Burnin' the Buddha

I suppose that my view of Buddhists is directly related to my high school's attempt to teach us multiculturalism by giving us Hesse's Sidhartha. There's nothing something about reading about the Buddha from a German source. I mean, you realize that no matter how into it he is, he's still German. We don't read any crazy shit about Buddha from people living in Tibet or anything. No, Herman "the German" Hesse.

This is the beginning of my feelings about "Buddhists"--their religion is only deep because they were born in a Christian country. If you're actually born in Tibet, you don't feel the need to go around telling people about Nirvana and mucking up every conversation with your beliefs about how the damn universe works. There's this Buddhist guy in one of my classes who keeps trying to tell us about the four forces of happiness. We start talking about Einstein's theory of relativity and he wants us to give equal weight to some crackpot that he read who has some theory about fire's place in universal peace, and then, I shit you not, without missing a beat, he tells us that he won't be in class for Passover. Evidently, like Madonna, he's bi-religious.