They bought a Ford Tempo for a dollar, saving it from the junkyard. It was more than a decade old, the tires needed to be replaced, and the windows didn’t all roll down, but they figured the engine ran well enough to get them across the country.
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Manseau was raised in a Boston suburb by a former nun and a priest. His father kept vestments in the front hall closet and carried around holy oils in case someone died in front of him. He didn’t have a parish–he’d transgressed by marrying–but he would hold mass in the dining room for a small community of priests who’d married nuns. Because his family was on the outside, Manseau never felt like he belonged to the Catholic church, but he studied religion in college, lived for a short while in a monastery, and, when he met Sharlet, was keeping a giant wooden cross over his bed (which he removed after realizing it could be “received strangely” by guests).
Sharlet describes his upbringing as “religiously eclectic.” He lived with his mother, a nonpracticing Pentecostal, but identified as Jewish, like his father. His mother exposed him to a number of religions, taking him to visit monasteries, ashrams, synagogues, and churches, often where her friends were singing in choirs or ringing bells. For reasons that escape Sharlet’s memory, a Buddhist nun camped out in their attic for a while, and when he was 16, his mother invited people of various faiths to pray over her as she was dying of breast cancer, as if to “audition each different god to see if it would help her.”
“We have different worldviews,” says Sharlet. “We couldn’t help but argue about ideas.” Even though they had no itinerary, “we’d end up fighting: should we turn left or right?”
Killing the Buddha makes no attempt to file down any edges. “There’s no way everyone can like everything in this book,” says Sharlet. “It’s like being in a congregation, where some jerk stands up and talks and you don’t like him and you wish he wasn’t there, but he is, and the transformative moment comes when you realize he is a part of you and a part of the story, so he’s worth listening to. That’s the idea of this book: it’s a congregation.”
