Why I Am a Buddhist: No-Nonsense Buddhism with Red Meat and Whiskey
Profound and amusing, this book provides a viable approach to answering the perennial questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How can I live a meaningful life? For Asma, the answers are to be found in Buddhism.There have been a lot of books that have made the case for Buddhism. What makes this book fresh and exciting is Asma's iconoclasm, irreverence, and hardheaded approach to the subject. He is distressed that much of what passes for Buddhism is really little more than "New Age mush." He
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Why Buddhism?,
The reasons for a person’s religious belief, or lack of belief, are highly personal, especially for individuals who adopt a religion other than their birth religion. Much can be learned too from a religion without becoming a formal adherent. Thus, I was eager to read Stephen Asma’s new book “Why I am a Buddhist”. I have been studying Buddhism for many years, mostly in adult life, and was eager to compare my experiences with Asma’s. In addition, I am aware of the diverse nature of the appeal Buddhism presents to many Americans, as this diversity is suggested in the subtitle of Asma’s book, “No-Nonsense Buddhism with Red Meat and Whiskey.”
Asma is professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at Columbia College in Chicago. He has written extensively on Buddhism and taught it at the university level. Asma makes a great deal of the difference between what he terms “Chicago” Buddhism and what he sees as a more New Agey form of California Buddhism. Asma also is a musician who has played jazz and blues on the guitar for many years. My background in philosophy and in music (playing classical music on the piano) further attracted me to this book.
Asma writes in a colloquial, punchy style that will probably be of greatest appeal to young people. The book wears its learning lightly with many references to popular American culture as well as to scientific literature and to Buddhist texts. The books’ style results in a mixed feel. Portions of it didn’t seem especially useful to me, but much of the book spoke with insight. I attend a Buddhist Sutta studies course, and found Asma useful to our ongoing discussion of detachment and sexuality as it related to a specific Buddhist text. Asma’s comments on sexuality and on Buddhism and art seemed particularly good, and much of the rest also was valuable. Thus, I found the book helped explain the attractions of Buddhism, for Asma and for others and for myself. In the rest of this review, I focus on those portions of Asma’s discussion of Buddhism of most interest to me.
Well, what then is the appeal of Buddhism? Many Americans learn from Buddhism because they find themselves unable to believe in theistic forms of religion and yet seek a spiritual basis for their lives. This is the fundamental appeal of Buddhism to Asma as he recounts how he spent a rebellious adolescence moving from religious skepticism to a turn to Transcendentalism, and ultimately to Buddhism with its emphasis on change and on the here and now and its rejection of fixed transcendent entities such as God or gods and the soul. Asma views the Buddha as a philosopher, and this is certainly an important part of the attraction Buddha has for many Americans. (Asma also distinguishes American forms of Buddhism from the varying forms of cultural Buddhisms found in Asia.)
As Asma’s understanding of Buddhism deepened, he came to learn from it a great deal of the nature of desire, its causes, and its control. This too is something I have tried to learn from Buddhism with, as in the author’s case, limited success in putting it into practice. Asma developed an understanding of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and of the value of meditation and concentration in curbing the passions to avoid being ruled by them. Asma teaches his own version of the Buddha’s teaching of the “Middle Way” which for him involves accepting the passions without being overcome. He is particularly concerned, as most people probably are, with sexuality and erotic passion. I found what Asma had to say valuable and linked well to Buddhist teachings and my own experiences.
Other chapters of the book explore Asma’s adventures as a single, divorced parent in raising his son, including the need to curb one’s expectations and desires, to control one’s own ego, and to let go. These are each valuably Buddhist lessons. Asma also finds in Buddhism a tolerant, accepting attitude towards the sciences which does not require the rejection of modern inquiry in the name of religious faith. Asma seems to qualify or reject Buddhist teachings that, in some form, may conflict with scientific teachings of with the Western mind. Thus he has critical things to say about Buddhist teachings of rebirth and karma. In these respects, his teaching owe a substantial amount to another contemporary Buddhist writer, Steven Bachelor, in his book “Buddhism without Beliefs”. Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening
Asma appealed to me with his discussion of Jack Kerouac and with his analogies (which the Buddha also drew) between attaining religious insight and learning to play a musical instrument. The unhappy details of Kerouac’s own life sometimes detract from the importance of his understanding of Buddhism as…
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|Blue-Collar “Chicago Buddhism”,
There are a lot of good things about this book. The author, Stephen Asma, does a great job laying out the basics of Buddhism, providing just enough technical language to educate the reader without getting bogged down in Sanskrit terms or doctrinal details. He provides an important framework for thinking about Buddhism in terms of a “first language” (cultural Buddhism) and a “second language” (learned Buddhism).
But parts of the book are quite disappointing. The author teaches philosophy at a Chicago college and I suspect that he wrote parts of this book to serve as a textbook in his classes. Some of the chapters seem very much directed at an adolescent population. His discussion of cravings, for example, is all about romantic love. Then he has a chapter about being a parent that has only a rather tenuous connection with the concept of “no-self” that is the purported subject of the chapter. It does include some very entertaining anecdotes that I’m sure work well in the classroom.
His chapters on Buddhism and science and Buddhism and the arts are much better. He demolishes the quantum mechanics mysticism that seems very popular in New Age thought and demonstrates nicely the connection between Zen and the arts.
“Chicago Buddhism” is his term for a Buddhism that is separated from what he calls “hippie” values and is more based in the gritty details of everyday life. I liked his ideas about Buddhism being a force that can help neutralize our Western consumerism. But his ending chapter, which discusses a more “muscular” Buddhism with examples of violence in Buddhist countries, ends with an odd essay on the struggle between Buddhism and Christianity in modern China that seems to have little to do with the rest of the book. It’s a final example of the uneven quality of the sections in the book – some are very good and others are not.
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