New wave of Buddhist writers emerges and gets noticed

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) A reader is more likely to encounter a talking bag of Doritos than a Buddhist monk in George Saunders’ surrealist stories. The celebrated author, who has earned comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain, has been practicing Buddhism at a Tibetan temple in upstate New York for several years. […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) A reader is more likely to encounter a talking bag of Doritos than a Buddhist monk in George Saunders’ surrealist stories.

The celebrated author, who has earned comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain, has been practicing Buddhism at a Tibetan temple in upstate New York for several years. “Literature at its highest level,” he says, “is a Buddhist thing.”


But while Saunders believes his religion and his work are inseparable, he’s not inclined to pen any Karma-lized junk food. “I wouldn’t write a story where a guy has an identifiable Buddhist thought,” he said.

Saunders is just one of a bevy of Buddhist fiction writers, however, who say Dharma-tinged themes _ the constancy of change, the limits of human reason, the self-denial of true compassion _ often lie just below the surface of their stories.

Fifty years after beatniks Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac introduced Zen to a generation of American readers, Buddhist authors are now active in every genre, from detective fiction to children’s books.

Moreover, American Buddhist converts like Saunders, who won the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant” last year, are scooping up accolades far out of proportion to their relatively small numbers:

_ Charles Johnson, another MacArthur Fellow whose novel “Middle Passage” won the National Book Award in 1990, is a member of a Zen temple in Seattle.

_ Kate Wheeler, a former Buddhist nun, has been awarded the O. Henry Prize for best short story twice and was named one of the 20 “Best Young American Novelists” by the literary magazine Granta.

_ Jon J. Muth’s bestselling book, “Zen Shorts,” a collection of Buddhist parables, was awarded a Caldecott Honor last year by the Association for Library Service to Children.


So what accounts for this new generation of “Dharma Bums”?

“Buddhism has always attracted the literary crowd,” said James Shaheen, editor and publisher of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Even before the beat writers, New England Transcendalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau explored Buddhist ideas.

“What’s unique about this moment is that, both in the arts and the sciences, you have more and more Buddhists who are expressing Buddhist ideas,” Shaheen said.

U.S. Buddhists are 1 percent of the population, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public life. Other research indicates 25 percent of American Buddhists are converts.

Demographics are only part of the story, scholars and writers say. Globalization and the Internet play roles as well.

“The world is more interconnected now,” said Wheeler. “Some of the ideas are more welcome.”

Jeff Wilson, an assistant professor of religious studies at Renison College, University of Waterloo in Canada, said American Buddhist converts are uniquely suited to introduce those ideas into literature. They tend to be well-educated, middle- to upper-class and culturally plugged in, he said.


“These are people with access to communication technologies and the leisure time to write about Buddhism,” Wilson said.

Saunders, who was raised a Roman Catholic on Chicago’s South Side, was introduced to Buddhism about a decade ago by his wife and the writings of Catholic monk Thomas Merton. The former geophysicist and current creative writing professor said taking up meditation “was like a big door swinging open.”

“You become aware that the reality your mind is making up is not reality. It gives you the power to say, `This is just a projection of my mind, it’s not reality.”’

In Saunders’ dystopian tales, “reality” is not such a great thing. Teenagers are kept in market-research compounds; advertisements follow people down the street; casual violence abounds.

As Kerouac and Ginsburg rhapsodized about the open road and lamented the complacency of Eisenhower era Americans, Saunders skewers his own materialistic and narrow-minded contemporaries. Yes, things might be better were we all Buddhists, Saunders said, but he’s not about to start preaching. “Fiction is a way to access these things much more obliquely, it’s a way of thinking without thinking,” he said.

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Both Saunders and Johnson said Buddhism _ and especially meditation _ provide unique aids for writers. It teaches how to concentrate on a single object for long periods of time, to see and show the dense web connecting us all, and to empathize with others.


In Johnson’s novels, the Buddhist ideas are a little more apparent. His “Oxherding Tales,” takes off on a famous Zen parable, and in each work, characters follow Buddhism’s eight-fold path from suffering to something approaching nirvana, scholars say.

“It’s all there,” Johnson said, “but none of it with flags.”

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Publishers have begun to flag a trend.

Boston-based Wisdom Publications has put out two volumes of “Buddhist fiction” since 2004. The first volume, “Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree,” edited by Wheeler, was hailed as a cultural breakthrough and sold nearly 7,000 copies.

Next fall, Wisdom will publish a young-adult novel about a second-generation Buddhist coping with perennial problems: schoolyard bullies and parents.

Some Buddhist writers, however, are skeptical about labeling a book “Buddhist fiction.”

“The closest thing to what I would call Buddhist fiction is the haiku, and its still about 17 syllables removed from experience, so it fails by 17 syllables,” said novelist Christopher Moore, a Buddhist from Toledo, Ohio.

Johnson agrees _ to a point.

“Fiction does not deliver enlightenment,” he said. “It can be like a finger pointing at the moon; it can’t give you the experience of being the moon,” he said, paraphrasing an old Zen lesson.

A photo of George Saunders is available via https://religionnews.com.

KRE/RB END BURKE

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