In this excerpt from his new book, Why I Am a Buddhist: No-Nonsense Buddhism with Red Meat and Whiskey, Dr. Stephen Asma, who describes himself as a “Chicago-style Buddhist,” reflects upon his journey to the homeland of legendary blues musician Robert Johnson and what it taught him about developing craft integrity and virtue.

The Zen of Vocation: Forget about the Groupies and Focus on the Craft

I played in blues bands for more than fifteen years, having the very good fortune to play with legends like Buddy Guy and Bo Diddley, but it wasn’t until I started playing in a rock band that I got invited to play the House of Blues. The irony here is delicious. The House of Blues is a well known chain of clubs all over the States that purport to offer gritty blues culture, but almost never actually book blues acts on their stages — and in fairness to them, it’s usually because blues artists don’t draw the big numbers of fans that pop music does (and there’s a lot of overhead in these Disneyfied clubs). So, one night I stood on the expansive spot-lighted stage, playing for a packed house of tourists and well-heeled yuppies, feeling a little guilty and nervous about my now teetering blues credentials. Don’t get me wrong. It was sweet to play a club that actually had a glitzy dressing room, complete with sumptuous snack trays and an overstocked beer fridge. This must be what it’s like to be a rock star. This is not what it’s like to be a blues musician. But I could feel comfortable in this corporate setting, sucking up to Mammon, because I could console myself with the fact that our dressing-room came complete with a shower! No kidding, a shower . . . with stacks of immaculate white towels. The sins of my musical prostitution would be wiped clean. I could go forth purified and moisturized.

The very next day, I actually left Chicago to drive south on a pilgrimage down to blues country — Delta country. My goal was to visit the homeland of blues great Robert Johnson, and continue on down to New Orleans to finally, as Muddy Waters commands, “get me a mojo.” The whole strange experience, standing on stage at the House of Blues the night before I left to explore the absurdly poor Mississippi Delta, got me thinking about authenticity, integrity, and selling out. Blues itself, like Buddhism, is a paragon of integrity, resolutely refusing to sell out. But all artists and craftspeople have struggled with these issues at one time or another, and Western culture has well-worn archetypes for this particular temptation and struggle.

Robert Johnson himself is a recent incarnation of the Faustian bargain. Born in 1911, Johnson spent most of his short life in the Delta area, where he substituted the life of the rambling blues singer for the back-breaking life of the sharecropper. In the early 1930s, when he left the area of Robinsonville for Hazelhurst, he was known only as a mediocre talent. But when he returned sometime later he was manifestly changed. He was so talented when he strolled back into town that rumors began to circulate. A story evolved that Johnson had made a deal with the devil at a desolate crossroads. Here he supposedly wagered his soul for the power to play his instrument and sing with supernatural skill. Johnson’s own eerie songs “Me and the Devil,” “Crossroads,” and “Hell Hound on My Trail” fueled the legends. He was indeed a phenomenal finger-style and slide guitarist, a talented composer of ironic and moving songs, and a passionate singer of the blues. His work represents a kind of prism through which Delta blues passed on its way up north to the urban blues of Chicago. Contemporary blues culture still harks back to Johnson as a patron saint of all things “blue”: sorrowful heartache, struttin’ and gamblin’, prideful self-affirmation, ramblin’, and regret.

Johnson played his last gig at a juke joint named Three Forks on a Saturday night, August 13, 1938. Some say that the devil finally came to collect his debt, but most scholars agree that Johnson messed around with the wrong woman (one who had a very jealous lover) and paid the price. He died of poisoning at the age of 27.

I drove to Mississippi and spent a week hunting down obscure geographical references that appear in Johnson’s songs. Some towns were gone altogether, and others had dilapidated vestiges of earlier eras. I spent time in Rosedale, Greenvile, Robinsonville, and other tiny towns—collecting little pieces of cotton and Mississippi mud for my future mojo. I wanted to find the Three Forks joint where Robert Johnson met his Maker. I didn’t find the bar, but I did find the sign that had hung above the juke-joint door.

In Clarksdale, Mississippi, there is a Delta Blues Museum that houses the historic bar sign in one of their display rooms. The director of the very modest museum sent me to the nearby corner of Highways 61 and 49. No one actually knows where Johnson’s real crossroads is located, but 61/49 is the conventionally designated spot where Mississippi folks tip their hats. I found an excellent hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint on the junction of 61 and 49 called Abe’s, that served no-frills rib specials, the eating of which certainly constitutes your own private deal with the devil, or at the very least it hastens the meeting with your Maker.

While I was toweling off the barbecue sauce and drinking some decidedly local beer, I stared out Abe’s window at the crossroads sign. Robert Johnson is a modern-day Faust, and like Christopher Marlowe’s and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Dr. Faust he simultaneously elicits our admiration and our reproach. The reproach is obvious, of course, and doesn’t require much explanation — people who sell their souls to the devil are not the kind of people whom you want your daughter to marry. But Johnson’s deal, like that of Faust before him, is not as crass and shallow as one might think. Johnson didn’t make a deal to become famous. In fact, fame per se doesn’t even enter into the legend or into Johnson’s real life. By the time musicologists came to the Delta looking for him, he was already dead (so they found Muddy Waters instead). All Robert did was make a deal to become talented. This is very different from a wager for fame. Selling your soul to become famous or wealthy is obscene, selling your soul to become talented is strangely beautiful.

But selling your soul here is just a metaphor for the deep and profound sacrifices that craftspersons make as they try to perfect themselves and their work. This applies not just to artists per se but also to scientists, manual laborers, computer programmers, and other devotees of excellence. Our culture is understandably ambivalent about these people because we respect and love their craft, but we lament the damage that their passionate pursuits sometimes wreak on their families, friends, and even their own health. I would like to have the talent of a Van Gogh, for example, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be Van Gogh.

At the end of Goethe’s Faust there is a beautifully redemptive moment. After we have watched Faust do a lot of stupid stuff (facilitated, of course, by the devil Mephistopheles), we find him at death’s door. He is a tragic figure because he is still striving to understand himself and the human condition, he is still struggling to grasp the deeper truths. He has made many mistakes and taken many wrong turns, but he struggles on. His passionate pursuit has made a mess of his life, but his will to understand and to create is somehow awesome. Goethe has a choir of angels announce at the end of the play, “Whoever strives in ceaseless toil, him we may grant redemption.” So, maybe this is how you cut a deal with the devil and still come out okay.

The Robert Johnson legend contains within it the lesson of craft integrity. It’s the story of a man who changed his basic outlook on life, from one who first pursued happiness and pleasure directly—using his guitar and voice to get women and get local fame—to a man who pursued excellence instead, and then reaped rewards as a mere unintended consequence of that sacred pursuit. He didn’t use music for personal gain. On the contrary, he sacrificed himself for the pursuit of musical excellence. But there’s nothing about such pursuits that ensures recognition, or peer understanding, or celebrity status. That’s why Johnson and all other Faustian characters are tragic. They are possessed by some sort of mysterious pursuit of excellence, and the personal consequences be damned.

Robert Johnson may have sold his soul, but he didn’t sell out. There are many parallels between the extreme lives of Zen monks and blues artists, in this sense. Each has sacrificed the normal life of moderation and chosen to walk a desolate razor’s edge. They are in their own ways extreme pathways, and as such they diverge from Gautama’s original teachings of the Middle Way. But they provide wonderful icons of certain virtues, like dedication, endurance, and creativity — good work virtues. My own view is that these virtues can be practiced without giving up all the other aspects of a balanced life, but if you want to examine and reflect on such virtues, then the extreme cases are illuminating.

When I finally arrived in New Orleans, in search of my voodoo mojo, I binged on all the clichés. I ate embarrassing amounts of jambalaya and gumbo, watched a great street-band playing gospel favorites like “Just a Further Walk with Thee,” indulged the Tarot card readers all along the cobbled streets, crammed in some sugar donuts and coffee at the Cafe du Monde, ogled some strippers that looked like rejects from a David Lynch film, and then passed out in a highly questionable hotel room. Hey, I said I was a Buddhist; I never said I was a first-rate Buddhist.

The next afternoon I found a good place to purchase my mojo bag. It was a voodoo shop off the beaten path and it was absolutely crammed with trinkets of weirdness. Like the “curiosity cabinets” of seventeenth-century Europe, this shop had a chaotic mixture of manmade and natural oddities bulging forth from every shelf — it was an overstocked apothecary of magic totems. I found a bluish-purple satin drawstring bag about the size of a credit card. I began searching the store for voodoo objects of significance. The shelves had boxes of items and each box had a hand-scrawled sign that explained the specific powers of the item. For example, one box contained real alligator heads (each about the size of my hand), which seemed to have been sawed off their bodies and shellacked. I would have bought one but it wouldn’t fit in my mojo bag. The sign on the alligator box said “Good for warding off evil in-laws.” A sign on a box of tiny turtle shells said “Good for improving gambling luck.”

I chose a little carved scarab beetle that seemed to be made of soap-stone in order to “Increase financial status.” I also secured some very small seashells to “Ensure safe travel.” But the real jewel in the crown was the swamp-rat’s foot. It was the size and shape of my bent thumb and it was quite hideous, with sharp black claws and dark brown hair. The sign on the box assured me that this was the item to help with “Romantic Relations.” At last, that infamous Muddy Waters charm would be mine! I didn’t find any charms that improved musical ability per se, but I figured that the confluence of the other totems would suffice to help me be a better guitar player.

Well, I’ve had my mojo for a couple years now, and I can’t tell if it’s working. Maybe the problem is that I don’t really believe in the power of a rat’s foot, or a mojo even. Hell, not even Muddy Waters really believed it. He reveals in Robert Palmer’s book Deep Blues that such voodoo stuff was popular among superstitious rural folk, but he didn’t go in for supernaturalism. Buddhists all over Southeast Asia also love their superstitious amulets, and they make and trade elaborate talismans that are designed to give unearned skills and powers to the wearers. I’ve got a few of those, too.

My disbelief is bred partly from an overall dislike of superstition, which is, after all, one of the reasons I like philosophical Buddhism so much. But it also comes from a deep-seated distrust of all so-called quick fixes. You don’t become excellent by carrying a mojo or an amulet, or by making a deal with the devil, or by sucking up to a corporate record executive, or by pretending to care about your craft (whatever it may be). Robert Johnson didn’t become great because he drew up an unholy contract — and to think he did is to degrade the real work into which Johnson poured his heart. His real deal was to consecrate his life to music: to dedicate himself to practice, to the countless hours of skill-mastery, and to the amateur love of craft.

So, perhaps we have a response to my earlier question, Why is hard work, craft, and presence a better pathway than seeking celebrity status — especially when you can attain the benefits of being a star without the talent part? First, integrity in work or craft is how you own it — it’s how you become the activity, or how you become an ingredient in the product you’re making. Otherwise, you’re just dancing with yourself outside the real action and pretending to be valuable. Second, becoming the activity is how you transcend your little ego — and that only happens when you’re genuinely going for it, not when you’re going through the motions. Finally, there is something inside you, that you carry around with you like a flame, when you have a hard-won set of skills. If you know how to build a sturdy chair, or play a fugue, or program code with precision, then you have something that can’t be taken away from you. Nor does it need the external recognition of sycophants to give you fulfillment. External acknowledgment can come and go, but the internal happiness that comes from skillful action is intact either way.

In the Dhammapada, the Buddha describes the sad state of the impostor — the seeker of adulation and flattery. Even spiritual workers are susceptible to vanity, and Gautama cautions monks against the pursuit of celebrity. Such a fool “will wish for reputation, for precedence among the monks, for authority in the monasteries, and for veneration amongst the people. ‘Let householders and hermits, both, think it was I who did that work; and let them ever ask me what they should do or not do.’ These are the thoughts of the fool, puffed up with desire and pride. But one is the path of earthly wealth, and another is the path of nirvana. Let the follower of Buddha think of this and, without striving for reputation, let him ever strive after freedom” (V.71–75).

Why I Am a Buddhist, by Stephen Asma (copyright © 2010) is used with permission from Hampton Roads Publishing. Available wherever books are sold or directly from the publisher at 1-800-423-7087.