Buddha Who?

Buddha?

Buddha who?

Indeed. Well, it's time to set the record really straight, like Tom Selleck straight. Because I'm tired of people on the street arguing with me that Buddha was one of the original members of Cypress Hill. So strap on your thinking caps boys and girls, we're embarking on a magical journey to the Land of Not Being So Stupid.

For starters, you probably know Buddha as that big fat Oriental guy smiling and giving the thumbs-up in ads for Chinese restaurants across the country. What few know and may be surprised to learn is that he was also the father of a worldwide religious movement, sort of like Jim Jones without all the mass suiciding. Or think Eddie Murphy in that Holy Man movie. I haven't seen the movie, but it seemed like it had something to do with religion.

The problem with the Buddha is that everyone has their own idea who the man was. For some, he's known as the source for the famous philosophical quote "It ain't easy, bein' cheesy." For others, he was an inspiration to the morbidly obese worldwide. Others are just crazy.

Case in point: feminist voice Liz Gromer of the Humboldt, California Daily Bitch.

"If you want to buy into the bullshit Hollywood image of Buddha, you go right ahead if it helps you sleep at night, thinking of Buddha in this glamorized image of some great big fat fucker from China. But the truth remains the truth, and the truth is Buddha was an 87-pound woman from Chicago, and she had an ABORTION. That's right, and I hope it rocks your pathetic little sanctimonious world, you fucks."

On this side of crazy, the real Buddha was born in Northern India in 565 B.C. as Siddhattha Gautama, which isn't that bad once you consider that this was a country where people were naming their kids things like Dikshit and Assum. Gautama was born as royalty; real royalty, not the crap we have now like Paris Hilton or a bunch of inbred Brits. As a child he rode around on pygmy elephants and his feet weren't allowed to touch the ground until he was seven, that kind of thing.

Buddhists believe that Gautama was born after having a go at reincarnation innumerable times in an attempt to become the Buddha, or "Bitchin' Guy." In nearly all of the lives he ended up being a gay hairdresser in New York, so he had to start the whole thing over again too many times to count. Eventually, however, he fulfilled the Ten Paramitas, a Mexican entrée that is very difficult to prepare, and was ready to be born as the Buddha.

While she was pregnant, Gautama's mother had visionary dream of a magnificent white elephant handing her a hamburger, which was delicious but needed relish. She took the dream to mean her son-to-be would either be a great success, or would just love bun meat.

A seer who had crashed the party for Gautama's birth told the father, King "Dan" Suddhodana, that his son would either grow up to be a great king or a kick-ass spiritual leader. Dan quickly set out to prevent his son from having any kind of character-building experiences, so that he would go the king route and Dan wouldn't be stuck with a lousy spiritual messiah for a son, forsaking material excess and laying around the house all day.

The young Buddha spent his childhood like any other boy, trying to kill small birds, but because of his wealth he was able to forsake throwing rocks and just paid the birds to fly into the rocks themselves. After seven or eight years he tired of this and turned his attention to spiritual matters. Ten minutes later, he discovered girls, and it is best to gloss over the next several years in the Buddha's biography.

In 545 B.C., Buddha was kicked out of college for boning the Dean's daughter, who was then 16 but had tits like a 24-year-old. A dissatisfied Buddha would drift aimlessly for the next few years on the George W. Bush plan for character development, except they didn't have cocaine back then and you had to juice a lot of toxic berries to get high. Eventually, Buddha was married and had a child in 540 B.C., though he was unaware of either fact and ended up deserting the family he didn't know he had to embark on a pilgrimage to find his lost shaker of salt, i.e., Enlightenment.

On his way out of town, the Buddha famously saw his "four sights": a dying man, a sick man, an old man, and the smug fucker who got the sick guy sick and killed the dying man and who kept pointing at the old man and laughing that he was so old. It was then that Buddha realized the four sufferings of existence: to be old, to be sick, to be dead, and to be an asshole. Buddha decided then and there that none of these were for him.

Gautama wandered in the wilderness for three years and in an act of self-denial, he ate nothing but Pringles the whole time. He would never eat them again. After the Pringles phase he tried eating nothing at all for two more years. After the second year, Buddha realized that denying the body the pleasures of food is "boddhishiti," or "bullshit." He then immediately ate three large pizzas and spent the rest of the week contemplating indigestion. Pretty much from then on the Buddha was Marlon Brando fat, but nobody gave him any crap about it.

Buddha then traveled to Rajagaha and studied meditation under the eccentric masters Alara-Kalama and Uddaka-Ramaputta, who argued constantly over who was uglier. Under their tutelage, Gautama achieved a transcendent state of deep meditative peace, which he summed up as "big whoop," before telling Alara-Kalama and Uddaka-Ramaputta they were both equally ugly and leaving.

Gautama decided he would have to go it alone to find true Enlightenment, and so spent the next four years contemplating why hot dogs come in packs of ten while buns come in packs of eight. After the fourth year spent in contemplation, Buddha realized he didn't even like hot dogs, and was enlightened.

From then on, Gautama was known as the Buddha, or as a bodhisattva, which is Hindi for "Big Deal." He quickly attracted legions of followers, to whom he passed on his wisdom about low-maintenance haircuts and not eating yellow snow. The Buddha would travel the countryside for the rest of his life, enlightening the masses and terrifying All-You-Can-Eat buffets across the land.

Though many in the West have a hard time taking the Buddha seriously as a religious figure because he never wrote a best-selling book (Jesus) or built much of a self-help empire (Hubbard), many slackers have adopted the Buddha as their patron saint, allowing them to camouflage their persistent sloth as a sign of low-grade Enlightenment. But their more-industrious neighbors are quick to remind them that while ancient people had to put up with the Buddha crashing on their couch all the time, at least they got some clever haikus out of the deal.

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