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 loudly asserts that it is time to "take the California out of Buddhism." He presents a spiritual practice that does not require a belief in creeds or dogma. It is a practice that is psychologically sound, intellectually credible, and esthetically appealing. It is a practice that does not require a diet of brown rice, burning incense, and putting both your mind and your culture in deep storage.
In seven chapters, Asma builds the case for a spiritual practice that is authentic, and inclusive. This is Buddhism for everyone. This is Buddhism for people who are uncomfortable with religion but yearn for a spiritual practice.
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Stephen T. Asma, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at Columbia College in Chicago. He is also a jazz musician and a popular guest on Chicago area NPR programs.Visit him at www.stephenasma.com.
Product Details
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing; First Edition edition (March 1, 2010)
Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.
Asma is the author of seven books, including "Against Fairness" (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012), "On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears" (Oxford Univ. Press), "Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads" (Oxford Univ. Press), "The Gods Drink Whiskey" (HarperOne), and the best selling "Buddha for Beginners" (originally published in 1996 and reissued in 2008). His writing has been translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew, Czech, Romanian, Hindi, Portuguese, and Chinese.
Asma has written for the New York Times, the Sunday Times, the Daily Beast, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, the Fortnightly Review, and Skeptic magazine.
Dr. Asma is a founding Fellow of the "Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture" at Columbia College Chicago. The Research Group is actively working on a philosophical and scientific understanding of the mind/brain that properly incorporates the emotional dimensions of mammalian consciousness.
In addition to Western philosophy, Asma has an abiding interest in Buddhism and Confucianism. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, teaching a "Buddhist Philosophy" seminar course as part of their Graduate Program in Buddhist Studies. In addition to Cambodia, he has also researched Asian philosophies in Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Laos. He has also lived and studied in Shanghai China.
Asma has lectured at Harvard, Brown University, the Field Museum, the Newberry Library, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and many more.
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 shown in his "The Dharma Bums" The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) and his biography of the Buddha, "Wake up". Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha And Buddhism resembles playing an instrument, whether blues guitar or classical piano, in the long-term practice and devotion that each require, learning every step of the way. Asma concludes his book by developing his analogy: "In both ventures, my skills wane significantly if I don't practice... Sometimes I challenge myself and run headlong at stuff that's over my head, and other times I lay back and just find the groove. My goal is not extreme virtuosity in Buddhism or music, but well-rounded living." In other words, there is always more to learn in playing music and in practicing Buddhism. This is the case, of course, with any religion.
Readers interested in Buddhism and in the appeal it has to a diverse spectrum of Americans will enjoy reading Asma's fine and personal book.
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.Read more ›
I started this book really enthused and excited. The early parts are interesting and full of life and an interesting point of view. Toward the middle of the book, that began to change and went downhill quite rapidly.
It began to fall apart in the section on relationships. The author's inability to see how his own attachments to ideas and rules about relationships cloud his attempts to rationalize problems in this area as a part of some great spiritual quest. The fact that he quotes Freud, Plato, and Darwin in his discussion of relationships pretty sums up the whole problem with how he views this area. He also begins to reveal his reductionist materialist views by treating human consciousness as just chemical fluctuations, but more about his mistaken scientific interpretations later.
In the section on parenting, he reveals his lack of understanding of his own behavior and the inability of his Buddhist leanings to combat his dangerously aggressive reactions to perceived threats to his child. Punching cars which get too close and nearly wrecking his car while trying to keep a mosquito off his child (to whom wrecking the car would have caused FAR more harm) shows an incredible immaturity and irrationality, born at least in part from an amplified case of "first time parent" syndrome. His romanticizing of parenthood clearly reinforces that assessment.
He really lost me when he attacked "mystical" views of spirituality and several important schools of Buddhism - for example, characterizing Tibetan Buddhism as a "distortion" and dismissing it. His attempts to use science as a method to "disprove" mysticism was humorous at best. Like most pathological skeptics, he mistakes a clever use of poorly understood models for reality....
The basis for these attacks is clearly demonstrated to be a reductionist, materialistic view of reality which embraces the highly distorted pablum of mainstream science. In his discussion of physics, his lack of understanding of modern physics becomes glaringly obvious. In trying to debunk the "mystical" view of quantum physics, he confuses the wave-particle duality with the principle of indeterminism, which are two very different things. He also shows an absolute lack of knowledge of the serious research which has been done in the areas he is discounting, which is the exact opposite of a scientific attitude. On the science he gets a complete "fail."
As concerns his attempts at religious history in Asia, I am going to have a friend who seriously trained in this area go over the book and let me know what he thinks. If the author approaches this area with the same rigor as his science knowledge, I fear another major "fail."
Despite his apparent fondness for Buddha's original exhortation against dogma, the author seems to have more than his share to dish up, despite liberal quotes and stories about Kerouac and Ginsberg.
In the final analysis, it all just doesn't ring true. There are many parts which are interesting and quite good, but the overall feel and problematic areas of inaccuracy pretty much ruin the book for me.Read more ›
