Buddhist Blog Assignment #1
South Park: Buddha Doing Coke
For this assignment I decided to see what South Park had to say about Buddhism. As most of us know South Park is an animated sitcom that is best known for its dark humor on many topics. When I first saw this clip I was really confused. Why would Buddha be doing coke? Doesn’t that violate one of the 10 precepts of not being intoxicated? When I think of intoxicated by the way I don’t think of just being drunk from alcohol, I think of any sort of substance that can cause the mind to deviate in an unusual way. I repeated this clip multiple times, trying to see if I was missing something, but no matter how many times I saw it I still couldn’t get the message the producers of this animated sitcom were trying to get across.
It became clear to me once I started reading Brad Warner’s book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. It was chapter 5 (pages 25-32) that shed light on the hidden meaning; that enlightenment can be reached through drugs. In this section of the book Warner highlights that the Buddhism that has become a fad in America is not real Buddhism. One of the fads that was surfacing was the use of “…psychedelic drugs [that] could give you in a single dose the insight that dedicated Buddhist practitioners spend decades working on” (page 26). He goes on to talk about the “…scam artists that are calling themselves Buddhist teachers…[that will help]…speed a person to enlightenment” (page 26-27). They promise that “…you will receive an authentic kensho or satori experience in which you realize your True Nature just like Buddha did under the Bodhi Tree in a single half-day lesson” (page 27).
Warner strongly imposes this method of practicing Buddhism. He further goes on to state that enlightenment is “…not a cool experience…like that acid trip you took at Burning Man five years ago…it’s not something that someone who’s gotten can now give you” (page 28). Enlightenment is when “…you begin to accumulate little bits of understanding [that] at some point begin to come together…[to] a deeper intuitive knowledge…[that] at some point…reaches a threshold [where] there may be a single moment in which everything seems to change.” (page 29).
In conclusion Warner negates this stereotype by saying that enlightenment cannot be reached through the use of stimulants. It’s not just about achieving that dreamy state of mind in which you detach from the world (because of the excess serotonin floating in your neural synapses); it’s about coming to a deeper understanding about life through time, effort, and energy. An understanding that really can only be done through meditation and proper practice of the religion. America is known for trying to find the shortcuts to everything but in the case of reaching enlightenment from Buddhist teachings, there is no shortcut.
