Kate Wheeler, "Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree"

Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree

I'm sure that of those people who imagine they actually exist, or imagine they do not, there are some who wonder what a collection of so-called Buddhist fiction would be. The editor of this collection, Kate Wheeler, wisely chooses to let this unanswerable question alone, to let the stories define only themselves. In the end, the reader is left with just these stories and the promise that another such collection would be entirely different.

The collection for me is very useful, especially since my own attempts to make the twain of writing and contemplative practice meet seem to have been epic fails (to use the common parlance). This is a wide survey encompassing a wide variety of approaches to the general topic.  There is a great variety of voice and tone, many different forms of practice are represented here, and even the authors themselves seem to write from different levels of experience in their own contemplative practice - one might be fairly advanced in meditation, another not so much.

I approached this one with a great deal of curiosity - one might approach fiction about the making of music the same way - to see what the authors did to make these pieces work, what their concerns were and what problems they typically encountered.

Why would a Buddhist want to write stories? Isn't the idea to get away from stories, to break free from all enchantments of the mind, free from its constant promises of good and bad things to come? Perhaps the answer is that the fictive project is something entirely different. It is not a "giving in" to the nervous mental chatter of an uncultivated mind, but is itself a form of practice, a form of deep concentration. It can yield up intense moments of joy, sadness, insight, transcendence, a state of flow and play. And, just as often, a desire to read baseball box-scores. (All of that is not unlike meditation, at least, the meditation as I now try to practice it.) What answers do the authors give?

In “Tanuki” by Jan Hodgman, what I remember most is the spot-on depiction of an elderly woman parishioner, the way she maintains a superficial adherence to custom and propriety but hardly cares to conceal her own corruption. She stands in, somehow, for the entire village. The nun who has taken over their temple is always in a precarious position there, and it is in her meetings with this shallow old woman that we see how unappreciated and misunderstood her work is.The author tells us this about how the nun came to her life: "She shaved her head after leaving a marriage she could only describe as tasteless."  Excellent - a present moment sensation used to capture the entire sense of the marriage.

In the story “In the Sky There is no Footstep”, by Margo McLoughlin, there is this depiction of a moment of insight:

Sometimes, after the morning puja in the women's meditation hall, Anagarika Liz would wait until all the others had left. Then she would step outside, look up at the sky and watch the clouds. The words from the Dhammapada would come to her: "In the sky there is no footstep..."

Wow. (Although I find it odd that this experience is described as habitual, come to think of it.)


Were there attempts to let the teachings unfold within the stories themselves? I think “Hungry Ghost” by Keith Kachtick goes for this, in its story of a traveling surfer who also pursues an interest in the dharma. He is in conflict with himself: he wants to remind himself to remain above desire, but there is the matter of a little cabana near his on the beach and the lovely young German woman in it. The desire builds, the conflict intensifies, he rubs his lama beads and frets, but after he's gotten past that, he brings a handful of beers and his guitar over to her cabana, they smoke dope and wind up in bed. At the end, there is a nice prolepsis, the story telescopes into the future (at least, the future as this man imagines it) and he sees that for her, this seduction won't be remembered as a good turning in her life, and just may be the place where she saw things begin to go wrong.  I ask myself whether this is Buddhist or Catholic in tone. A little of both, I think.

A story I love – and this one was not written by a self-described “Buddhist” - is “Zoo Animal Keeper I, REC-SVC-ZK”, by Martha Gies. This sentence, almost at the end of the story, comes after a live-in student of a traveling Zen monk has been turned down for a job. With the lightest possible touch, it captures the attitude of non-clinging and equanimity:

I invited Luke to come to Ka'ili'ili Road after work to have a bowl of tea, and he said he just might do that, which sounded to me like he would not. We shall see. I have placed two of the cigarillos that he likes in the Sensei's humidor, just in case he drops by.

The title story of the collection also works beautifully as a whole, this one illuminating the non-judging empathy an actor feels towards Nixon, a man he portrays in a one-man play each night, on hearing of his death. There is a strong sense of an exploration on what is personal and what is not, what is within the control of an individual, and what is the result of impersonal forces moving through.

“Greyhound Bodhisattva”, by Francesca Hampton – a remake of the story of the prodigal son (intentionally or not) - is a more traditional piece of fiction albeit one in which the character's conflict is “Buddhist”. A young priest, the 12th reincarnation of an important lama in his Tibetan lineage, has fled his village and is living – by monkish standards – an immoral life in America, having taken, at one point, an American lover. His people, it turns out, forgive him for all this: they want their reincarnated lama back at home where they need him. He dreams of the circle of lamas with whom he has incarnated this lama, and of his elderly teacher who, having been sent to America to fetch the wayward young monk, had only this to say about his lover: “at least she isn't pregnant”. Through this wayward monk's eyes, the reader sees that there is desire and remorse, but there is also compassion for the suffering he sees around him in LA. He “returns” to his role, not by returning to his village, but by attending to the poor and lowly he is now left among in LA. A vivid, Buddhist fantasy, I like.

A very strong piece in this collection is “Beheadings”, by Sharon Cameron. She handles the strong emotional content of the story by slowly peeling off layers until the story gets to the heart of the trouble. The narrator is seeking to find her brother, a brother whose emotional distress is shown in the second paragraph:

...Cambodia is "clean". He explained what I already knew: at least 1.7 million people dead from Pol Pot's scourge, a fourth of the total population. All the bad karma has washed over this place, he wrote. It's annihilated past sins. This is the cleanest place on earth.

Risky, I think – does her brother's trouble deserve to be elevated to the sufferings of a whole country? – but the author makes the revelations work with this juxtaposition. This is a story of a man unable to forgive himself and I read it only several months after attempting a similar story.  Another vivid passage:

What did it for me was seeing a scrawny dog with its head caught in a clear plastic jug, running around the streets of Phnom Penh, banging into laughing people, getting kicked away, taunted, and eventually forgotten.

The horror her brother is feeling is shown in episodes. In one, he engages in an old Shawnee ritual seeking to cleanse himself of his sin. In it, he has  to dive down into a river in the middle of winter – he has to break through the ice on the surface – to retrieve a handful of silt, because, having done so, he would be blessed and immune to "malign forces. All the evil in the world could no longer hurt him.”

Another approach is in “Mi Mi May” by Diana Winston. Here the protagonist is at a long Buddhist meditation retreat, striving for her awakening. She hits a bit of a detour in the person of Mi Mi May, a young woman who claims to have come very close to the final stages of enlightenment at this same retreat, her way of letting our narrator know she has the inside scoop on things. Mi Mi May is acting the bad girl now, no longer even bothering to pretend to practice. She prods the narrator into breaking silence by offering the temptation of fried chicken (to be brought in the next day by her visiting relatives).Mi Mi May is a funny, lively character, a great little archetype of the better devils of our nature.

There is a danger in this writing and that is the danger of the Buddhist cliché, the coded phrase meant to please the practitioner. It can be hard to avoid. In “In the Sky...” there is the moment when we're told the head monk will savor the cake, then "when the cake was gone, he'd let it go.”  Or, in “Beautiful Work”: “I cannot say what awareness is. It is nothing. It is no thing.” I'm not sure these are grievous errors, but as I went through the collection, these things that felt like cliches, or worse, attempts to please or impress the Buddhist audience, did seem to pop up enough so that I noted to myself that I should avoid them in my own writing.

My thought on that now is that it depends quite a bit on intention - if the intention is to illuminate a moment and doing so brushes up against cliche, so be it. It might be useful to have a sort of taxonomy of possible cliches handy, though, so that when they show up in the writing, one might make an extra effort to go further.