Prologue

The Birth of the Cheeseburger Buddha

It happened on a cold Wisconsin evening, the snow piling up outside, when I was working as a security guard at the McDonald's on East Main Street in Green Bay. My job was to keep the high school kids from tearing the place apart after basketball games—rowdy, hormonal, full of energy and fries.

That evening, during my break, I was sitting in the far corner of the restaurant, layered in thermal underwear beneath my uniform, sweating buckets under the indoor heating. Outside, winter howled and ice claimed the streets, but inside, I was melting.

I sat hunched over a cheeseburger, reading The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. Between bites, I turned pages, trying to understand emptiness while swallowing beef and cheese. Grease on my fingers, dharma in my mind. And then, like lightning from nowhere, it hit me.

A voice—clear, piercing, undeniable—shouted from deep within:

"You are nothing but a Cheeseburger Buddha!"

I froze. Halfway through chewing. Halfway through a paragraph.

The absurdity. The truth. The beautiful, ridiculous insight.
I was a sweating, uniformed Buddha chewing on samsara in a fast-food temple.

That was the moment he was born:
The Cheeseburger Buddha.

A sketch took form later—a grinning, cynical monk in a Zen robe, holding a cheeseburger like a lotus. Equal parts satire and sincerity. A spirit guide for the fast food age. A koan in polyester.

He’s been with me ever since. Watching. Smirking.
Waiting in the background whenever I take myself too seriously.

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Chapter One

A Zen Scatology – The Lotus Out of Muddy Waters

I was born alongside my twin brother, like an afterthought, sometime on the twelfth of August, 1949, in a mangrove tidal swamp along the Sungai Pina River—in a place called Kampung Selut, or “Muddy Village.”

From the very beginning, my existence was shaped by mud.
The river, the swamp, and the thick, gurgling earth beneath our feet defined our early lives. Kampung Selut wasn’t romanticized, and it wasn’t sanitized. It was real—raw and untouched, with its sludge and stink in full view. A place where life crawled up from the depths.

Our house stood on stilts above the muck. The roof was no fancy zinc sheet, but woven atap nipah—palm fronds to shield us from rain and sun. Everything was basic, earthy, unpolished. There were no toilets. We squatted over planks. Waste fell into the ditches behind the house and joined the rest of life’s detritus as it flowed toward the river.

It was natural. It was the cycle.
Dirt. Water. Waste. Return.

High tide was our liberation. When the waters rose, so did our spirits. We would swim with abandon in the murky brown, pretending to be pirates and buccaneers. The river was our sea. The sky our escape. The floating dead animals? Just part of the scenery.

Even the occasional human feces drifting by didn’t faze us.
It was the river’s language. Life and death. Sacred and profane. All mixed in the current.

The Infant in the Water

One evening, while paddling our canoe, pretending to be warriors of the tide, I spotted something strange—a bundle of Chinese newspaper, tightly rolled and bobbing unnaturally.

I poked it with a stick.

The layers came apart. Waterlogged, ink-smudged. And beneath them… a bleached white head.
A baby.
Still.
Pale.
Lifeless.

We froze. No one screamed. No one investigated further. We turned the canoe around and paddled back in silence.

Days passed. The river stank. The grown-ups muttered.
Eventually, I told my uncle. He didn’t yell. He didn’t question.
He found the bundle and buried it deep in the mud, away from where we played.

Nothing more was said.
The infant became one of the river’s many ghosts.

And that silence—that understanding that some truths are touched once and never again—became one of Kampung Selut’s first teachings.

When You Got Shit on Your Head

Another lesson came, not from the dead, but from the living.
It was a day like any other. We were swimming, laughing, diving. The river was full of trash and rot and joy.

And then came the yell from a friend:

“Hey! There’s shit on your head!”

Now, here’s the thing about growing up swimming in a river full of sewage:
It’s going to happen eventually. Human waste on your head—like a brown crown of karma.

But here’s the rule, the village wisdom:
Never doubt your friend. Never check with your hand.

Because the moment you reach up to confirm it, it's on your hand too.
You’ve made it yours.

So instead, you slide slowly underwater.
Let the river do what rivers do.
Let it float away.
Then, grab a handful of river mud—thick, gritty, ancestral—and scrub your head clean.

That’s your shampoo. That’s your cleansing.
That’s Zen.

Let it float.
Let it go.

We never got sick, oddly enough.
No cholera. No rashes. No rot.
Our immune systems were forged in fire—filthy, glorious fire.

But here’s the tragedy:

Not one child died from that river…
but most of my childhood friends died later—of heroin.

A different poison.
Quieter. Cleaner.
And far more deadly.