BUDDHIST FICTION COMES OF AGE

Although Ruth Ozeki's A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING didn't win the Booker Prize, its being a finalist says something important:  Buddhist Fiction has come of age.

No book is even going to be nominated for Britain's most prestigious literary prize unless it appeals to a general readership -- I mean, of course, a general literate readership.  Such a book has to have virtues beyond a Buddhist theme:  the prose has to be outstanding, the subject matter serious and worthy of thoughtful people's time and energy, the theme of universal significance.

And yet -- this book is also Buddhist. I mean, lots of writers explore the nature of time -- fiction is so well-suited to that kind of exploration because the stroke of the pen can take readers to any time and place, or multiple times and places in even a single chapter.  But when quotations from Zen Master Dogen frame the exploration, as in Ozeki's book, then we are in Buddhist fictional territory.

Or again, the nature of reality is also easily explored in fiction: a few keystrokes make things appear and disappear.  But when the analogy to the nature of consciousness is made clearly, then we have Buddhist fiction.

There's always a danger that a genre with a religion as its modifier -- Buddhist fiction -- is going to be dismissed as parochial or didactic, as not worth reading by those who don't share the faith.  A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING is not alone in showing that Buddhist fiction can be bigger than this.  But the fact that this book has gotten so much attention can draw the attention of readers -- especially non-Buddhist readers -- to a genre that they may have dismissed before.

Note:  My interview with Roland Merullo, another Buddhist fiction writer, appears here:
http://buddhistfictionblog.wordpress.com/

Interview with Ruth Ozeki: The Spirits in Words

I interview Ruth Ozeki about the literary aspects of her acclaimed novel, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING, in the Fall 2013 print edition of RAIN TAXI Review of Books. 

Note (9/19/13): This book has now been shortlisted for the Booker Prize!  I can testify that it's a worthwhile read.

Interview with Ruth Ozeki

The part of my interview with Ruth Ozeki relating to the Buddhist aspects of her magical novel, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING, may be found at http://buddhistfictionblog.wordpress.com/category/currently-reading/

The part of the interview focusing on literary questions will be published separately, tba.

Pondering Dogen and Proust

Recently I interviewed the novelist and Zen Buddhist prist, Ruth Ozeki, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING.  I made a commitment to myself to turn the recording of our conversation into an edited, publishable transcript as quickly as possible, but I got caught up in a way I didn't expect.

In the interview, we discussed generally the many quotations by the Zen Patriarch Dogen, and, glancing back through them a couple of evenings ago, one in particular caught my attention:

"Thus, the self, setting itself out in array, sees itself:  This is the understanding that the self is time."

And I realized I knew exactly what Dogen meant:  we are not in time, or experiencing time, but we are time -- and when we touch the "eternal moment," we discover that it is not just another type of moment but that it embraces all moments, all of what we are as eternal being.  There is not one thing called  "me" and another thing called "time."  When we know ourselves as time, we know nonduality.

The other author whose work sets the tone and is quoted in Ozeki's novel is Proust.  And so, reading this Dogen quotation, I felt moved to go back and read the end of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and see if Proust's illumination was the same as Dogen's.  But this took the whole evening because, unlike Dogen, Proust didn't just say it pithily in one sentence.  No, he went on and on, page after page.  And my evening passed with no more work on the transcript.

So today, I was thinking about this, and I realized that the reason Proust took so long to get to the point was that writing was an exploration for him:  when he experienced something new and didn't know quite what, in order to find out, he had to write about it.  And then I realized that my process is exactly the same as his!  In fact, I've often thought of my spiritual practice to be writing, although, having read Proust when I was much younger and more academic in my approach to writing, the similarity never occurred to me.  

After my interview with Ms. Ozeki, we were speaking more casually, and she asked me what my spiritual practice was.  And somehow, being asked this by a Zen priest who is also a writer -- and a much more accomplished one than I -- I completely forgot that for years I have considered writing to be my practice, and a very valuable one that has illuminated many spiritual questions I have grappled with.  Instead of saying this, though, I heard myself reply with an embarrassed laugh, "I don't have a practice."  Then I added hurriedly,  "But I did, in Japan."  And I imagined Ms. Ozeki to be thinking, but to be too polite to say, "But you were in Japan decades ago!"

Well, now I can answer, "My practice is the same as Proust's."  And who can question that?