What the Buddha Never Taught: A Rock Opera

An interview with playwright and songwriter Dr. Martin Adam

Note the little Canadian flag patch on the backpack, to Buddha’s left.

When one thinks of life in a Buddhist monastery, toe-tapping song-and-dance numbers might not spring to mind at first. But why not? Buddhism spread throughout Asia via artistic and cultural forms that were not part of the Buddha’s teaching — sculpture, painting, architecture, koans. In the West, Buddhism has been spread via novels and movies, so why not a musical comedy? That was the thinking of Dr. Martin Adam, who teaches Buddhist Studies at the University of Victoria. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. So he decided to write the musical himself.

The show, What the Buddha Never Taught: A Rock Opera, will have a ten day run at the Jericho Arts Center in Vancouver BC, June 30-July 10, 2022. It will also stream online, so anyone can watch it anywhere in the world (for a voucher, ($50 CND, $40USD) to the website at the link above).

I have a big stake in this! I wrote the book on which the play is loosely — very loosely — based. Published in 1990, What the Buddha Never Taught chronicles my stay at a real Thai forest monastery, Wat Pahnanachat, where Western and Thai monks practice side by side. The book itself was a rare thing: a Buddhist comedy. The comedy comes from my observations of the foibles of Westerners who put on the religious robes of another…