22 CHICAGO READER | JUNE 10, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Books

Run, You FatBastardStephen Asma wants toknock the new-age nonsenseout of Buddhism.By Harold Henderson

Stephen Asma tries to avoidother Buddhists at parties.Once they hear what his reli-

gion is they’re likely to share a“mishmash of their pseudo-

Eastern-quantum-herbal beliefs,”expecting the same in return. “Ialways smile carefully and back

away slowly, looking desperately forthe bar,” he says.

Asma, who teaches philosophy atColumbia College, explains in hisnew book, The Gods Drink Whiskey:Stumbling Toward Enlightenment inthe Land of the Tattered Buddha,that “I am a Buddhist” isn’t quite thesame as “I am a Christian” or “I am aMuslim.” Buddha taught that every-thing, including the self, is transientand that if you get too attached toanything you’ll suffer and cause suf-fering. He then drew the logical con-clusion: if Buddhism itself becomesan object of inordinate attachment,you should discard it. Hence the say-ing, “If you meet the Buddha in theroad, kill him.” Reminded of this,Asma chuckles and says, “Yeah, I kill

that fat bastard every day!” Asma, the son of a Chicago steel-

worker, grew up Catholic but startedreading about Buddhism when hewas 15. He came to believe in whathe calls philosophical Buddhism: hedoesn’t meditate, he thinks scienceand the scientific worldview arehumanity’s best hope, and he’s on amission to “take the ‘California’ outof Buddhism.” This was his stridentmessage when he appeared atTransitions Bookplace in 1996 topromote his book Buddha forBeginners. He says his talk empha-sized the Buddha’s corrosively skepti-cal take on metaphysics and thesupernatural and his denial thatthere’s a soul that passes from one

[snip] If you don’t like heat, stay out of the kitchen. “If the Pope wants to tellAfricans not to use condoms, then he has left religion and deserves no more respectthan George Bush or Bill Clinton,” writes Sam Smith in his “Progressive Review.” “Ifthe Anglican church wants to perpetuate a second class status for gays, then weshould give the Archbishop of Canterbury no more honor than Tom DeLay.” —HH

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24 CHICAGO READER | JUNE 10, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Our Town

life to another. The audience didn’tseem offended, but the store manag-er started yelling that he was wrong.

Asma softened his tone a little twoyears ago, after he went to Cambodiafor a semester to teach Buddhism toa dozen Cambodian graduate stu-dents at the Buddhist Institute—anodd necessity because the country isonly slowly emerging from the devas-tation of the Khmer Rouge genocide.“In Cambodia you can’t go to thelibrary or the bookstore and buyBuddhist scriptures,” he says. Theresimply aren’t a lot of books around.“The cities have storefront shopswith old photocopy machines thatare constantly breaking down andbeing repaired. People bring in theirfew precious books and copy them. Iread Hesse’s Steppenwolf and aGraham Greene novel in these shod-dy copies.” He expects that’s how hisnew book will circulate there.

Books were the least of the casual-ties of the Khmer Rouge reign, from1975 to ’79, when just being able to

read or wearing glasses was enoughto get a person tortured and killed.Everyone Asma met had lost at leastone family member, usually many.

Cambodia’s rich heritage ofTheravada Buddhism hadn’t beenobliterated, but what survived oftenseemed like a shoddy copy. Asmalearned that people would leave shotglasses of whiskey in little “spirithouses” at the full moon to keep localspirits happy, make pilgrimages to apagoda said to contain the Buddha’stooth, and fertilize crops by directingflowing water over hundreds ofcarved penises. They didn’t knowmuch about the Buddha’s teachingsand didn’t always like listening to peo-ple who’d studied them. Two youngmonks who’d spent years studying inSri Lanka told Asma they couldn’tteach what they’d learned becausethey depended on daily handoutsfrom the devout. “If we preachedthese religious and philosophical the-ories,” they said, “we wouldn’t eat.”

Asma says he went to Cambodiawith an attitude “like the Protestant

attitude toward a lot of Catholic ritu-als—let’s clear all this stuff out.” Butwhile he didn’t lose his preference forphilosophical Buddhism, he began toappreciate the stories, the imagina-tive power, and the social glue thatthe superstitions of what he calls cul-tural Buddhism provide.

Cambodia is no one’s candidate fora holy land. As Asma describes it inhis book, it’s a place where “forapproximately sixty dollars, onecan . . . buy an ounce of marijuana, ahalf-gram of heroin, a handgun, anda full day at the brothel, finished offby a relatively decadent meal.” Hesaw a man shot to death next to hisregular spot in an outdoor cafe. Heroutinely encountered land mine vic-tims, some missing three limbs, beg-ging for coins or shining shoes. (Backhome in Chicago this led him toreply to an able-bodied panhandler,“Dude, you’ve got arms and legs.”) Hesaw the consequences of supersti-tion, as when suspicion of witchcraftled to a triple homicide (the victimswere so poor their house had to be

[snip] Does Christianity make more sense than free-market economics? Yes, according toWilliam Pfaff, quoted in the New York Review of Books: “A faith that the free play of market forceswill eventually end in Good is, in fact, more ‘absurd’ than religious belief, for there, at least, thereis a presumption of an intelligent Agent Who writes straight with His crooked lines.” —HH

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torn down to make their coffins).“Monks smoking cigarettes and hus-tling tourists for money at AngkorWat made my skin crawl,” he writes.

Yet Asma saw another Cambodiatoo. “The quiet pride and gentlehumor of my kindhearted friendKimvan, who lost most of his familyto violence,” he writes, “or the waymy grizzled hotel owner saved a babywho had been abandoned in thestreet and adopted him as his own—these experiences showed me a kindof human dignity and care that canbe witnessed more readily wherepeople have lost a great deal.”

Asma keeps coming back to anespecially humbling experience. Likemany Americans, he’s skeptical ofauthority and isn’t inclined to get onhis knees for anybody. But one dayCambodia’s supreme Buddhist patri-arch, Maha Ghosananda, came tovisit his class. Ghosananda lost hisentire family to the Khmer Rouge. In1993 he risked his life leading a 16-day, 125-mile walk for peace throughterritory the Khmer Rouge still con-trolled, and he subsequently lednumerous other peace walks. He’ssometimes called Cambodia’s Gandhiand arguably is working under worseconditions.

For safety reasons, Ghosananda’svisit to the institute had been keptquiet, writes Asma, “but as soon ashe emerged from the van he began tobe recognized by other monks, nuns,teachers, and laypeople. My studentsdropped to their knees in a group, asdid the rest of the crowd that wasnow gathering in the driveway of theinstitute. Some of the older Khmer,those who had lived through the hor-rible years of violence, began to weepquietly, and some sought to touch hisrobes or help him mount thestairs. . . . Never had I seen such aspontaneous, unstaged outpouring ofadmiration and gratitude.”

Asma sees Ghosananda as tran-scending the divide between philo-sophical and cultural Buddhism,though he’s quick to point out that ifGhosananda is something of aBuddhist saint it’s “not because heperformed a miracle, but because ofhis integrity, his nonviolent resistanceto these oppressive forces.” He was soin awe of the man that when someoneintroduced him to Ghosananda as ateacher of Buddhist philosophy hewas mortified. “I got a very weird feel-ing from this introduction,” he says,“like I had just learned the C Major

scale and somebody introduced me toMozart as a music teacher.”

Asma’s trip shifted his assumptions,a change he’s willing to call a spiritualawakening. Maybe the next time hemeets a new age Buddhist at a partyhe’ll have something to share. v

Wake-up Calls

Reclaiming the F WordIt took a couple badbreakups and a documen-tary film class for ThereseShechter to rediscover her values.By Cara Jepsen

F ilmmaker Therese Shechterusually waits a few dates beforeshe tells men about her new

autobiographical documentary, IWas a Teenage Feminist, which willbe screened this weekend at ChicagoFilmmakers.

“I sort of have to pick the righttime to tell them I’ve made this film,”says Shechter. “I told one man aboutthe film and he said, ‘Oh, are you afeminist?’ I said, ‘Yeah, aren’t you?’He didn’t call again, so I e-mailedhim. He said, ‘I really dig you, but Idon’t think I could date a feminist.’”

Shechter, who’s 43, wasn’t alwaysso quick to call herself one. Her doc-umentary, a 67-minute video thatexamines how the term’s connota-tions have changed since the 1970s,is a result of the process that got hercomfortable with the word again.“What happened to this movementthat changed people’s lives, and nowit’s a bad word?” she says.

In 1974, when Shechter was growingup in suburban Toronto, MarloThomas’s popular TV special Free toBe . . .You and Me had a big influenceon her. “That was a time that made mefeel really empowered,” she says.“Nothing around me made me feel thatway when I started to make the film.”

The video starts with a voice-overof Shechter saying she hadn’tthought about feminism in years.“What happened to my feminism

[snip] The last word on Dick Cheney. “It doesn’t matter whether he takes AmnestyInternational seriously,” says William Schultz, the organization’s director. “He doesn’ttake torture seriously, he doesn’t take the Geneva Convention seriously, he doesn’t takedue process rights seriously, and he doesn’t take international law seriously.” —HH

Boutique of the Week

W hile visiting a friend in Seattle five years ago,Margaret Jung bought her first pair ofCydwoqs (pronounced “sidewalks”), leathershoes handmade in California. They were $170

on sale—“the most money I’d spent on shoes in my entirelife,” she says. But after wearing them at her catering job—where she was often on her feet for 12 hours at a stretch—she found they were worth the money. “They were morecomfortable than anything else I had,” she says. “I didn’thave any leg or back fatigue.” She wanted another pair, butcouldn’t find anywhere in Chicago that carried them. So shedecided to open her own shoe store—Traipse, at 4724 N.Lincoln, in Lincoln Square. Besides Cydwoqs Jung carriesstyles for men and women by Lisa Nading, Camper, andGiraudon, all lines that fall in with her philosophy that shoes

should be both comfy and cool. There are no stilettos atTraipse, but there are chartreuse kitten heels by Lisa Nadingand strappy cork wedgies by Farylrobin. The store, whichopened in 2003, stocks 75-100 styles at a time and is popularwith fashion-conscious Lincoln Square folks, but Jung says it’sbeen a tough road. “At first I had only 30 different shoes tochoose from. People would come in and say, ‘Is this all youhave?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, this is all I have—but what I have isreally great!’” She dreamed about shoes every night duringthe store’s first year. “I would dream that I couldn’t get shoesthat were supposed to be coming in, or they’d be shoes that Ineeded to try to find for my store because a customer hadasked for them,” she says. “I was like, ‘If this goes on I’ll justhave to close my store.’ Now I only have shoe dreams everyonce in a while.” —Heather Kenny

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Margaret Jung

Traipse

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