Hasn’t every third person you know read “Buddha’s Tooth” by now?
The book is somewhat about a mislaid molar of the historical Buddha—a forgotten tooth, found and duly deemed a dentine relic, so much so that an actual Temple was built over its final resting place. The bones of St. Stephen (ample enough to reconstruct him several times over) never met such an impressive fate in all the cathedrals of Europe.
Here’s a nutshell review of my favorite book in recent years:
The narrator and author, U. C. Fate (can this be a real name?), begins ‘a magical mythos tour’ at the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka, where, shortly after arriving, Mr. Fate is beaten to a ruddy pulp by an angry mob.
He awakens to find he’s in possession of a God-consciousness that easily collapses time and faith systems and permits him to travel (with Dante and Virgil, no less) on an excursion to ancient Greeks, American Indians, modern Rock-n-Rollers, Catholic conquistadors, Mormons, and most importantly, the original owner of Buddha’s tooth.
The work is a pilgrimage among Eastern and Western religious ideas, with a nod to atheists and humanists along the way. It’s partly a philosophic critique of religious history, partly a biography of Buddha, partly a screenplay, partly poetry, and partly impartial partisanship.
The whole of it is porous to genre.
There’s a conspicuous display of the author’s erudition on many religious traditions. Plainly, decades of reading support this book. The knowledge proffered is jarring, and the writing flies and flows like the Kano River waterfalls. This is not beach reading. You’ll have to attend to it.
To crown all, the story is absolutely hilarious in parts, offering not just the horselaugh of the sports bar but also a deeply funny, surgically tooled, crystalliferous wit—sharp at the point and sides.
To crown all, the story is absolutely hilarious in parts, offering not just the horselaugh of the sports bar but also a deeply funny, surgically tooled, crystalliferous wit, sharp at the points and side.
And there’s something else about this book that’s so far out there that it’s on the rim of the edge of the fringe of the border of the verge of the future of understanding about religion and irreligion.
It would be a cliché to say someone is ahead of his time, and, really, the phrase is probably inaccurate every time it is used. It is impossible to think thoughts before their time, and no one could ever cogitate a twenty-third-century idea as a resident of the twenty-first.
And yet this book, this book, even as it was written in the twenty-first century, feels like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” for the 23rd Century. Were it possible for a book to be ahead of its time, this is the book.
Mr. Fate has provided a signal for a new trajectory in freewheeling, learned writing on religion and irreligion. I would call it Religio-Theatrico. It’s dramedy that does not offend even as it bends our sensibilities a half-inch shy of snapping.
You’ll “Buddha’s Tooth” it twice and ponder it in every third thought for forty days afterward.