Some Quick Questions about Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Have you read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse? If so, will you fill out the short survey below?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I read the English translation when I was in high school, and in hind sight, it is probably the impetus for my interest in Buddhism and also the seed of my dissertation project that only began to blossom with more Buddhist fiction publications in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. As it turns out, I know I’m not the only person to have been impacted by the novel. This is the book my fieldwork participants thought of first when I mentioned the term “Buddhist fiction.” For my post today I thought I would ask other readers about their reception of Siddhartha.

How old were you when you read Siddhartha? teens

twenties

thirties

forties

fifties

sixties

seventies

eighties

nineties

Have you ever recommended the book to others? yes

no

Did Hesse's novel have any impact or lasting effects? If so, what?

Interview with Ruth Ozeki about her new novel: A Tale for the Time Being, by Chris Beal

Thank you so much for giving your time to this interview this afternoon. To begin, please say something about how your Zen practice and your involvement in Buddhism have contributed to this novel.

If you sit on the cushion for any amount of time, you understand vividly how much of the time we are in the past, in the future, and how difficult it is to stay in the present moment. In a way the whole book can be read as a parable or metaphor for what happens in the human imagination. In our minds we are time travelers. So the idea of this fictional character projecting into the past and into the future was a way of performing in fiction the kind of thing we do in our minds all the time.

Could we say, then, that the whole novel is a model of what we do in our minds?

Absolutely, and I think that all novels are.

You could argue that everything is.

Yes, and many people have. I mean, Buddhism is all about that, right? This is more overt because it’s pointing to the ways we do that all the time.

You quote Dōgen quite a bit and he’s also talking about time.

The quotes are mostly from Ugi or Genjō Kōan, or actually there’s another – The Merits of Home-Leaving. In that, he also has a lengthy discussion of the number of moments in the day.

That’s in the appendix, too.

Yes. He breaks time down into 6,400,099,980 moments in a day.

What do you see as the purpose of his doing that?

He’s playing with scale. He’s also de-familiarizing. He’s taking the most common thing in the world – a day – and blowing that up. And then he also says that the snap of the finger is 65 moments and every one of those moments is a moment to wake up and to turn your life around and to do things which will create beneficial karma. And so he’s also urging his young monks to do zazen: every moment you’re doing zazen is an opportunity to wake up. So ‘don’t shirk.’

It’s tremendously encouraging because we always think time is going by so fast. We have slow motion cameras and various other means of depicting that now, so we can photograph a humming bird and I suppose that the slow motion video of a humming bird is almost proof that Dōgen is right. But he was slowing it down in the only way he could back then, which is through language.

So playing with scale is also something I was also doing in the book, where Ruth and Oliver are talking about old growth tress, for example. That was a kind of playing with scale. And the discussion of whales and extermination. And Oliver’s project, the neocene – all of that is just sort of playing with different notions of time – geologic time. Just shifting, shifting.

So you brought up the ecological concerns in the book.

The tidal wave appears in the book as a reality, but it also appears metaphorically, talking about, for example, information, or when Jiko talks about “person, wave, same thing.” She uses the metaphor of a wave to talk about impermanence and dependent co-arising. That was there before I started writing about the tsunami, but it gained potency once I realized I could include the tsunami in the book and, in fact, that the tsunami needed to be an essential part of the book.

Both main characters – Nao and Ruth – go back in time.

Especially the whole notion of ghosts comes from Nao’s section of the book. And that does tie back into a pilgrimage made to Japan in 2010 with Norman Fischer. A bunch of priests went to Japan with Norman Fischer for a Zuisei ceremony, which certifies you as a a full-fledged priest. It’s something that in Japan a young priest leaving Eiheiji or Sōjiji would do at a very young age, but for a lot of the priests in the West, it’s a big deal to go to Japan.

You have to do it in Japan?

Well, no – there are Zuisei ceremonies here too but the Sōtō Zen hierarchy in Japan knows about Norman and that he’s a distinguished priest in the West so the lineage wanted him to come. And many of the Sōtō Zen priest in the States have now gone back to do this.

Anyway, while we were in Japan, we traveled around to various temples including Suzuki Roshi’s home temple. And one of things that really came home to me was how Zen is so much about the caring for and veneration of the ancestors. Ghosts are very palpable in Zen lineage – that there’s a real sense of the dead as being very much with us.

In Japanese culture in general, that’s true.

In Japanese culture in general. And so in O’Bon, the dead come back and you have to feed them and send them away again and it’s so much a part of Japanese culture that I thought it was completely appropriate for Nao to meet her great-uncle in ghostly form.

The 104-year old nun’s name is Jiko Yasutani, and Nao’s family name is likewise Yasutani. As you probably know, Yasutani was the name of a famous Roshi who greatly influenced American Zen. Was this a conscious coincidence on your part? If so, how is Jiko similar to the Roshi?

I knew, of course, that Yasutani is a famous Zen Master but that wasn’t why I chose the name. It was just there – it seemed like the right one. It very often happens that the name will just be there. Although to some extent, knowing Yasutani was a famous Zen Master was in the back of my mind somewhere. Also there was a movie that had something about Yasutani in it – and it was a bit of a wacky movie, too. So that was kind of in the back of my head, too, that it wasn’t a name that was completely foreign.

How do you define enlightened consciousness and do you see the book either in form or substance as reflecting or pointing to such consciousness?

I really don’t think that much about enlightened consciousness and I certainly don’t spend any time going after it, whatever it is.

That’s very Sōtō.

It’s very Sōtō. I truly am a product of my lineage. So, yes and no. When I’m writing a book, I’m concerned about the book being an expression of my mind and my awareness at that moment. I’m trying to understand and express my mind at any particular moment. I think that when novelists write, we’re trying to express some kind of truth. And that’s why we write fiction because we understand that truth isn’t something that can be expressed by trying to express it. Truth is not something that can ever be expressed.

And I think that may be the same with enlightened consciousness, whatever that may be. It’s not a term I use. But that I write fiction to express my understanding of truth, that’s something I can say – and fail to do. Because it’s impossible to do – there’s no way to ever express more than a fleeting glimpse or moment. So the failure is built into the effort. But the doing of it is the expression. When Dōgen talks about zazen, he talks about practice and realization being the same thing. When you sit zazen you are an expression of enlightened consciousness. You are an expression of things as they are. That’s the kind of writing I try to do.

What did you learn from writing this book?

I think that what I’ve learned through the writing of this book – which took six years – is that books are time beings too – they take the time they take – and you can’t really do much about that. You have to keep showing up. This is Zen again. Just coming back over and over again. We talk about zazen as a practice of return. And writing is like that too, just showing up, not whether you’re doing it right. It’s just the showing up that counts. And that’s wonderfully encouraging. And so I do have more faith in that practice as a result of having written this book.

Anything you want to add that I didn’t address?

There are so many ways of doing philosophy. And in the West we have one way which is very analytical. And if you read, let’s say Heidegger – because being/time is his theme – it seemed clear to me that Heidegger’s thinking was in some way influenced by Japanese Buddhism and by Dōgen. I’m pretty sure there was a Japanese Zen Master who was in Germany in that time and whom Heidegger had met and I’m pretty sure there is historical evidence of that.

But you read Heidegger’s work and you see philosophy being done in one way, and you read Dōgen’s work and you see it being done another way. So it interested me to take these philosophies of time and being and to do them in another way. It’s a different kind of expression that raises the same kind of issues and takes these larger questions and turns them and turns them and looks at them from different points of view and does that in a way that opens up these questions in a way that is certainly more accessible and more interactive.

I like the way you say “opened up” because when you think of philosophy, you think of people laying down what the premises and conclusions are in a straight line –

And really it’s more in line with how Dōgen does it – it’s not in a straight line at all.

So I was playing with how you write literary fiction that somehow embodies and performs these kinds of questions. And it’s not about just laying them out in the text but about somehow performing them. It’s almost between the lines.

It’s all the blank space.

It’s the holes.

Well, thank you so much Ruth. This has certainly been illuminating – and a lot of fun as well.

Announcing New Buddhist Fiction: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING, by Ruth Ozeki (Viking Penguin, 2013)

Three-time Canadian novelist Ruth Ozeki is at it again. The plot of her new novel interweaves the stories of Ruth, a writer living on an island off the coast of British Columbia, and Nao, a Japanese teenage girl. Nao’s family is a mess – except for her great-grandmother, a Zen Buddhist nun who has turned her own past tragedy into wisdom and helps Nao endure in a way no one else can.

When Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunch box washed up on the shore of her island and begins to read the journal she finds inside, she learns of Nao’s difficulties – how she was forced to return to Japan after her father lost his job in Silicon Valley, and,  having grown up in California, is now treated like a foreigner in her own country, mercilessly bullied and tormented in school. Seeing tragedy looming in Nao’s future, Ruth wants to change the expected outcome for both Nao and her family. But can she intervene to effect change when the story presumably took place long before she is reading it?

With quotations from Proust and Zen Master Dogen setting the tone, this meditation on time and so much else makes us ponder how we can live in the face of the transient nature of existence, how we can care for each other along the way, and how we can be transformed in the most unexpected ways.

NOTE:  WATCH FOR A DIALOGUE WITH MS OZEKI TO APPEAR HERE IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

“About vs. Of”

Reading works of Buddhist fiction is such a joy that sometimes I admonish myself for ever turning it into the locus of my dissertation project. Having to think seriously about it kind of takes some of the fun out of it. So far in my experience, the most challenging thing about approaching Buddhist fiction academically is trying to define it. I have tried to use genre theory to help with this, but it too is challenging. In the collection Contemporary Genre Theory, a volume edited by David Duff, he notes on the very first page that “In modern literary theory, few concepts have proved more problematic and unstable that that of genre. Having functioned since Aristotle as a basic assumption of Western literary discourse, … the notion of genre is one whose meaning, validity, and purpose have been repeatedly questioned in the last two hundred years.” Genre theory itself is dynamic, interdisciplinary, constantly contested and always developing. Where is a reader and thinker to start when even the theoretical boundaries are blurry?

I am learning to start where there is friction. One of the interesting boundary issues surrounding Buddhist fiction that presents as friction is “about vs. of.” These are not my chosen terms but those of the incredibly astute participants in my focus group fieldwork. Some of the participants noted that there seems to be a difference between stories that are about Buddhism verses stories that are “of” Buddhism. There are some stories that are clearly about Buddhism; they have Buddhist characters and these characters live their lives as Buddhists and/or the story has a Buddhist setting. There are other stories that are not about Buddhism per se but contain within them that which readers perceive as the dharma – these stories are “of” Buddhism. The best Buddhist fiction is, in my humble opinion, both about and of Buddhism, but the easiest to recognize and define are stories about Buddhism – stories that narrate a Buddhist world view.

A good example of the friction at the boundaries of fiction that is about Buddhism and fiction that is of Buddhism rests in the works of Charles Johnson. Dr. Johnson is Professor Emeritus, Pollock Professor of English at Washington University. He is a noted author of novels, short stories and essays who was awarded the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002. He is also an African American who self-identifies as a Buddhist. It is no surprise, then, that he wrote the forward to the first anthology of short works of Buddhist fiction entitled Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction (2004). As an author and Buddhist, Johnson has penned many novels and short stories and essays, as well as the autobipgraphical work Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2003). His works are both of and about Buddhism.

Of: Charles Johnson’s novels Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), which won the 1990 National Book Award, are both works set in mid 19th century America. They are also both stories structured around Buddhist epistemology. The title of Oxherding Tale is a reference to the Zen painting-poems Ten Ox Herding Pictures or Ten Bulls which, along with slave narratives, is one of the literary tools used to tell the story. In Middle Passage, the protagonist Rutherford Calhoun undertakes a transformational journey that illustrates the Buddhist concept of interdependence. Neither of these novels is actually about Buddhism – they are stories about African Americans. A reader without knowledge of the Ten Bulls or interdependence (Sanskrit pratītyasamutpāda) may not see these Buddhist aspects in the structure of these novels, as there are no overt references to Buddhism in these works.

About: Charles Johnson’s short story “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra” appears in the March 2012 issue of the Shambhala Sun periodical. It is a lovely story about a Japanese abbott who buys and restores an old run down temple using money he saved from translation work. The abbott, Toshiro Ogama, bought the temple so that he could be alone, but one day is faced with his first visitor. She is a young black American Buddhist named Cynthia Tucker. She is also a writer, and knows of Toshiro Ogama because he translated her work. Despite his attempts to keep her out of the way while spring cleaning, Ms. Tucker’s visit to the temple precipitates a breakthrough experience for Ogama. This lovely story is both about and of Buddhism, and you can read it here: “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra”. You can also read Charles Johnson’s own thoughts and reflections about the short story in an interview he gave to E. Ethelbert Miller here: E-CHANNEL: KAMADHATU: A MODERN SUTRA .

So is all of Charles Johnson’s work Buddhist literature? Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge imply this in their edited volume The Emergence of American Buddhist Literature (2009). But to label all prose and poetry by Buddhists as Buddhist literature is akin to labeling all such works by Christians as Christian literature, which is neither true nor helpful to my academic challenge. I think that, for the time being, I will forge ahead with the idea that Buddhist fiction is contemporary story that has recognizable Buddhist elements (characters, plot, setting) and clearly narrates a Buddhist world view, unless someone would like to convince me otherwise.

Conversations with Francesca Hampton, Author of Buddha on a Midnight Sea

Dear Francesca,

First I must thank-you, so very much, for participating in what amounts to an on-line author reading of your short story collection Buddha on a Midnight Sea for the Buddhist Fiction Blog. While our blog readers are not in your immediate presence to hear you read your stories, your voice comes through them so clearly that I, for one, feel as if I have benefited from knowing you for some time.

Second, I’m sure you will join me in encouraging all readers to post their questions about the collection of stories in Buddha On a Midnight Sea to the Buddhist Fiction Blog to engage in conversation with you. I know you are excited to hear feedback.

And so we come to the third point, my initial question for authors of Buddhist fiction, which is usually “who is your intended audience?”. Alas, you already answer this question quite eloquently in your preface when you note that you “imagined the stories as a break time activity in the context of a Lam Rim (Stages of the Path) retreat or other less intensive Buddhist religious gathering of several days duration, a relaxation activity to inspire practice even as the reader was entertained, and I still hope someday they may be. But I have discovered, sharing them informally with others over the years, that they are also helpful to those who wish a glimpse of the Buddhist path before treading it, or even just a story that brings some lightening of the heart or a useful idea of two in a time of trouble. I have learned that some of the stories have already been shared in study groups and prisons and even added to required reading lists in college courses” (Hampton, Buddha on a Midnight Sea, x – xi).

So my initial question is a bit trickier, I guess: Do you think of your stories as representing or carrying the dharma? If so, how?

I look forward to your response and a great discussion about your work.

Special Invitation for Currently Reading: Buddha on a Midnight Sea by Francesca Hampton

Happy New Year! This month I’m going to read Francesca Hampton’s collection of short stories in Buddha on a Midnight Sea. The poignant, insightful short stories in this collection are the result of Ms. Hampton’s unique creative writing talent combined with her belief in the efficacy of Buddhist narrative, both honed over four decades of Buddhist practice and experiences all over the world. In particular, Ms. Hampton has a talent for deep characterization and vivid description that acts as a conduit allowing readers to live through the characters. This is a skill that is difficult to cultivate in any form, but most especially in short story.

For this particular “Currently Reading” experience I have a special invitation for you. Ms. Hampton has agreed to discuss her stories with Buddhist Fiction Blog readers, so I invite you to purchase a copy of Buddha on a Midnight Sea at these links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Midnight-Sea-Short-Stories/dp/1621417484

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/buddha-on-a-midnight-sea-short-stories-francesca-hampton/1112436720

Ms. Hampton has also provided a link to the short story “Teachers” here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6BfPq5S_oEeam5XbDI4MXBrdXM/edit

and to the short story “In the City of the Queen of Angels” here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6BfPq5S_oEeNzlYbTNvckRSUTA/edit

both of which are part of the collection in Buddha on a Midnight Sea. You can also review the author’s online page here: https://sites.google.com/site/abouttheauthorfhampton/

Once we have all had time to read the stories, I start the ‘review’ of the Buddha on a Midnight Sea collection on 30 January 2013 by opening up a discussion with Ms. Hampton that I’m sure will be even more engaging if you jump in. I sincerely hope that you will join me in reading these short stories and discussing them with Ms. Hampton a couple of weeks from now.

Announcing New Buddhist Fiction x 3

It’s been a busy, busy holiday season and I thought before the year ends I should write a post about three new works of Buddhist fiction that have been published recently. I extend my deepest appreciation to all those Buddhist Fiction Blog readers who brought these books to my attention. In chronological order, the novels are:

1. The Dalai Lama’s Cat by David Michie. Hay House Visions, October 1, 2012. http://www.hayhouse.com/ This link leads to Hay House publishing. Search for The Dalai Lama’s Cat once you are there.

This is my winter holiday read! I am half way through this light-hearted novel that is, as the title makes clear, about the Dalai Lama’s cat. She is a Himalayan, as one would expect, and she has many names to match her multi-faceted personality. The book is written from the cat’s perspective and is a thin veil for some rudimentary lessons from Tibetan Buddhism. The most interesting aspect of the novel, to me, is the extended characterization of the Dalai Lama. How did Michie research and write the fictional Dalai Lama in this book?

David Michie is the bestselling author of Buddhism for Busy People, Hurry Up and Meditate and Enlightenment to Go. He has also written four thrillers, most recently including The Magician of Lhasa, which, as the publisher’s web site remarks, “brings the profoundly life-enhancing perspectives of Tibetan Buddhism to a wider audience of fiction readers.”

2. Lunch with Buddha by Roland Merullo. AJAR Contemporaries, November 13, 2012. http://www.lunchwithbuddha.com/

The web site provides the following on Merullo’s sequel: “Lunch With Buddha has the same main characters as Breakfast with Buddha (Rinpoche, Otto, Cecelia, Otto’s family) and is, like its predecessor, a road trip book. This time, though, the trip is from Seattle, Washington to Dickenson, North Dakota, a route that takes the travelers through Washington State, across the Idaho Panhandle, across the breadth of Montana, and into parts of North Dakota not visited in Breakfast.” Merullo’s Breakfast with Buddha was so popular that I can foresee nothing but success for this novel.

3. Mandarin Gate by Eliot Pattison. Minotaur Books, First Edition November 27, 2012. http://www.eliotpattison.com/

This is Pattison’s seventh novel in a series featuring the compassionate, intrepid Shan Tao Yun, an ex-Inspector from Beijing who shares the plight of imprisoned Tibetan Buddhists of post-revolutionary China when he is thrown into a prison camp in Tibet for unnamed crimes against the regime. Pattison writes with a power of insight and depth of compassion that are heart wrenching. A wonderful review of the novel and an insightful interview with the author, Eliot Pattison, can be found here on Sumeru. Many thanks go out to Karma Yönten Gyatso for this review and interview.