Stephen Asma tries to avoid other Buddhists at parties. Once they hear what his religion is they’re likely to share a “mishmash of their pseudo-Eastern-quantum-herbal beliefs,” expecting the same in return. “I always smile carefully and back away slowly, looking desperately for the bar,” he says.
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Asma, the son of a Chicago steelworker, grew up Catholic but started reading about Buddhism when he was 15. He came to believe in what he calls philosophical Buddhism: he doesn’t meditate, he thinks science and the scientific worldview are humanity’s best hope, and he’s on a mission to “take the ‘California’ out of Buddhism.” This was his strident message when he appeared at Transitions Bookplace in 1996 to promote his book Buddha for Beginners. He says his talk emphasized the Buddha’s corrosively skeptical take on metaphysics and the supernatural and his denial that there’s a soul that passes from one life to another. The audience didn’t seem offended, but the store manager started yelling that he was wrong.
Books were the least of the casualties of the Khmer Rouge reign, from 1975 to ’79, when just being able to read or wearing glasses was enough to get a person tortured and killed. Everyone Asma met had lost at least one family member, usually many.
Asma keeps coming back to an especially humbling experience. Like many Americans, he’s skeptical of authority and isn’t inclined to get on his knees for anybody. But one day Cambodia’s supreme Buddhist patriarch, Maha Ghosananda, came to visit his class. Ghosananda lost his entire family to the Khmer Rouge. In 1993 he risked his life leading a 16-day, 125-mile walk for peace through territory the Khmer Rouge still controlled, and he subsequently led numerous other peace walks. He’s sometimes called Cambodia’s Gandhi and arguably is working under worse conditions.
Stephen Asma
When: Tue 6/14, 7 PM
