by Jeremy Phillips
Release Date: 9/8/15
Summary from Goodreads:
It's not surprising that sixteen year old Chris Jones has no idea where he fits in…
After all, he's a Buddhist kid in America-during the Christmas season. Add in the fact he plays guitar in a punk rock band called The Dharma Bhumz, and his life is one giant paradox. Caught between the principles of his religion and the influence of his hard-partying bandmates, Chris is in a constant struggle for balance.
An upcoming talent show is his chance to shine-or fail spectacularly…
It's already hard enough preparing for the show, since his friends are more interested in getting high than practicing. And now Chris has to worry about impressing pretty Mary Simpson. To make matters even worse, Mary's parents are fundamentalist Christians, a few steps above his family on the social ladder, and they firmly believe Chris isn't good enough for their precious daughter.
Conflicted about his friends, lying to his family, and still mourning a devastating loss, Chris wonders if being an American Buddhist guitar wizard wanna-be is worth it.
Or does any of it even matter anymore? .
Excerpt
“So doesn’t it bother you?” I shudder, thinking of
ending up like one of the various invalids that my father takes care of. Not to
run and play anymore, or even to have proper control of your own bowels.
Perhaps it would be better to lose your mind, like the one old fellow I’d seen
earlier, staring blindly off into space. Only, perhaps that would be worse.
All of a sudden, I realize that what’s been
bothering me is the Buddha’s so-called First Noble Truth, the one that set him
onto the path of trying to find Enlightenment—Awakening, Satori, that type of
stuff—in the first place. This is the
First Noble Truth set into flesh, in the bodies of a hundred different
examples, scattered in the building all around me. The Truth of Suffering, that
all who are born will come to suffer, at least once in their lifetime, from the
unhappy triple curse of sickness, old age, and death.
Guest Post
My
Own Thoughts On My Buddhist Christmas
By
Jeremy Phillips
I have been a student of Eastern philosophy, and
Buddhism in particular, for a long time now.
It has always been fascinating to me.
But years ago, when I first tried to do any reading about it, the very foreign
nature of the philosophy tended to get in the way of actually understanding
what I was reading. No matter what book
I chose to read, no matter what school of Buddhist philosophy I was trying to
understand, it was always the same:
A master teacher of some type, a person very
different than myself, would be describing these very old ideas, from his very
Eastern mindset. Eventually, I came to
feel that what might be helpful for a Western reader would be a book that spoke
about this stuff in an entirely different way…
When I sat down to write My Buddhist Christmas, I did
it with the idea of writing a young adult fiction story, about an American
teenager who had been raised up as a Buddhist all of his life. Such a person, unlike myself who approached
Buddhist philosophy with the mindset of an adult raised in the USA, would
understand Buddhism as a more intimate, more essential part of how he already
viewed the world. Such a kid would truly
be a Buddhist, while still being very much an American teenager. When I started taking my own kids to a Shin
Buddhist temple in Spokane, Washington, I started to wonder how the conflicts of
life might go for these kids, conflicts which can be even more of a challenge
during the Christmas season.
But My Buddhist Christmas is more than a just a book
on Buddhist philosophy. It’s also a
“coming of age” story, told from the perspective of a main character who is feeling
some of these conflicts very intensely, while also dealing with a devastating
loss. During the course of the story, my
narrator character can be seen experiencing a lot of the stresses that a
teenager in America will experience.
He
experiences the conflict of becoming infatuated with a pretty girl, and of
falling rapidly (perhaps a little too rapidly) in love for the first time. He experiences the conflict of trying to keep
a group of unreliable teenagers on task, so that they can make their Punk rock garage
band work out for a talent show that he’s involved with. He experiences the difficulty of peer
pressure, in a variety of ways.
As he goes about his life, my narrator also shares
with the reader a variety of Buddhist parables and philosophical observations,
learned from his childhood. The end result
of this, is that as the narrator gets to the end of his story and grows up some
about how he is living, as he more fully understands his own Buddhist
philosophy, the reader, too, will also gather a greater understanding.
Really, I wrote this book for people of all
ages. Adults will read it, and perhaps
remember how it was to be a teen, how it was to be growing up and starting to
take responsibility for themselves more.
Teens and pre-teens who read it, will be able to identify with some of
the struggles represented in the story. Ultimately
it is my hope that whoever reads it, will come away with a better understanding
of what Buddhism has to say about life, while enjoying an entertaining story.
About the Author
My first novel will be available on September 8th, 2015. It's a Young Adult fiction story called: My Buddhist Christmas.
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