"Killing the Buddha" makes you want to jump and holler and run right out and get yourself a Bible, just in case, shame on you, you don't have one. You might want to pick up the Quran and the Kama Sutra, too, for that matter. This book is a mystical souffle, a sensual, cosmic marinade. It surely stokes the metaphor fire.It's a spiritual guide for jazzbos, riffers, makers of mix tapes, dub masters and surfers of highways both actual and digital. It does not, however, provide signposts. Rather, it points the way, whatever that may be, by suggesting that choosing the way is a spiritual act.

		Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible By Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet Free Press $25

This singular book aims to get readers to riff on their own, get them talking, feeling, believing. It is incomprehensible at worst (Haven Kimmel's take on Revelation is one tough nut), enigmatic, and frequently inspiring, like its role model, the Bible. Parts are remarkably moving, others strikingly stimulating. It is book as quest and calling rather than as text.

In "Killing the Buddha," transmogrifications of the Old Testament alternate with interludes describing places and characters Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet met on the road. This is wild Americana, part of a tradition that encompasses the tall tale and the road novel. Like Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," it tells of stopovers in America's secret places. Like Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," it feels like a random mosaic, accidentally cohesive and open-ended.

Some parts are better than others, and if, like me, you're not that conversant with the original, some are far more comprehensible. Its overarching theme may be the blending of the Bible's story with the meaning of America. That is explicit in Francine Prose's retooling of Exodus:

"There are many reasons, I suppose, to enjoy and admire and be inspired by Exodus," she writes. "Its themes could hardly be more stirring -- or more beautiful, really. Oppression and liberation, courage, self-determination. Nothing less than the human spirit yearning to break free, then breaking free, screwing up, suffering, wandering and painfully, slowly starting to learn how to live as a new, hopeful nation. It's the Founding Fathers, the Emancipation Proclamation, with highly cinematic hoodoo: The way that Moses and his brother, Aaron, make people listen to them is by magically changing their walking sticks into snakes. ... There's little in the Bible to equal, chapter for chapter, its roller coaster of incident, suspense, magic, hesitations, missteps, punishments and sufferings, renewals and redemptions."

The title stems from advice ninth-century sage Lin Chi gave a monk who said he'd seen the Buddha. Lin Chi told the monk to kill the Buddha because "The Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha but an expression of your longing." Not to kill the Buddha, the Savior, God is to feel that all has been answered and there is no more reason to question.

That notion led Manseau and Sharlet to visit places from New York City, an orange grove in Florida, bars and churches in Nashville where the spirits of Waylon Jennings and John Walker Lindh intertwine, an actress witch in Crestone, Colo., a mystical tattoo parlor in East Los Angeles and tornado groupies in Oklahoma. All the people our explorers track are pilgrims and searchers. Call them crazy, call them fearless. Their stories often are more memorable than the technically more impressive Old Testament recasting.

The best Manseau-Sharlet yarn is about "Two Foot" George McVay, a geologist and sometime rodeo champion in Mount Vernon, Texas. The founder of the Prairie Station Cowboy Church, McVay preaches tolerance and protects calves from buzzards. He knows pain from riding One Jump George, a bull "so called because no rider ever held on longer than a single buck of his hind hooves."

Here's Two Foot aboard One Jump: "Four seconds: George the bull spins and jumps. George the man hangs on with his right hand, his left in the air like he's blowing a kiss. Five seconds: One Jump looks back, surprised to see a cowboy still holding on. He swings his head over his left shoulder, down then up, and catches Two Foot's face with the point of a horn. Bare cow bone drives into George's left eye and back out like a spoon scraping a bowl. Six seconds: George McVay is on the ground."

The more serious Old Testament revisions include A.L. Kennedy's scholarly analysis of Genesis, Michael Lesy's family history-oriented reinterpretation of Leviticus and Peter Trachtenberg's wittily mathematical updating of Job, black humor, Pac-Man equations and all. The more playful include April Reynolds' framing of Samuel as an earthy tale of congregational change, Charles Bowden's update of Isaiah in a meditation on the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, and Eileen Myles' siting of Daniel in celebrity-rich Long Island. Rick Moody's Jonah, too, plays on Long Island, casting the whale man as a "Kosher fag." This is a funny and topical piece.

"In the meantime, the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. It is possible, of course, that the Lord might have beached him on Plum Island, nearby, where the federal government was torturing monkeys and baboons with Bacillus anthracis where they refined and aerosolized dengue fever and hantavirus and Ebola and plague. This would have been appropriate recompense, but it did not come to pass."

The authors, founding editors

of the online magazine killingthe-buddha.com, could easily expand this by tapping into other modern writers. You can't wear out the spiritual groove. You can never cover the country, either. Particularly when it's the country of the soul.