Chris Beal Reviews THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS, by Ruth Ozeki

Inventive and amusing, Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel, THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS, also manages to be profound. Ozeki is a Zen priest affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation, and she makes liberal use in her writing of what she has realized through her spiritual practice.

The “book” we are reading here is conscious: it dismisses what it considers a conceit – that some “author” is writing a book. The author is no more than a scribe, our book tells us. By contrast, this book seems to have opinions and ideas about many things but especially about its main character, Benny. And it often speaks in the plural – “we books” – when discussing the role of books in human life. Here, “books” themselves are a metaphor for how experience is created, how it is “bound” so that a time-space continuum of experience becomes manifest. This is most clear when we (through Benny) visit the bindery of the library where Benny hangs out. Literally, this bindery is the place where old books are repaired, but it is also much more than that.

Published by Penguin Random House, 2021.

Benny knows a book is being written about him, and he often talks back to the book, questioning the way it is telling his story. He thinks the book has agency. But the book protests that its role is only to record what happens (although it does seem to have plenty of opinions!). One of Benny’s tasks as he stumbles toward maturity is to discover his own agency so that he no longer needs to project it.

But Benny’s task is made much harder because he has lost his father in a freak accident. His parents loved each other very much and his mother, grieving, has put on so much weight that Benny is ashamed of her. She also hoards to the extent that her home is in a hazardous condition, and she may lose her and her son’s housing as a result. In the midst of all these crises, Benny, at fourteen, is not ready to be grown up.

Benny’s father, a jazz musician from Japan, named his son after Benny Goodman. Benny’s mother is white, and because Benny looks like his father, his mother is often asked if he is adopted. In this and other ways, Benny experiences himself as an outsider.

Benny also hears voices – not just any voices, but the voices of the objects in his environment. He experiences their pain when they are treated badly. He keeps this to himself when he can because, to others, it proves he is “mental.” But does it? Or is he just more sensitive than others?

The plot involves many other characters, including a girl whom Benny grows to love: she lives on the edges of society and he comes to know her in the mental hospital where he is sent for a time. There is also the psychiatrist, well-intentioned but set in her narrow ways of viewing consciousness. And there is a Japanese Zen nun who has written a book, TIDY MAGIC, on clearing out all the excess “stuff” in our homes, a la Marie Kondo. This little book falls mysteriously into the hands of Benny’s mother and provides another view of how we might treat objects in our consumerist society.

The format of the book is especially inventive. The book must have thought long and hard about how to present its complex story within the format of pages of print. For example, it changes font when a character talks in first person. Or, when TIDY MAGIC is quoted at length, the text is printed on a gray background.

But you will have to read THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS to absorb all its richness. At 546 pages, it will take you awhile, but the book will be glad that you took the time to savor and enjoy it.

An Autumnal Harvest of Buddhist Fiction

One of the things I enjoy most about this blogging experience is interacting with other readers of Buddhist fiction. Recently I learned of some previously published novels I didn’t know about, and just last week I read about two very new works brought to my attention in Tricycle. So September has been a good month for harvesting information about good reads.

Buddhist fiction blog reader Richard Gordon emailed me to recommend three novels as works of Buddhist fiction. I get a lot of these kinds of emails and I usually know the book(s) that are being recommended. But I had not heard of any of these novels, and I did not have a lot of time to peruse the books myself, so I asked Richard why they thought these novels were “Buddhist” fiction. The answer I received was brief, yet detailed and knowledgeable. I was so grateful and thrilled!

I will be featuring these books in future reviews. They are as follows:

Tea with the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy. Open Road Media, 2014.

Nothing Sacred by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Gypsy Shadow Publishing, 2011. There is also a sequel entitled Last Refuge.

The Old Man and the Monkey King, by Robert Durand, which as the title suggests is an extension of Journey to the West, and in particular, the portion popularized as Monkey. Illustrations by Leslie Morrison. California: Capricorn Press, 1972.

More recently, Tricycle Magazine‘s fall 2021 issue offered an excerpt of Rafi Zabor’s new novel, Street Legal: A Novel (debuting in December, 2021 from Terra Nova Press). You can read it here: https://tricycle.org/magazine/rafi-zabor-street-legal/

Lastly, Tricycle.com published an interview with Ruth Ozeki who talks about her latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. Penguin, 2021.

The story is about a boy named Benny who begins to hear voices of mundane objects after his father dies. Ozeki relates that “The book takes its title from a key teaching of the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.” It’s referring to the notion of dependent co-arising, or what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing.” https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ruth-ozeki-book-form-emptiness/

I’m very excited that our contributing editor Chris Beal will be reviewing this novel in the near future.

Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism: “Buddhism and Modern Literature”

I am very proud to announce the publication of my Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism article “Buddhism and Modern Literature.” It came online yesterday and I am excited to see how it develops over the next few years, since I am sure I will have to add to it as Buddhism continues to intersect with modern literature in a multitude of forms and ways. The citations cover Buddhism in modern fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, autobiography and biography from around the globe. Have a look here: Buddhism and Modern Literature.

And I am particularly fond of a reference under the heading “Literary Fiction” that our readers might remember from the Buddhist Fiction Blog:

Beal, Chris. “An Interview with Ruth Ozeki about Her New Novel: A Tale for the Time Being.” Buddhist Fiction Blog (10 April 2013).        This engaging interview reveals the Zen aspects, influences, and nuances of Ozeki’s award-winning novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Beal’s well-honed questions solicit deep and provocative answers about Zen Buddhism, fiction, and philosophy.

Another reference that might interest Buddhist Fiction Blog readers can be found under the heading “Cross-Genre Fiction”:

Beek, Kimberly. “Telling Tales Out of School: The Fiction of Buddhism.” In Buddhism beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States. Edited by Mitchell Scott and Quli Natalie, 125–142. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.     Beek examines the reception of Buddhist stories narrated inside and outside of Asian contexts by comparing the different reflections of Buddhism in Amy Tan’s Asian American novel The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and Keith Kachtick’s Buddhist-infused novel Hungry Ghost (2004), suggesting the emergence of Buddhist fiction.

The whole bibliographic article contains over 80 citations to general overviews, anthologies, primary works, articles, dissertations, web sites, etc. that outline the depth and breadth of Buddhism and Modern Literature. If you cannot access the entire article directly from the Oxford Bibliographies web site, you can probably access it through an institutional library. Happy perusing!!

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.