The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha

by Asma, Stephen T.

• ISBN13: 9780060723958
• ISBN10: 0060723955
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-05-04
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In this astonishing journey through Cambodia and Southeast Asia, intrepid traveler and scholar Stephen T. Asma explores and explains the basics of Buddhism in a way that could not be more entertaining, nor more thought provoking. After the Vietnam War, the communist Khmer Rouge outlawed the practice of Buddhism in Cambodia. To enforce their decree they burned temples and jailed monks. Twenty years later, the newly reopened Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh invites the young American professor Stephen Asma to come teach Buddhism to its students to help resurrect the ancient religion after years of suppression. The oldest and purest form of Buddhism, Theravada, once flourished in Southeast Asia, and Asma scours the countryside to find its traces. He climbs mountains to meditate in temples housing golden Buddhas and treks through jungles in pilgrimage to sites swallowed up by overgrown banyan trees. What he finds has little in common with the popular forms of Buddhism practiced in America. Buddhism Cambodia style is thoroughly intertwined with a sturdy set of Hindu fertility rituals and popular beliefs in ancient local spirits who enjoy gifts of flowers, fruit, and whiskey. Asma discovers that not even the Khmer Rouge, with its communist antireligious prejudices, could destroy these traditional practices. Walking the streets of the cities, Asma talks with saffron-robed monks and discusses philosophy with hard-drinking rogues, while a world filled with elephant-taxi drivers, dignified prostitutes, entrepreneurial street children, and unrelenting beggars maimed by abandoned land mines crosses his path. He weeps at the infamous killing fields, philosophizes over marijuana pizza, and carouses with students at a Cambodian karaoke bar. He experiences life and witnesses death in ways that will change him forever, and returns home to Chicago with life lessons that can benefit us all. With stories of political assassinations, over-zealous Christian missionaries, animistic monkey-god-and-phallic-symbol rituals, and an eye-opening visit to Asma's classroom by a Buddhist monk thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace prize, this chronicle of a year of living dangerously provides a compelling, darkly comic, never-before-experienced look into the clash of cultures in a little-known corner of our shrinking world.

Author Biography

Stephen T. Asma is a professor of Buddhism at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois.

Table of Contents

A preface on pop-Buddhists and academics
Introduction : getting my hands dirty	p. 1
The ring of Gyges : living in Cambodia with impunity and hedonism	p. 15
Reason for the few, magic for the many? : monkey gods and penis worship	p. 49
"My God can beat up your God" : missionaries	p. 84
"Britney Spears? : never heard of her" : the virtues of being uncool	p. 120
Karma and the killing fields	p. 150
Seeing a man get shot to death	p. 183
Lessons to bring home : transcendental everydayness	p. 217
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

The Gods Drink Whiskey
Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha

Chapter One

The Ring of Gyges

Living in Cambodia with
Impunity and Hedonism

One of the main ways Khmers in Phnom Penh practice their Buddhismis by subjecting themselves to traffic. The constant near-misses, last-minuteswerves, precarious balancing acts, and obstacle-course road conditions would put the average person into a stress seizure. Yet the locals remain unperturbed, which is why the no-system traffic system works. If you can get across town in full possession of your calm demeanor -- your peaceful state of equilibrium -- then you are the Buddha.

The "roads" can only be charitably described as ditches. The streets are dirt pathways with potholes big enough to lose whole cars, and almost all transport is done by motos (minibike scooters, the drivers of which are called moto-dups) or cyclos (bicycle rickshaws with the passenger seat in front). Everyone travels by moto, and it is not at all uncommon to see whole families precariously perched on a single bike. Walking down to the Foreign Correspondents' Club for a drink, I saw a little motor scooter, made for two, with a one-year-old baby balanced on his father's lap while the mother and two more children sat cramped together behind him on a ten-inch seat. The record number that I witnessed was six family members, but after a few months even this failed to register with my acclimated senses.

The good thing about traffic is that you can go from one end of townto another on a moto for about two thousand riel, or fifty cents. The badnews is that every time you get on one of these you get a serious I'm-not-fucking-around brush with your own mortality. The only time I everenjoyed my moto adventures was when I was inebriated, which happenedmore than I should admit, but there it is. On those occasions, the paralyzingfright was transformed into exhilaration.

There are no traffic rules in Cambodia, and there can be hundreds ofmotos at any one time moving on one city block in the capital. If you haveto turn left, you just drive straight into oncoming traffic and hope everyonesees you. If the oncoming traffic doesn't get you, the giant potholesand rubble will. There are some nasty accidents in Phnom Penh, butfewer than one would imagine. The dodging and weaving of the relaxeddrivers, seemingly drugged on their own natural phenobarbital, makesfor a successful rhythm of mutually accommodating motion.

I ordered a Mekong whiskey at the Foreign Correspondents' Club,and pulling up a seat at the balcony, I watched the action below me inSisowath Quay. The view extends over the Tonle Sap River, and I watched the fishing boats troll downstream. A table of British reporters and photographers were attacking huge steaks next to me, seemingly relievedto be eating something besides rice and fish. Down below me, young saffron-robed monks meandered in a small group. A little girl wholooked no more than four years old was begging unsuccessfully, and whenshe turned in my direction I saw that she had a newborn baby (undoubtedlyher sister) strapped around her body with a wrap cloth. One babycarrying another baby. This kind of thing never ceased to affect me, andit was especially troubling because, as I came to understand later, thischild's mother, and countless others like her, had put her child out on thestreet because the sight of a child's misery was more financially rewardingin these expatriate parts of town.

Having been to Cambodia once before, I naively thought that I wassomehow "ready" for it this time. But you can never really be ready forCambodia. It's sort of like seeing a really good punch coming at your face,bracing yourself as best you can, but getting knocked senseless anyway.The poverty in Phnom Penh is truly profound -- it makes Americanurban ghettos like Cabrini Green in Chicago seem like plush utopias bycomparison. Unlike America, where poor people suffer from obesity,poor Khmer people actually suffer from having no food.

I noticed a little Khmer boy, about five years old, who was causingmischief with every hapless passerby. This was Bunly, a kid I had met theweek before when he asked me to buy an old copy of the Phnom Penh Postthat he had fished out of a gutter. Bunly had acquired excellent Englishby simply living in the streets around the barang businesses on SisowathQuay. The week before he had worked every grifter's angle on me, until Ifinally acquiesced and bought his tattered newspaper. I was sad that a kidthis small already had the makings of a swindler, and I felt that dumbluck had put his birth in a place where childhood would be so short-lived.

On the northern side street, a sixty-something crippled man teeteredacross the street on a homemade cane that he'd fashioned from a kitchenmop handle.The poor guy's head was disfigured and partly covered too.One sees a lot of the land-mine survivors begging here, and it is trulyheartbreaking. There are approximately five hundred land-mine injuriesper month in Cambodia, the legacy of decades of civil war and conflictswith outside nations. My friend François, who fashions prosthetics forthe Red Cross, assured me that all the land-mine victims near the Correspondents' Club have excellent artificial limbs that they deliberately leave home so as to garner more sympathy dollars, but that fact is still very cold comfort. When the man hobbled by, Bunly got in line behind him andbegan an elaborate impersonation, limping and tottering in melodramaticfashion. The kid was so delighted and amused by this, each step amore grotesque improvisation, that my moral indignation waned and Ifound myself smiling. This was followed by waves of guilt. And thenmore smiling ...

The Gods Drink Whiskey
Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha. Copyright © by Stephen Asma. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha by Stephen T. Asma
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