in my soup. Baba, Baba on my stoop ..." Then the road-tripping writers are off, maybe in search of a Buddha their own size to pick on.

Other times, the authors hoist their enthusiasm center stage. In Geneva, Ill., they scribble the Book of Dina, a lapsed Calvinist stripper the two meet on their trip, on a cocktail napkin and seem certain it is as sacred a text they will find.

Preceding each dispatch from the road is an original work commissioned by the editors — 13 modern interpretations of the major books of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Even with its episodic Wiccans, Muslims and crack addicts, this "bible" cleaves to the Old Testament: Francine Prose deconstructs the sadistic nature of portions of the Seder in "Exodus," Rick Moody fashions Jonah into a gay copyeditor from Queens and Charles Bowden excerpts Isaiah to tell the true story of an Indian congressman in the Southwest. In one of the book's more cerebral "scriptures," Job becomes a Venn diagram.

These contributing pieces, ostensibly the biblical backbone of the book, are a "makeshift choir," write Manseau and Sharlet. While the interpretive chapters are personal and isolated, the running account from our storytellers is a seamless work of collaborative writing. Having decided to relate only those experiences they felt they had shared philosophically as well as circumstantially, Manseau and Sharlet succeed in writing in the first person plural without disingenuousness. The reader is truly unaware of differences in either personality or writing style and is thus spared the sidekick syndrome — there is no Dean Moriarty in this car.

"Killing the Buddha" is the song of "this strange godless, pious land," hummed to the tune of disillusion and disaffection. This "bible" gives scant evidence of a loving god (except for the one in the soup), and many signs of a Judeo-Christian angry God. Manseau and Sharlet report there is an abundance of Americans who love Him nonetheless ... and that curiosity and a car will confirm it.

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)