“Buddhism and American Literature”

I did a thing! I have a chapter titled “Buddhism and American Literature” that has been published in The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, edited by Ann Gleig and Scott Mitchell. The book just came out late last month.

While I cannot post the entire chapter here, I will post a picture of the first paragraph because it is viewable in the “Read Sample” of the Amazon dot com website. The book is incredibly expensive so if you want to read the chapter, the cheapest way may be to acquire the book through a library loan.

Kimberly Beek. “Buddhism and American Literature” In The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, edited by Ann Gleig and Scott A. Mitchell, 499–515. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Poetry from A Thousand Days of Tantra by Keith Emmons

I was introduced to Keith Emmons’ poetry last year when I met him through a mutual acquaintance. He shared a few poems with me and I instantly resonated with the way Keith captures the present moment with discernment. The initial poems I read reminded me a little of Jane Hirshfield’s poetry. When I learned that the poems came from poems written during a three year tantric retreat, I was instantly curious. Late last year, Emmons self-published these poems in his collection titled A Thousand Days of Tantra: Inside Three-Year Retreat. As he says, “The beauty of three-year retreat is expressed here in poetry” (p. 9).

The collection is made up of two books: Deer Park Poems and The Lady Sangmo Trilogy. Both collections present the first-hand experience of a three year, three month, and three day silent retreat conducted by Emmons and his tantric partner, herein named Lady Sangmo. The ‘thousand day” retreat is a central practice in Vajrayana Buddhism that involves intensive daily practice of Vajrayana methods like deity yoga, mantra recitation, and Mahamudra/Dzogchen, including focused study of Prajñāpāramitā or Perfection of Wisdom Sutras. Emmons and his committed partner added tantric practices to their retreat. As Emmons describes it, “A Thousand Days of Tantra is a unique presentation of an authentic long term retreat experience, conducted according to scripture, that is accessible and, hopefully, enticing to all” (p. 9).

Unique presentation indeed. Emmons writes in both free and rhyming verse, which is refreshing given the amount of free verse that seems to be preferred by contemporary poets. The images he creates are at once wistful and grounded in a reality reflective of a Buddhist worldview. And sometimes the poems are so intimate that they seem hardly appropriate of Buddhist poetry, until the reader remembers the tantric context, as if the only way to free oneself of desire is to relish in it.

What I appreciate most about Emmons’ poems is the way he transports the reader, bringing them along with him on retreat. Take for example this poem:

Day after day lifting the pink Post-it 
and placing it at the next chapter - 
as if going anywhere in a text 
is going anywhere. Do the hills 
go anywhere, verdant with giant redwoods 
as mist advances up the valley 
from the sea, cascades over the ridge 
then silently recedes? Yellow beams 
soften the haze, then diamonds sparkle 
from moist bay leaves suspended in air. 
I know each day something stays still; 
each day something goes away (p. 34).

In the page before this poem the reader learns that Emmons is reading the Diamond Cutter Sutra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) which is part of the Prajñāpāramitā. In the poem presented here, Emmons grapples with the notion of spiritual progress. Emmons creates friction by contrasting his experience of reading a Buddhist sacred text in a progressive linear fashion with terrain imagery that does not really “go anywhere”. The reader is brought up short on the path of the poem with the last two lines that resolve the tension between the text-based spiritual practice and the cyclical, fluid natural world by echoing a key teaching in the Diamond Cutter Sutra: ultimate reality is empty of inherent existence, and all phenomena are in constant flux (interdependent).

The seeming simplicity of the images and phases in this poem reflect all of Emmons’ collection. Perhaps a review that graces the back of the book and summarizes the collection will work best to entice readers to lose themselves in Emmons’ imagery: “I love especially the weaving of light and bird song, love making and wisdom texts, with turns of phrase and rhythm that startle and give strength over and over to your lines. You truly have made a pure land and sharing these echoes of it in this work is a great gift you are offering.” — written by Francesca Hampton, author of Buddha on a Midnight Sea and Leo Learns to Meditate.

The Buddha’s Storied Life

Late last year, The Buddha: A Storied Life, edited by Vanessa R. Sasson and Kristin Scheible, was published by Oxford University Press. The volume is a tribute to the legacy of Buddhist Studies scholar John Strong, who’s work has educated and influenced so many Buddhist Studies scholars, especially through his seminal work The Buddha: A Short Biography (2001).

Containing 12 chapters from leading scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies, the stories recounted in the book cover all the important elements of the Buddha’s biography and highlight the ongoing tension between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic in every instance of the Buddha’s story.

In the preface, Charles Hallisey talks about the ways that he learned to read the many stories of the Buddha from Professor Strong. This lesson in reading informs the structure of the book. Methodologically, there is a chronological flow of chapters that echos John Strong’s ability to work with scholars from across the field. In this way, the book is a multivocality that, even within each chapter, “preserves some of the heteroglossic richness of the biographical traditions, while likewise revealing [each author’s] intellectual diversity” p. 10.

The introduction, written by editors Sasson and Scheible, outlines how “the Buddha biography is perhaps the strongest throughline, the most palpable thread connecting communities and ideas, that runs right through about 2,500 years of Buddhist history: it is the story of Siddhārtha Gautama, his birth, his early life as a prince, his awakening to become the Buddha, and his teaching career and death” p. 1.

Bias toward an individualistic interpretation of the Buddha’s story is:

tempered when a reader understands the Buddhist biographical imperative to expand a single lifetime. The road to awakening may seem to be an inner, psychological process, as well as a singular experience for a singular hero, but the Buddha’s life narrative is in fact much broader in scope. Referring to Frank Reynold’s seminal work, Strong recognized that a reader’s “individualistic bias” can be mitigated by the appreciation of the karmic depth of a lifetime–the great expanse revealed in the “extended” Buddha biography. In other words, reading the Buddha as an individualized hero-type might seem logical and salient, but doing so obfuscates the work of many other beings in the story of his final lifetime, the fact OF his many previous lifetimes, and the pattern of the many previous (and future) buddhas as well (p. 4).

Here is a picture of the chapters and their authors:

My favourite chapter is by Buddhist Studies scholar, fiction writer, and volume co-editor Vanessa Sasson. The chapter is titled “A Timeless Love Story” (pp. 82-97). Herein, Sasson traces the infinite pairings of the Buddha and Yasodhara across time and Buddhist sacred texts to argue that:

Indeed, the Buddha would not have a story at all were it not for the many other characters in his life playing their parts. The Buddha’s story is built around relationships, each character participating in the great narrative that is the Buddha biography. As Strong so insightfully argues, the Buddha’s story is not just “a solo quest of a solitary seeker.” It is also a collective narrative, intertwined as it is with so many others (p. 93).

Since the Buddha’s biography is the seed of all Buddhist fiction, this volume is important for helping modern readers understand that sacred stories told and retold still help us to make meaning in this crazy, chaotic world. Moreover, the volume highlights the invaluable scholarship of John Strong that is grounded in reading as an act of cultural engagement to remind us that in reading and engaging with the Buddha’s story, we become a part of it.

REVIEW of The Cat Who Taught Zen by James Norbury

My Canadian winter has been very dark so far this year, and while I yearn for sunshine, I am also trying to appreciate winter as a period of sheltering in place, a time for getting cozy and imbibing in stories.

I like to think that a global equivalent to Canadian winters is the rainy season in places like India, where, in the past, mendicants and monks gathered in forest groves, and later, monasteries during the rainy season when travel was more challenging. Such gatherings provided opportunities for religious discourse and community building – in other words, storytelling.

With all things cozy and storytelling in mind, this January I have enjoyed reading James Norbury’s book The Cat Who Taught Zen (2023, New York: William Morrow). At first glance, it looks like a children’s book, but in point of fact is for all ages. Norbury has written AND illustrated the book with lovely watercolour sketches. Amazon.com currently ranks it at #15 of all Zen philosophy books, in amongst works like Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Mud, No Lotus (2014) and Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up (2016). Yes, I know . . . looking past the silliness of Amazon genre classifications, The Cat Who Taught Zen is exactly what I needed in January.

Big Panda and Tiny Dragon by James Norbury 2021.

I first tripped across Norbury’s work through his art postings on Instagram. His previous book Big Panda, Tiny Dragon (2021) was preceded by months of social media postings of his artwork depicting his characters Big Panda and Tiny Dragon, accompanied with pithy captions. I still follow Norbury for daily doses of feel-goodness.

In The Cat Who Taught Zen, Norbury takes his reader on an insightful journey filled with discerning animals, and in particular, a Cat. Almost every page has gorgeous illustrations: some line drawings, some watercolour, and some combination. In all there are 169 pages of illustrated story, followed by an Afterward that begins with the line “Zen can be a confusing idea.”

Norbury’s book fit the bill for a cozy January fiction read that made me feel like I was immersed in Buddhist storytelling. If I have one quibble, it is with the Afterward, which lacks citations to the Zen stories on which, Norbury says, he based his own story. I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I appreciate Norbury’s book as something of a storytelling escape, I’m growing tired of the decontextualization of Zen to commodify it as a self-help tool. Interestingly, Amazon currently ranks The Cat Who Taught Zen as #366 in the Happiness Self-Help category.

Catching Up, Moving Forward, and a New Category

It’s been more than a few months since I have posted. I needed a break, so I took it. But now I feel the need to catch up in order to ‘close out the year’, and the only way I can think to do so is to finish writing up the posts I’ve missed and back date them. So you may be alerted to a post from, say, July 2023 in January 2024. I hope the time discrepancy is not too jarring.

In the meantime I’ll fill you in on my newest adventure – editing. I recently helped edit a non-fiction Buddhist book that was published last month: Pith Instructions from My Teachers by James Gritz. You can find a copy at Sumeru Press or on Amazon.

Moving forward, I want to be able to write about contemporary creative Buddhist literature outside of the fiction genre, with emphasis on “creative” and discluding anything that would fall under self-help. To this end, I have added the blog post category “Not Buddhist Fiction” to the Buddhist Fiction Blog. This will allow for the occasional blog that expands the genre scope to Buddhism as it intersects with poetry, memoir, and other creative non-fiction works. I may even mention the occasional academic and/or educational book.

My desire for expansion comes from recently writing about Buddhism and American Literature and remembering how much I enjoy reading outside of the fiction genre. Sometimes a poem really resonates, and sometimes enjoying a creatively written memoir makes it even more memorable when it is shared. If you have suggestions of English literature that is also Buddhist to discuss or review, feel free to send in suggestions.

And for next year and many more to come, dear friends, may everyone be safe, happy, healthy, and may everyone live with ease.

My Review of “David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion” by Rose Harris-Birtill in the Religion and Literature Journal

A while back I reviewed David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion (2019), by Rose Harris-Birtill for Religion and Literature, a journal published by the University of Notre Dame. Harris-Birtill’s work is important for Buddhist fiction because it is the first text written by a solo scholar about one individual author whose work inhabits and purports a Buddhist worldview: David Mitchell. He wrote Cloud Atlas (2004), The Bone Clocks (2014), and Utopia Avenue (2020) to name just a few of his novels. This is big! It means that Buddhist fiction is truly starting to be recognized in the academy.

While I cannot post the whole review here for copyright reasons, I can post the opening paragraph.

You can find the full review through the Project Muse database. Here is the citation:

Beek, Kimberly. Review of David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion, by Rose Harris-Birtill. Religion & Literature 54, no. 3 (2022): 171-173.

Enjoy!