The Tibetan Tengyur (bstan ‘gyur) is an encyclopedic collection of more than 3,500 Indian Buddhist texts, assembled in more than 200 volumes. It forms the second major part of the Tibetan Buddhist canon, and together with the Kangyur (bka’ ‘gyur), the collection of the discourses of the historical Buddha, constitutes the sum total of Indian Buddhist learning translated into Tibetan, the core and foundation of the Tibetan Buddhist intellectual world. The Tengyur, which means “translated treatises,” contains a varied collection of works, some commentarial, some independent. Among its contents are the great treatises of Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Madhyamaka and Yogacara; Tantric works; the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita) texts; commentaries on sutras; as well as works on logic, linguistics, poetry, and medicine.

Recent years have seen the beginning of initiatives to translate the whole of the Tengyur into English, though we are still many decades, possibly even a century, away from its completion. (The 84,000 project, which aims to translate the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon, expects to complete the translation of the Tengyur by 2110.)

However, readers of English can get an impression of the vastness and intellectual depth of the Tengyur now, through individual works that have already been translated, and also through a remarkable new project brought out by Wisdom Publications. This four-volume series of books, called Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, has just concluded with its final volume, Philosophical Topics. 

The series was conceived by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who asked a group of Tibetan monastic scholars to produce a summary of the key scientific and philosophical contents of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. This Compendium Compilation Committee, chaired by Thamthog Rinpoche, abbot of Namgyal Monastery, produced a series of four Tibetan volumes, which have now been translated into English. With a total length of more than 2,000 pages, this is a formidable achievement. 

The first volume covers the physical sciences, with discussion of ancient Indian Buddhist theories of matter, time, and cosmology, as well as a substantial section on embryology, while the second volume is devoted to the Buddhist sciences of the mind, providing an overview of Buddhist psychology, the mind’s constituents, inferential reasoning, and meditational mind training. The final two volumes focus on philosophy. The third volume surveys the ancient Indian philosophical cosmos seen through Tibetan eyes, presenting an account of the Buddhist conceptions of the main schools of Classical Indian philosophy. These include the Nyaya and Vedanta, as well as “unorthodox” schools like the Jains and the ancient Indian materialists, followed by a thorough presentation of the key schools of Abhidharma and Mahayana philosophy. The final volume offers a  discussion of specific philosophical topics, such as the two truths and nonself,  and provides an impression of the lively philosophical debates these topics sparked in ancient India.

Translating this demanding and often technical material was not an easy task, and Wisdom Publications assembled an impressive set of experts under the general editorship of Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama’s principal English translator. The first volume was translated by Ian Coghlan, who has recently published a fine translation of Buddhapalita’s commentary of Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. The second was translated by Dechen Rochard (who also translated the fourth volume) and John Dunne. Rochard is a specialist on Madhyamaka and Candrakīrti, while Dunne is well-known for his work on Buddhist contemplative practice in dialogue with cognitive science. The third volume was translated by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Hyoung Seok Ham. Lopez has recently translated a voluminous 18th-century Tibetan work on tenet systems (frameworks for understanding the nature of reality) for the Library of Tibetan Classics series; Ham is a distinguished Sanskritist and expert on the Classical Indian Mimamsa school. Volumes 2 and 3 also contain introductory contextual essays by Dunne and Lopez, respectively.

The fourth and final volume covers six central topics of Buddhist philosophy: the two truths, the no-self theory, ultimate reality according to Yogacara, emptiness in Madhyamaka, Buddhist epistemology and logic, and exclusion semantics, or apoha. (Exclusion semantics is a way of understanding a particular concept by eliminating everything that it isn’t.) With the exception of the theory of the two truths, which runs through the entirety of Indian Buddhist philosophy (described in greater detail in Sonam Thakchoe’s new magisterial The Two Truths in Indian Buddhism), the remaining five topics line up with the systems of tenets described in traditional Tibetan accounts: no-self with the Abhidharma, followed by Yogacara and Madhyamaka, and the final two topics with the school of Dinnaga and Dharmakirti. As these schools are treated in detail in volume 3 of the series, there is some overlap. We find discussions of the Yogacara theory of the three natures (trisvabhava) in both volumes 3 and 4; the same is true of the Svatantrika-Prasangika distinction, while matters of logic and inference are treated in much greater detail in volume 2. The interested reader will want to acquire all four volumes to ensure they do not miss relevant discussions elsewhere in the series.

Somewhat more concerning than the perhaps inevitable spread of discussions across separate volumes are the editors’ inconsistent translational choices. An unsystematic comparison of volumes 3 and 4 yields numerous examples: parikalpita-svabhava is rendered as “imaginary nature” in one volume and as “imputed nature” elsewhere; other cases include spyi (“generality” or “universal”), buddhi (“intellect” or “cognition”), akara (“image” or “aspect”), and so on. Why the publisher has not insisted that the translators harmonize their terminological choices at the outset of the project is unclear. Those familiar with the subject matter are unlikely to be confused by the examples of translational variation just mentioned; they are, after all, all reasonable English equivalents of the relevant Sanskrit and Tibetan terms. However, this volume is presumably intended for readers without prior acquaintance with the substantial Sanskrit and Tibetan technical vocabulary characterizing Indo-Tibetan philosophy. In an attempt to render dense, scholastic material, which frequently relies on precise definition of and differentiation between terms in English, a consistent choice of translations is essential. Tibetans themselves realized the importance of such terminological consistency when translating Sanskrit texts into Tibetan as early as the 9th century, and one would hope that a similar desire for translational coherence would also characterize contemporary endeavors, at least within the boundaries of a single project. 

What is the intended audience for this series of books? These volumes occupy an interesting middle position between introductory overviews and primary sources. On the one hand, they constitute synoptic compendia, which bring together discussions of specific topics from various sources under a single heading; on the other hand, they are firmly rooted in the Tibetan scholastic tradition, sharing its expository style and focus on copious quotations from primary sources. The intended readership is clearly not the complete novice in the field. Leaving the differences in translational choices to one side, by the time someone who has never heard of Dinnaga, Dharmakirti, or exclusion semantics gets to sentences like the following, readers will probably have reached for a more elementary exposition of Buddhist philosophy:

“Conversely, in the case of negative concomitance or the heterogeneous class, although this is limitless like the homologous class, there is a difference in that the term, being absent from all dissimilar or heterogeneous cases, can be ascertained in a general way not to apply to those.” [4:478]

Nor are the books meant as a substitute for reading the scholastic Buddhist treatises of ancient India or the Mahayana sutras. What these four volumes provide is an entrance into the thought-world of Tibetan philosophy, and the way it has made the Indian Buddhist tradition its own by systematizing, analyzing, and developing it. A reader who already has some familiarity with Abhidharma, Yogacara, and Madhyamaka, with the main problems these schools discuss, or with Buddhist theories of mind and meditation, will find an account of how the Tibetan tradition put these together as a single body of knowledge.

Indeed, it might be more accurate in this context to speak of the dominant stream of the Tibetan scholastic tradition. This reviewer would have been delighted to see more of the philosophical diversity of the Tibetan conceptions of the Indian sources represented in the series. Discussions of tathagatagarbha (buddhanature) theory and the philosophical complexities this entails are absent, for example. The status of epistemic instruments in Madhyamaka, a hotly debated issue in Tibetan scholasticism (for more on this, see the recent two-volume study by The Yakherds, Knowing Illusion, Oxford University Press, 2022), is presented exclusively from the perspective of Gelugpa orthodoxy. The focus of the series is of course the presentation of Indian Buddhist discussions, but nevertheless, one would hope that the reader does not go away with the impression that over the course of more than a thousand years in which Tibetans translated, studied, and analyzed Indian texts everybody in Tibet agreed on how these works were to be understood.

Despite minor flaws in translational coherence (which might be mitigated considerably if the publisher made available a searchable, cumulative version of the glossaries of the four volumes), this series constitutes a monumental achievement. It affords English-speaking readers a view of the contemporary Tibetan scholastic tradition from the inside, and allows them to see the conceptual and philosophical richness of Indian Buddhist literary culture through Tibetan eyes. Students of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and of the Indian intellectual tradition more generally, have every reason to be grateful to the Tibetan scholars making up the Compendium Compilation Committee, as well as to the English translators for providing them with this fantastic resource.

♦

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Challenging the ideas about the European discovery of Buddhism and its influence in the construction of Protestant Buddhism, Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India presents a compelling narrative of the reinvention of modern Indian Buddhism in colonial and postcolonial India.

Drawing from “unarchived histories,” Douglas Ober examines the marginalized, disenfranchised, and forgotten institutions and persons that played an instrumental role in shaping the trajectory of Buddhism in medieval/early modern and, especially, colonial India. He begins by questioning the prevalent idea of the decline of Buddhism in the 13th century. Ober argues for the presence of Buddhism and its memory in the minds of Hindu Brahman elites, who continued to remember a story of struggle, competition, and conquest over the Buddhists in premodern India.

This was evident to a vast network of native scholars/assistants who worked alongside the colonial surveyors and civil servants of the East India company. These assistants often talked to locals to gather information about sites, texts, or images, and their investigations revealed the bias against Buddhism and the appropriation of Buddhist spaces within Hinduism. Ober forcefully argues that the idea of the European discovery of Buddhism resulted from the deliberate silencing of native scholars, reflecting “colonial arrogance, bigotry, and racial prejudice.”This began to change in the second half of the 19th century, when English-educated Indians began to produce new scholarship on Buddhism. In addition to collecting manuscripts and archaeological/art historical data, scholars presented Buddhism as a scientific, rational, and scriptural religion that opposed the evils of Brahmanism, i.e., the caste system and Vedic ritualism. In contrast, scholars such as Sarat Chandra Das traveled to Tibet, studied there, and collected hundreds of manuscripts, and challenged the predominant representation of the Buddha as a social reformer or the sangha as a promoter of gender equality. Later, scholars attempted to identify “crypto-Buddhists” in the early 20th century among the marginal lower castes, tribals, and untouchables. What is evident through the discussion of these examples is the entangling of colonial institutions, European and native scholars, and their dialogues, which resulted in a sustained interest in recovering the Buddhist past.

Ober also covers monk-scholars, who developed their understanding of Buddhism through monastic training in Sri Lanka or Burma, rather than the scholarship of the time. The focus on these agents at the grassroot level highlights their important role in reimagining Buddhist sacred sites such as Sarnath and Kushinagar. Ober also draws our attention to the crucial role of the Theosophical Society in the development of scholarly practitioner global networks. The Theosophical Society’s preference for Buddhism and engagement with Buddhists from different parts of Asia led to the emergence of a number of Buddhist associations, which focused largely on social and religious reforms through scriptural Buddhism, in contrast to Dharmapala’s Mahabodhi Society and its goal of reviving Buddhism’s past glory. All of these associations were part of a broader global Buddhist network in which they exchanged information and resources across national, regional, cultural, and geographical boundaries.

At the end of the 19th century, the anti-Brahmanical representation of Buddhism began to be replaced with a new interpretation that saw Buddhism more as an offspring of Hinduism. This new formulation, Ober writes, was “inextricably tied to the birth of the modern nation and intellectual assimilation of the Indic religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism.” (Growing up in India, I was always taught that both these traditions were heterodox sects of Hinduism and not separate religions.) Ober provides a contextual study of sociopolitics through which this understanding caught the imagination of nationalist leaders and Hindu thinkers in the first half of the 20th century and became the popular understanding. A new conception of inclusive Hinduism that equated “Hindu-ness” with “Indian-ness,” and defined it as “a combination of territorial, racial, religious, and cultural characteristics,” emerged as a result of the works of organizations, including the Hindu Mahasabha. The philanthropist J. K. Birla’s patronage for the construction of a number of Buddhist viharas and temples, modeled on Hindu revivalist architecture, was aimed at asserting India’s claim as the Buddhist homeland and Buddhism being part of a singular Hindu tradition. This claim helped tone down the anti-Brahmanical rhetoric and framed the revival of Buddhism as a recovery of India’s great past.

Buddhism’s return to the national forefront was not a monolithic but a multipronged phenomenon.

Buddhism’s return to the national forefront was not a monolithic but a multipronged phenomenon. Several leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar (a Dalit) and monk activists such as Bhikkhu Bodhananda (a Bengali Brahman) continued to make strong arguments for the egalitarian, anti-caste, anti-Hindu nature of Buddhism. Despite being aware of the claims of the “Hindu-Buddha,” and a proximate relationship between the Hindu and Buddhist organizations, Ambedkar argued for a clear separation between a Buddhist and a Hindu identity. This separation was also emphasized by Marxist scholars, who found close connections between Buddhist and Marxist doctrines. Rahul Sankrityayan presented Buddhism as “a religion of reason, human pragmatism, and atheistic humanism,” while Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi highlighted the process of collective decision-making and lack of private property in the sangha as features common to Buddhist and Marxist thought. Ober correctly asserts that these articulations were a result of global networks that shaped their scholarship as well as activism in the independence movements in colonial India.

Ober also interrogates how Buddhist symbols, sites, and relics were intricately tied to the nation-building exercise and used as instruments of foreign policy. The adoption of Buddhist Dharmachakra and the Lion seal of Sarnath as national symbols was predicated on Nehru’s understanding of Buddhism as “a modern religion of reason” that did not require any institutional commitment. Even though he participated in multiple relic tours and Buddhist functions, Nehru saw Buddhism as a “cosmopolitan modernizing force with pan-Asian appeal” that could be utilized as an instrument of foreign policy to represent India as the guiding force of the past and present. Nehru consciously chose relic-centered diplomacy as a tool in the Buddhist border regions to present India as a legitimate state and in neighboring Buddhist countries as the homeland of Buddhism.

Ober’s exhaustive survey assembles Buddhism’s disparate histories from different regions of modern India and contextualizes the formation of its multiple stands. He effectively dismantles the idea of European discovery of Buddhism and challenges the overemphasis on the contribution of Dharmapala and Ambedkar’s scholarship. Each of the indigenous curators Ober profiles was linked to the global networks of monks, scholars, intellectuals, political leaders, industrialists, and the colonial state, demonstrating the interplay between East and West, local and global, native and colonial, and national and universal. The ambitious scope of Ober’s work justifies his multisited and multilingual methodology, and reliance on translations and secondary literature. While Ober engages with previous works that focus on the role of colonial actors and selective native scholars, his effort is elevated by engaging with the voices of marginalized people and overlooked associations in the rebirth of Buddhism.

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Three-year retreat is one of the focal points of committed Tibetan Buddhist practice. And yet there are virtually no published, first-person accounts of what it entails to spend three years, three months, and three days in intense, sometimes solitary, practice. Vicki Mackenzie’s Cave in the Snow, a third-person narrative of Tenzin Palmo’s twelve years in a mountain cave, revealed little of that practitioner’s personal, inner journey. Diane Rigdzin Berger’s memoir exposes a great deal.

Most three-year retreats occur in a group setting, and the rules of such a retreat, specified by the supervising lama, usually restrict broadcasting details about specific practices and inner experiences to outsiders. In Berger’s case, the rules were a little more relaxed, and although she couldn’t give details of specific practices, her story comprises a rich tapestry from which anyone knowledgeable about Tibetan Buddhism can get a clear picture of what she was practicing and how these practices affected her. We can also be thankful that the author is an experienced writer with a gift for description and a poetic touch. She brings the reader right into the heart of her retreat. 

Not only was this a solo retreat, but necessity required Berger to move from place to place, supported by friends, family, and sangha members in several Pacific Northwest locales. Her retreat was directed by Kilung Rinpoche, lama and head of the Pema Kilaya sangha, based near Seattle. Berger draws on journal entries from the retreat and reflections added once she had decided to write a book about it.

The texture of Berger’s memoir is flowing and atmospheric. Closed retreat brings greatly heightened sensitivity, and here she is generously open, giving the reader access to everything from her emotional struggles and occasional physical difficulties to her insights, dreams, and inner reactions to practice. All of this is richly embroidered with references to the abundant wildlife that inhabited her various retreat settings and her feelings of close attunement to the natural world.

Despite the unusual mobile aspect of the retreat, we are given a very clear idea of what it means to be in a long, solitary, and essentially traditional Tibetan Buddhist retreat. Berger often practiced five or six sessions per day. Appropriate altars were maintained in each setting. Full attention was given to protectors and local spirits. Sang and incense offerings (such as the well-known Riwo Sangchö) were performed regularly. Her practices included Dzogchen meditation, deity sadhana practices, lengthy mantra recitation, foundational practices (ngondro) and prostrations, predawn fire pujas, daily tsoks (food offerings), and other rituals. Anyone familiar with the more advanced Tibetan Buddhist practices can guess what other, more esoteric, activities Berger was engaged in.

But why would a Westerner, and in particular Diane Berger, attempt such a feat? “To achieve enlightenment?” or “to be free?” This is, of course, the final goal for all Buddhists. But deep practices—especially those addressed in long retreats in this tradition—are done more specifically to remove obstacles to realization. And what that boiled down to for Ms. Berger, as she explains it, was to free herself from the distractions and sidetracks she had acquired from life. Perhaps these could be called her personal neuroses. Berger came to her retreat as a seasoned meditator, with decades of experience in the Tibetan tradition. She had received teachings from a number of highly regarded lamas and had practiced in Tibet and Nepal. But she was not, by nature, a recluse. Leading an exceptionally active life, early on she had worked as a journalist and later helped found a humanitarian foundation and a Buddhist sangha. Like many modern people, she was engaged with society and proactive. She had married twice, raised children, and had grandchildren.

Contemplating in her journal the benefits of her retreat, she wrote, “And now, somehow, perhaps that is the big miracle after these three years—it has become simple to sit for practice. No underlying diversionary pull, no addictive ideas, no some-thing else.”

Because her book is so open and honest about her inner world and its difficulties—similar to those all of us in the modern world acquire—we are given a realistic picture of what deep Tibetan Buddhist practice can release us from and how that comes about. This became especially clear in those transitional moments when Berger moved from one venue to the next—by car, ferryboat, and even a small airplane. Anyone who has done long solo retreat knows how overwhelming it can be to suddenly need to engage other people, to encounter the normal chaos of a supermarket, to set up a new living space. At these moments, our ingrained mental and emotional patterns suddenly reveal themselves. Such encounters are woven into the multicolored fabric of Small Boat, Vast Ocean.

At the same time, it also becomes clear that the guidance of an experienced mentor was essential. (For an uninitiated person to “cook book” such a journey from written material would be impossible and potentially dangerous.) The retreat was designed for her specifically by Kilung Rinpoche, and Berger consulted with him frequently, either via in-person visits or by phone. In some of those moments when the ground seemed to fall out from under her feet, her teacher’s advice and support kept her on track. 

By literally making her three-year retreat an open book, Berger has given those on the spiritual path an incredible gift. Readers who wish to deepen their knowledge about Tibetan Buddhism, or those considering long solo retreat, will find Small Boat, Vast Ocean entertaining and enlightening.

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In a well-known koan from the Book of Equanimity, an abbot asks a scholar where he is going. The scholar replies that he is going on pilgrimage. The abbot then asks, “What are you going on pilgrimage for?” The scholar confesses he doesn’t know. The abbot simply responds, “Not-knowing is most intimate.”

Chenxing Han takes this last line as the guiding philosophy of her new book, one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care. Written in the aftermath of her friend’s death from acute myeloid leukemia, one long listening is an ode to not-knowing, chronicling how grief fundamentally restructures Han’s view of reality. She describes the book as a “mala bracelet of rumination-worn beads” that circles around three autumns: the fall of 2014, when she began a chaplaincy residency at a hospital in California; the fall of 2015, when she moved to Taiwan to study spiritual care at a Buddhist college; and the fall of 2016, when her friend and former roommate passed away. Han’s friend once said to her that autumn is “the most honest season,” as it “does not pretend that life blooms forever.” The autumns that Han chronicles in one long listening are no exception. Filled with reminders of impermanence, these three seasons of Han’s life are times of profound loss and quiet transformation as she learns what it means to grieve—and to care.

The memoir’s fragmentary structure mirrors how Han comes to understand grief: as a cyclical process that ruptures expectations of coherence and instead unfolds in its own time. Over the course of the memoir, we watch Han revisit the same memories, turning questions over again and again as if in prayer, never arriving at a clear answer but rather delving deeper into the intimacy of not-knowing. In eschewing linear narratives and clean resolutions, she aims not just to describe the experience of chaplaincy and grief but also to evoke it in all its opacities and uncertainties.

As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets.

Han, as a hospital chaplain, interfaces with uncertainty on a daily basis as her patients and their loved ones grapple with new diagnoses, rapid physical decline, and death. Confronted with their many questions—“Why does my father have cancer? Is grandma ever gonna leave the ICU? Where is my daughter now that she’s dead?”—she can only answer honestly, “I don’t know.” For Han, this is the heart of chaplaincy: learning to accompany others through the unknown and unknowable as they come to terms with illness and impermanence. Of course, this is no easy task: “At the threshold of every patient’s room, I can foresee nothing of the visit ahead,” she writes. “This not-knowing is terrifying.” Often she is called in when other medical providers are at a loss and when every possible intervention seems inadequate. There is no easy fix; all she can do is listen and be present. Yet sometimes, impossibly, presence is enough. Her honest and tender vignettes of bedside visits illustrate the intimacy that can emerge from holding space for another without rushing to offer a solution. Her patients trust her with their despair and heartache—and with their hidden joys. (“No one told me this work would be full of love stories,” she muses.) Through listening openheartedly, Han bears witness to the fears, delights, shames, and regrets that make up a life.

This is challenging work, and Han frequently finds herself on the verge of burning out. In her first written assignment as a chaplain resident, she “waxe[s] poetic about the chaplain as bodhisattva,” striving to offer herself fully to her patients, sometimes losing herself in patients’ stories as a means to “forget [her] own hauntings.” Soon, though, she realizes how untenable it is to attempt to accompany every patient through their existential distress without also tending to her own. At a friend’s urging, she begins to give herself “permission to fall short of limitless generosity,” accepting that she, too, is in need of support. As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets. Sitting at the bedside of a dying elderly Chinese man, she is transported to her own uncle’s deathbed; visiting a Buddhist writer who is undergoing chemotherapy, she receives a blessing not to give up on her own writing. These moments blur the lines of who is caring for whom, and Han comes to recognize that “we are each other’s bodhisattvas.”

This lesson becomes all the more poignant as Han finds herself in the throes of her own grief. As she sits at her dying friend’s bedside, Han notices all the ways that her friend is caring for her and teaching her how to go on after her death. After her friend dies, Han comes to view their friendship as “one long listening.” And though she initially finds herself livid with the “listening-bereft world” after her friend is gone, eventually Han discovers that she is still listening—and her friend is too. Honoring her friend’s memory becomes a way of opening up to the everyday wonder of the world, and Han is often startled by the beauty she encounters—and the care she receives—when she sheds her expectations and follows what she views as signs from her departed friend.

In a poem written after her friend’s death, Han quotes the Upaddha Sutta’s refrain that “admirable friendship is not the half but the whole of the holy path.” In this light, one long listening is a testament to the ways that friendship can guide us through grief, cataloging Han’s companionship with patients, friends, strangers, oceans, trees, and the world itself. For its readers, the book serves as a companion, orienting us to the intimacy of not-knowing, the sustaining power of friendship, and the importance of honoring the losses in our lives. Through listening to Han listen, we might learn to listen to the world—to its cries and its silences, its sorrow and its pain, its joy and its despair—and to find beauty in it all.

♦

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The action of Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award-winning 1967 novel Lord of Light may be familiar to Buddhist readers—the rise of Buddhism in a Vedic or Hindu context—but the setting certainly is not. The book depicts the newly awakened Buddha on an alien world fighting against gods named Vishnu, Mara, Brahma, and Kali. The fight is not metaphorical, it’s a real battle in which the Buddha leads an army of zombies and demons in an effort to destroy “Heaven,” the Olympus-like home of the gods. Also in the fight are spaceships and giant lizards known as slizzards that are “much faster than horses.”

The book’s title refers to Maitreya, as several characters refer to the Buddha throughout, though he refers to himself most often as Sam, short for Mahasamatman. With this title Zelazny is likely thinking of Amitabha, whose name is often translated as “Infinite Light,” rather than Maitreya, whose name is related to “maitri,” or metta, meaning lovingkindness or friendliness.

Zelazny’s gods began as humans who traveled from Earth in a spaceship called the Star of India and subjugated an unnamed planet, naming its inhabitants—flamelike entities capable of possessing humans—rakshasas, or demons. The human conquerors, referred to as the First, assumed the identities of Indian gods, instituted a caste-bound society for new generations of humans, and created technology to mimic supernatural powers. 

Reincarnation is also accomplished by technological means. The oldest and most important gods have been reincarnated twenty times or more, and their identities as humans have faded but never entirely disappear. The Buddha reveals that Brahma, the chief god, was originally a human named Madeleine, for example. Brahma now presents as male, but gender fluidity is a routine matter when undergoing reincarnation. When a god dies (and this happens frequently, often at the Buddha’s hand) a replacement must be promoted, and is free to decide their gender. Mysterious beings known as the Lords of Karma maintain a temple where petitioners can come and obtain new, younger selves—as long as the Lords’ “mind scan” judges them worthy of such a privilege. For those out of favor with the Lords, there are still “bootleg body shops” in out-of-the-way places that also offer rebirth. (It’s not clear where the bodies come from, whether they are grown in vats or taken from lower-caste people.)

The gods maintain a stranglehold on technology, keeping their subjects in a perpetually pre-industrial state, using swords and plows rather than guns and tractors. They demand prayers, which travel by way of radio waves, and for which special coin-operated machines are installed outside temples. Priests can directly address their deities using video screens (though the gods often don’t answer), and fancy gadgets abound for the elites, but efforts by ordinary humans to advance technology are condemned as “Accelerationism” and are viciously suppressed. 

Into this world emerges the nobleman Siddhartha, also called Sam, who was one of the planet’s original conquerors. He lives a pleasant, undistinguished life until one day, angered by the prayer machines and the oppression of common people, he awakens and begins a planetwide rebellion. As Bernard Faure points out in 1,001 Lives of the Buddha, Zelazny in this work is influenced by Western ideas of the Buddha as a reformer of the caste system and proponent of progress. Buddhism and Accelerationism are fused into one movement, and the Buddha is heard to praise the virtues of ancient technology that the common people should be able to use. 

After losing in his battle with the gods, the Buddha departs for “Nirvana,” a golden cloud of magnetized particles that surrounds the planet. But he is summoned back from this apparently blissful existence by the radio-wave prayers of Yama, the god of death, who operates a huge lotus-shaped satellite dish. The returned Buddha attempts to unwind or reverse his enlightenment, to become an ordinary person again: “He does not meditate, seeking within the object that which leads to release of the subject… He does study the object, considering its ways, in an effort to bind himself… He tries once more to wrap himself within the fabric of Maya, the illusion of the world.” 

The gods are depicted as cynical and fraudulent, and the Buddha also describes himself this way, employing “the ancient words,” and “venerable tradition” to manipulate people. Yama says to him, “I know that you are a fraud. I know that you are not an Enlightened One. I realize that your doctrine is a thing which could have been remembered by any among the First. You chose to resurrect it, pretending to be its originator.” The Buddha replies, “Whatever the source, the message was pure, believe me. That is the only reason it took root and grew.”

But at other times the Buddha, and one of his disciples, an Angulimala-like figure who tried to kill the Buddha but was converted instead, are depicted as genuinely awakened: 

“Summer passed. There was no doubt now that there were two who had received enlightenment: Tathagatha and his small disciple, Sugata. It was even said that Sugata was a healer, and that when his eyes shone strangely and the icy touch of his hands came upon a twisted limb, that limb grew straight again. It was said that a blind man’s vision had suddenly returned to him during one of Sugata’s sermons.”

The possibility of actual enlightenment spurs both the Buddha’s allies and enemies to action. “Enlightenment” throughout conflates Buddhist awakening and the Age of Reason. When one man awakens, the whole world is awake. The Buddha’s ability to understand and outwit the gods offers the only hope of defeating them, but in the process, instead of toppling religion and ending it, he creates a new one. 

Roger Zelazny referred to himself as a lapsed Catholic and a man without a religion, but the topic reverberates through his works, including his ten-volume magnum opus, The Chronicles of Amber. All the religions appear in Lord of Light, if only briefly. A secret Christian, the chaplain of the original spaceship, inhabits the form of the Hindu death god/dess Nirriti, and fights against both the Buddha and the gods. Though the Buddha doesn’t ask it, his followers erect new temples and paint murals depicting his deeds. The ubiquity of gods and temples suggests that even in a time and place where science has solved the problem of mortality (if not morality), religion is an inescapable part of human activity, despite its outward forms being imperfect or corrupt.

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Inciting Joy, poet and professor Ross Gay’s latest inquiry into happiness, reads like an intimate conversation with a close friend. With his usual playful, openhearted wisdom, Gay explores what incites joy and what joy incites through subjects like basketball, dancing, and losing your phone. The word “incite” is often used alongside something like a riot or a revolution, but it’s just as apt for Gay’s definition of joy: a force that dissolves our deepest systems of order—“me,” “you,” “good,” “bad”—and embraces the sweet complexity of what’s left. 

Sorrow is inextricably bound up in Gay’s definition of joy. In the first chapter, Gay describes this with a scene almost identical to the night before the Buddha’s enlightenment when Mara attacks him beneath the Bodhi tree. The assault finally ends, as the story goes, when the Buddha says, “I see you, Mara,” and invites him to sit down for tea. Gay’s version adds one more step: Invite your friends and their demons (he calls them sorrows) to the table too and make it a party. This “potluck of sorrows” places communion and interdependence at the center. Joy isn’t the lack of pain but the presence of love.

If joy happens when the borders of the self dissolve, suffering happens when they harden.

Gay addresses the traditional beliefs about joy, namely that it’s confined to accomplishments and possession: the big raise, a new car, organizing that pernicious storage closet, or “getting the dishes sparkling clean.” “It is sad, so goddamn sad—that because we often think of joy as meaning ‘without pain,’ or ‘without sorrow’… not only is it considered unserious or frivolous to talk about joy, but this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without/free of heartbreak or sorrow.” 

In the chapter “Death: The Second Incitement” Gay explores his father’s cancer and eventual death. Amidst the tragedy is a tender, enduring caretaking between the father and son. The litany of pains and indignities his father suffers (being too weak to open a water bottle, vomit stains on his clothes) chips away at the ice block between them. “It was through my tears I saw my father was a garden. Or the two of us, or the all-of-us… And from that what might grow.” Illness forces us to face the reality we all exist in—we know how this ends, or more aptly, that it will. Although not all of us look after someone right up to the end, we’re all caring for the dying. From that, what might grow?

The essays on skateboarding, poetry, comedy, and academia that follow are a cartography of connection. “Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie,” Gay writes, “we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it.” Each incitement enumerates the ways we brush against each other: We imitate a pro’s three-point shot, we let a classmate look at our exam, we offer a high five to a stranger.

Or we plant a garden. Gay frequently touches on his experience planting the Bloomington Community Orchard alongside a group of go-getters who transformed a barren lot into a hundred yards of fruit trees. Digging into the soil side-by-side (whose hand is whose becoming less important) to nourish seeds and saplings so they can, in turn, nourish a community—that is interdependence.

Holding each other while we fall apart, Gay says, is another word for joy. 

Caretaking, a “radical joyning,” happens when we soften the boundaries around the self. A community garden can just be another hobby, but when every mouth that enjoys a ripe mulberry is your mouth too, it becomes something much more beautiful. In a story about dancing to Kendrick Lamar in a sweaty basement, Gay describes how the crowd became “amoebic, hive-ish,” how “‘each other’ got murky.” 

If joy happens when the borders of the self dissolve, suffering happens when they harden. An essay on Gay’s college football career shows how hypermasculinity backed by violence shrinks who the self is allowed to be. After a while, there’s no need for the figure of the coach or the cop to mark the boundaries—you become your own enforcer. Don’t cry. Don’t talk back. Make the right jokes. On either side of that narrow plank, shame and punishment await. 

Even amid the minefield of men’s sports, joy persists. Gay recalls how they shaved their legs together before games, feeling each other’s freshly smooth skin, and a teammate breaking his fall with a hand on his lower back. “In almost every instance of our lives—our social lives—we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking,” Gay writes in his previous collection A Book of Delights.

Lest you think Gay just has a natural proclivity for happiness, he describes a significant period of doubt and depression following his graduation. “Falling Apart: The 13th Incitement,” catalogs how his pattern of repressing tough emotions—those things we think of as “not-joy”—led to a dark period of numbness, doubt, and depression. 

“The obsessive thoughts were the churning, disturbed waters of grief denied, or grief refused, and the way to soothe those waters, it seems so obvious from here, is to wade into them. Into the deep waters, as my nana says.”

In the midst of his struggles, Gay attends a meditation class and is horrified by the teacher’s inquiries into a student’s discomfort. “Not only couldn’t I look at them talking about sorrow,” he says, “I thought it was cruel and unusual that we might be invited to watch.” Unsurprisingly, he later realizes, when you avoid your own pain, you can’t bear to look at anyone else’s either. If we want to be in meaningful relationships with others, we don’t just have a responsibility to ourselves to wade into the deep waters; we have a responsibility to our community. And holding each other while we fall apart, Gay says, is another word for joy. 

Gay’s sometimes cheeky, always honest narratives are a pleasure to read, but the book’s real gift is that it prompts us to consider our own joy. What are my incitements? What family legends and ordinary delights and old, not-forgotten wounds would end up in my own tome of joy? Not the well-polished milestones, but the moments that feel like a handful of soil in my fist: fragrant, full of life and decay, and proof of how we sustain each other. 

The post A Radical ‘Joyning’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

After years of lockdown, upended lives, and emotional overwhelm, we can finally go outside—now what? It’s hard to pin down a feeling defined by ambivalence, but Katherine May articulates post-COVID numbness in Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age with precision and forthrightness. Her attention is shallow; her mind is constantly watching for the next threat; her emotions are both overpowering and inaccessible. “Lately I can’t read a whole page of a book,” she says. Sound familiar?

The Maslach Burnout Inventory, a psychological diagnostic tool, says burnout is the result of three factors: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (also referred to as cynicism), and a diminished sense of accomplishment. This isn’t the first time that May, who was diagnosed with autism late in life, has experienced burnout, but it is the first time she’s seen it in so many others. The “pandemic hangover,” as she calls it, is marked by a sense of being “bored, restless, empty-headed, and bodily resistant to changing it.” She wants to write but flicks between social media channels instead. Time has taken on a disturbing quality. “Every night, when I wash my face,” she says, “I feel as though I have been standing at my sink in one continuous moment across several months.”

May wants the magic back. Childlike wonder and ancient reverence call to her. She wants the dam to break, to let loose a moment of catharsis so powerful it shakes off all the cobwebs. She wants to be enchanted again.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. . . . It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection.

The book is divided into the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Each part contains reflections on parenting, her childhood, meditation, and places with histories of enchantment. The elements’ evolving meanings illuminate the central themes of embodiment, interconnection, and hierophany, which she defines as divinity revealing itself to us through ordinary experiences. A being who is tapped into hierophany has “a supernatural key to see wonder in the everyday”—in other words, this is a being for whom everything is bliss. The elements remind us of our own physical material, too, and how that material is ever changing and eternal, personal and cosmic. In her section on water, for example, the sea’s unpredictability mirrors her Ménière’s disease, a condition caused by an excess of fluid in the inner ear. The act of taking off her shoes literally “grounds” her amid existential angst.

Turning to the natural world for answers is nothing new, but May catalogs her investigation with refreshing honesty and grace. Not every walk in the woods summons a Whitman-like transmission. Sometimes, like the rest of us, she shows up at a spiritual landmark and putters around, unsure of what to do, until it’s time to get back in the car.

Although the epiphanies May craves don’t happen automatically, she comes to a more useful truth: no place is inherently magical. You can return to the same woods again and again and find them different each time. May refers to this as experiencing “deep terrain.” The beeping toys and gadgets that her son is drawn to are shallow terrain, like most of the territory a burnout-brain seeks safety in. Deep terrain, on the other hand, is rich with multiplicity, symbolic meaning, and mystery and makes you find fresh understanding each time. It isn’t simple.

The Leonid meteor shower of 1833 is a perfect example. One early morning, an estimated 72,000 streaks of light fell across the sky in magnificent arcs. The witnesses, who at the time didn’t have the scientific knowledge to explain it, had to reckon with the mystery in their own ways, each one coming to their own uncertain conclusion about the nature of the universe. That very plurality of meaning is the magic of deep terrain. It doesn’t offer a straightforward answer. Engaging with its layers of history and life isn’t a means to an end but a practice in and of itself, one that requires curiosity, reverence, and ceremony. Most importantly, you create your own meaning. “We are not the passive recipients of the numinous,” May writes, “but the active constructors of a pantheon.” God is found not in the woods but in the woods’ potential to be anything.

“Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory.”

Just because something has the potential to be enchanting, though, doesn’t mean we can force it to be so. How do we create the causes for magic? One tool May uses is meditation. In stillness, she learns to open herself to the full spectrum of experience. When we scan the news for the next threat (a symptom of COVID burnout, May says), our minds are looking to control our experience. A headline provides an object for our otherwise vague fear. If we define our discomfort well enough, the idea goes, maybe we can get out of feeling it. In meditation, on the other hand, May realizes there is no narrative to pinpoint. The illusion of a definite reality dissolves along with the protective barrier it provided.

Sometimes that hurts. When it does, we can find strength in compassion. At a Zen Peacemakers retreat, she learns that it’s much easier to face hard truths when you’re buoyed by care—by both the care others have for you and the care you have for them. If you can feel into our interconnection, there will always be hands waiting to catch you. Sometimes that means practicing with a physical sangha; sometimes it just means recognizing how many minds have wrestled with the exact same suffering you’re dealing with now. In the presence of that community of searchers, which stretches endlessly back and endlessly forward, uncertainty can become a beautiful mystery.

May unpacks the predicament we’re all in and refuses to give an easy answer—there is no get-enchanted-quick pill. How do we take joy in not knowing? How do we add texture back to a flattened reality? How do we feel magic again? Her lyrical, often funny, earnest guidance is grounded in basic human nature but leaves room for our own unique paths. In the end, it’s just like the woods: we must make meaning ourselves. The effort may be awkward and uncertain, but on the other side is magic. And if you’re looking for a place to start, going for a walk is always a good idea.

The post An Antidote to Burnout appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Imagine this: You’re at a party when someone rolls out a multicolored plastic mat and asks everyone to take off their shoes. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” they say. “Let’s forget about all this conversation, the party, the food. I’m going to start calling out random colors and limbs, which will dictate where you put those parts of your body in increasingly impossible-to-sustain poses. Sound good?” Out of context, the natural response might be to ask, “Why would anyone want to do this?” But, of course, we know that millions of people do exactly this in the game Twister. This raises the question: Why do we play games at all?

In philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s APA Award–winning book Games: Agency as Art, the University of Utah professor attempts to answer this question with a dissection of what actually constitutes a game in the first place. It’s a famously tricky problem, one that prompted Ludwig Wittgenstein to conclude there is “probably no single characteristic which is common to all the things we call games.” Nguyen begs to differ, framing playing a game as a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” for the sake of making possible the experience of struggling against them.

It’s a fascinating argument, one that holds up to most examples we throw at it. For example, a basketball player takes on the obstacles of not carrying the ball and defending one’s own hoop in order to enjoy the experience of passing a ball through the hoop. If the game were simply Pass A Ball Through A Hoop, we could get a stepladder and do it as many times as we’d like. That would be almost unimaginably boring. And yet struggling against basketball’s actual rules adds up to a deeply engaging experience that allows us to bump against the limits of human experience.

But this still seems to be raising the question of why we engage with games at all. Certainly, most of us have more pressing demands: hunger, sickness, death. Family, friends, spouses. Nearly everything seems to be more important than deciding how to put a specific body part on a spot or getting a ball through a hoop. To this, Nguyen offers the concept of “disinterested interestedness,” which he describes as “practical reasoning and practical action engaged in, not for the outcome, but for the sake of the engagement in the practical activity itself.”

The player can enjoy a game only if they give themselves over to its goals and rules entirely.

In other words, the player can enjoy a game only if they give themselves over to its goals and rules entirely, taking seriously the idea that passing a ball through a hoop in a particular way has some real significance. This requires a significant buy-in on our part, which in turn means momentarily forgetting our other everyday concerns in order to have an aesthetic appreciation of the struggle against basketball’s rules. In that situation, food is not so important.

But stealing the ball and going for a layup? That’s life or death.

Many Buddhist thinkers discuss the art of living in similar terms. A particular situation arises—a sense of frustration at work, an unexpected medical setback—and we must take the present moment on its own terms, choosing the most skillful response while remaining unattached to some imagined sense of how the world ought to be. What’s artful about this approach to life is how it flows without judgment with the present condition.

Of course, one might raise the objection that while games give players clear-cut goals and rules, life itself is often far more messy. In this sense, the game framework applied to our day-to-day choices might seem to minimize the art of living into a series of binary choices and point-keeping. Minus one point for a bad response to a coworker’s small talk. Plus three points for holding the door for a stranger.

But taken in the broader sense of Nguyen’s definition of games—the act of putting aside our long-term concerns and taking on the conditions in front of us in order to fully experience a particular moment—it seems there is a useful comparison to make. The moments of our lives are not similar to games in a trivial sense but rather in how they provide us with the conditions we must take on fully in order to experience their deeper meaning.

What this really comes down to is playfulness, or what Nguyen might refer to as an ability to take on different agential modes. In our daily life we can see this in our capacity to move smoothly and willingly between different mental and social states without creating an internal tension that says “This is how it should be.” We work in an office, we ride the bus, we enter a meditation room, we come home to a family. Each of those settings demands a different skillful response. Can we move into them playfully, taking on their demands fully and reacting in an appropriate way with an unencumbered mind? Can we play the game of the moment, see what is expected of us, and thus experience all that life has to give?

It recalls Soto Zen priest Dainin Katagiri’s discussion of time in Each Moment Is the Universe:

. . . accept the fact that whatever you do, wherever you live, under all circumstances, you have a chance to realize the truth. With sincerity, try to realize the ultimate nature of your actions: bowing, studying, talking, or whatever it is that you do. When you bow in gassho, just do gassho through and through. If you really do this, you can touch the ultimate truth.

In a related essay titled “Games and the Art of Agency,” Nguyen calls games “yoga for your agency,” in the sense that they increase our flexibility toward different states of being. In a video game, we jump in and out of, say, what it would be like to be a robot flying around an alien planet or a race car or a medieval thief. “In this way,” he writes, “we can find our way to greater flexibility with our agency, by temporarily submitting ourselves to strictures on that agency.” Isn’t this mindfulness? Not straining against the conditions of our life, but bending with them into a new and broader awareness?

Could we do this with all of our experiences? Can we take our lives seriously enough to play each of their moments?

The post Playing the Game of the Moment appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I can’t remember when or where I first encountered the idea that Buddhists aren’t supposed to indulge in too many words, but I’ve since been exposed to all the rituals of silence and the refraining from talking, reading, or writing that happen at retreats or in Buddhist spaces. From what I understand, this caution about language stems, at least in part, from a conviction that language is a finger-pointing-at-the-moon, that it mediates reality and should be sidestepped, overcome, or disregarded to attain a higher awakening. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that this idea must only be partially true.  

The intimate relationship between thought and language is frequently studied, but rarely has it been depicted as vividly as in Fifty Sounds, a memoir by Polly Barton, who moved to Japan at 21 and later became a literary translator. The book is a collection of fifty personal essays each revolving around Barton’s experience with a particular Japanese onomatopoeic phrase. 

The Japanese language contains an impressive sound-symbolic vocabulary, including, of course, words that describe sounds produced by animals and people, as well as ones that imitate those of the inanimate world, such as rain or wind. Additionally, there are tons of mimetics that express states of actions, and those that depict psychological modes and feelings. “Unlike most European languages, in which onomatopoeic…words are considered unrefined or baby talk, in Japanese they are an indispensable component of the language. …They overwhelm ordinary speech, literature and the media due to their expressiveness and load of information,” writes scholar Gergana Ivanova.  These phrases are, indeed, used in a wide range of situations: Take goro-goro for example, which means rolling, tumbling, or rumbling, and is often used when someone wants to say that they just spent the day at home lolling about and watching TV. Or bura-bura, “to swing back and forth,” and is used to mean a kind of wandering, browsing, or strolling. You can use the expression ho-to, which evokes a sigh of relief, and or describe the quality of a heavy downpour using zaa-zaa. When a memory or a recollection is clear in the mind, it’s maza-maza (“vividly, clearly, distinctly”), and when you’ve only just caught the train or that deadline, you’ve giri-giri (“almost, barely”) made it. There are also a dizzying number of these kinds of words to modify the quality of everyday actions like smiling, walking, and laughing. 

These mimetics, Barton writes, have traditionally been overlooked by linguistics scholars but are being reconsidered as not just very evocative means of expression, but as mechanisms with the uncanny ability to place the listener and speaker in the same exact moment by means of affect. She goes as far as to say that these phrases are, for her, “where the beating heart of Japanese lies.” More than the mastery of keigo, or honorific language that is an essential-but-Sisyphean step toward fluency that gives most Japanese-learners massive headaches, mastering these phrases—which represent for Barton “a Japanese of gesturing and storytelling, of searing description, of embodied reality”—is her linguistic ambition. 

But Barton does not discuss these mimetics merely to celebrate a specific phenomenon of Japanese (in the way that a lot of pithy articles and memes about Japanese words like the one that means, for example, “the sun seen through the trees,” tend to do). Rather, she uses them to make a larger point about how language learning is shaped by personal experience.  

“Language is something we learn with our bodies,” Barton writes, “and through our body of experiences; where semantics are umbilically tied to somatics, where our experiences and our feelings form a memory palace; where words are linked to particular occasions, particular senses.” In opposition to “the text-books, memorized lists of verbs, and smartphone apps” that are the dominant representation of language learning, Fifty Sounds tells the story of how Japanese came to be etched into Barton’s consciousness in a certain way, creating a pulsing body of knowledge unteachable by the flat interface of apps. 

“Language is something we learn with our bodies.”

I first took an interest in the book because I had a similar trajectory to Barton; I moved to Japan at 23 and began learning Japanese there. Like Barton, my life had been overwhelmingly monolingual, so the development of a new, creative power that amassed over time, and with tedious practice, was something I experienced as totally miraculous, mainly because it had felt so impossible before I started. Barton is very good at describing what those first excruciating days (or, in my case, years) are like—especially considering that those experiences must be a distant memory for someone who, today, is such a skilled translator (her renderings of fiction by Aoko Matsuda, Kikuko Tsumura, and Tomoka Shibasaki are incredible).The initiation of a true process of immersion, Barton contends, jumpstarts a second infancy—complete with toddling, incautious attempts to find a “language parent”—which is all very difficult and humiliating, and sometimes lonely:

It is the kind of learning that makes you think: this is what I must have experienced in infancy except I have forgotten it, and at times it occurs to you that you have forgotten it not just because you were too young when it happened but because there is something so utterly destabilizing about the experience that we as dignified, shame-fearing humans are destined to repress it.

There’s maybe no other way to designate this feeling of vulnerability aside from likening it to childhood, when you’re learning everything all at once. At the same time, there’s an ease when you’re not very good: “You are on holiday from the disingenuity of language. You cannot express yourself except in the most basic terms . . . plainly, with terrible grammar, and a kind of deep profundity . . . Your very incompetence, it seems, has liberated you.” 

This type of liberation, of course, is short-lived, and, as the language-learner goes deeper into their target tongue, that bliss fades. The vulnerability entailed by immersive learning contains a heavy dollop of world-shattering, which Barton describes in ways not limited to what I’ll mention here. 

Cognition is bound by the words we know, and when we only know one language—that is, when we only live with one set of cues, concepts, assumptions, and rituals—we think that those cues, concepts, assumptions, and rituals are all there could be. Barton writes, 

As long as we are part of the linguistic majority, we never have the opportunity to question [our language], or at least to do so in a fundamental, world-shifting, ground-pulled-from-under-one’s-feet way. We do not learn to define our context at all, because it is transparent to us; it is only a short step from this to a felt sense that this is all that is possible. Which means, necessary.

If we never view this context from the outside, we can mistake it as “an unshakeable aspect of profundity and permanence” and can confuse our native framework “with deep, metaphysical truths.” Our language, Barton muses, paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein, is a pair of glasses through which we see the world, and it never occurs to us to take them off. Of course, this can lead us to think of language as something riddled with inaccuracies, or sure, something like directions (the pointing finger) but not the actual place (the moon). But what if language is not simply “‘a flawed distorting mirror’ of reality, but a complex, naturally evolved system to be taken on its own terms? What if . . .its primary function is not the internal thought but the social interaction?” 

In any case, the language(s) we know shape who we are, and achieving a level of competency in another tongue may help to put some dents in our self-hood, or to create another self entirely. 

“Authenticity—‘telling the truth’—is necessarily a construct forged by context.”

As her Japanese improves, Barton starts to entertain thoughts about the self being forged through language-mimicry and its lack of inherence, and although they “felt intolerably teenage-angsty,” these thoughts reveal the existence of a kind of chameleon-ship that is often praised in the abstract but despised in the day-to-day. Our society sees something noble in the ability to code-switch, to bounce between languages and diverse contexts. But sometimes the reality for multilingual people is less seamless, and certainly less glamorous. 

“It seemed to be woven into the cultural fabric of both the place I’d grown up and this new one I found myself in: a person should be consistent in their behavior if they want to avoid being immature, self-centered, flighty and irresponsible,” Barton writes. Yet, in Japan, Barton notices herself “being spineless and unfaithful on an almost daily basis.” She catches herself talking in English about how strange she finds certain concepts in Japanese, only to find that the same concepts make sense while speaking Japanese. This sense of hypocrisy may sound familiar to those who have tried to immerse themselves in another language. While living in Kyoto, I began a relationship with someone who was also studying Japanese, and who couldn’t speak English. Our fights, which happened constantly despite the obvious smallness of our range of communication, were peppered with contradictory statements. This, of course, is nothing special in and of itself. After reading Barton’s memoir, I realize that perhaps, moving between three languages, this person and I could never truly hold fast to what we were saying. For me, there were real psychological costs to this: I was skittish where my English self would have erected a boundary, and with my usual communicative defenses rendered useless, I had few tools to defend myself when our disagreements were more than miscommunications. 

It’s fruitless, Barton writes, to expect consistency from people who speak different languages, and important to remember that this changeability affects monolingual selves, too—no matter the language, we adapt to the circumstances, becoming what is expected of us. Perhaps we don’t really want to think about these things, because they also uncomfortably point to how authenticity—“telling the truth”—is necessarily a construct forged by context. 

At no point does Barton claim any sort of ownership of the Japanese language. And while her immersion contains moments of healing—liberation from self-judgment, and clarity around intentions—Barton was and remains wary of how susceptible a person of a different culture can be to “ignor[ing] the existing community… and caus[ing] those around [them] discomfort and labor that [they] are perfectly unaware of.” In other words, how easy it is to Eat, Pray, Love their surroundings into a back-drop for personal growth. More to this point, the memoir contains many amusing and somewhat painful encounters with gairaigo, or foreign loan words, that show well enough to the fact that she can never own it. Fifty Sounds situates itself in Barton’s specific journey to learn a language—it’s a memoir that “holds no aspirations to serve as a balanced or academically rigorous investigation” and is instead an “unashamedly subjective celebration of the interpersonal dimension to taking up a language.” 

So, in the end, perhaps the criticisms leveled at language as obstruction are rational enough. Immersion involves obsession, the diligence and drive to close the language barrier between you and other people. Even if language itself is not the issue, surely fixating on the right way to say things can only be a distraction to spiritual practice, if your goal is the moon. 

This is where it may be helpful to consider the parallel Barton draws between learning a language and eros: “Making the commitment to learn a language is not solely a practical, rational, commendable choice, a way of improving communication, although it can evidently be all of those.” It might more fruitfully be considered as an attempt to access the “tantalizing body of knowledge” in another, or a grasp at intimacy—a nod to the impossibility of “merging [one’s] self with theirs.” Perhaps, instead of blaming language and our attachment to language for spiritual sluggishness, we can recognize these very real desires within ourselves. 

I’m reminded of a friend who has on more than one occasion described his initial encounter with Buddhism in the same terms: “It felt like falling in love.”

The post Self in Translation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Liberation Day is a fine new short story collection by George Saunders, who has practiced for many years in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Four of the nine stories in the collection are new, the other five having previously appeared in the New Yorker.

Despite his lightness of touch and phantasmagorical humor, Saunders is a precise and learned writer, with a style echoing Chekhov, Vonnegut, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, laced with the flavors of Terry Southern, Monty Python, and Bruce Springsteen. The new book’s title story is a walloping leadoff in the Saunders tradition of heart-stoppingly moving, funny speculative fiction. “Liberation Day” is about a mind-blanked artist, enslaved and shackled to a wall in a rich man’s mansion; it’s about the plight of all artists in the 21st century’s hellscape of grief and disaster; about the mindless, snowballing cruelty of people and their lust and art and beauty and helplessness.

Though there is a lot of humor in it, Liberation Day is less fanciful and playful than Saunders’s earlier work, more deeply anchored in the events of our own dark times; one of the stories, “Love Letter,” dispenses almost entirely with the author’s untamed imagination, speaking with unusual directness of the current political situation in the United States. Taken as a whole, these stories are grappling with the chimeras of self in the modern world, a subject treated with an undeceived openheartedness, intricately connected with the author’s long study of Buddhism.

Saunders is a phenomenal teacher. I was lucky enough to take a writing class from him once, “The Russian Short Story in Translation (for Writers).” Once, in discussing the literary genius of Anton Chekhov, he basically described what has become his own gift:

[…] the whole time you feel this moral presence: “Anton, what should I believe? What do you want me to believe?” “Love is good.” “No, it’s not good.”And he’s constantly guiding you by the shoulders. Every time it gets too simple he goes, “No no no no no…no no…no no no no…no no.” And at the end he just kind of drops you off a cliff.

Whether in the classroom, in conversation or in his work, Saunders constantly provides an example by way of his own generosity and awareness; over the years he has been holding less and less back and offering more and more. The autobiographical piece “My Writing Education: A Timeline,” published in the New Yorker in 2015, provides a brief, clear introduction to his approach as an artist and teacher. He also writes a Substack newsletter—a writing class, really—called Story Club, which I can recommend very highly to any writer or reader interested in the art of fiction.

When I caught up with Saunders to discuss the new book, he was busy packing up the house in the Catskills where he’d lived with his family for many years. His children are grown now, and he and his wife have moved to California. He was in a reflective, maybe nostalgic frame of mind.

I started by asking him about a letter he found while packing up his house, written to himself many years earlier as a sort of eulogy to an abandoned book of stories. He’d posted this letter to Story Club, and it struck me that some of what it expressed seemed very present in his work now.

“I have my sense of beauty,” he’d written. “My work must be the expression of that, in whatever form is needed. Fuck artifice and the imaginary voices of short-story purists, etc. Listen only to your memory. What comes will be beautiful.”

In the letter, you wrote, “I have nothing to offer to the world when I’m careful.” Yes. That was an amazing thing. I was just going through some old files and had totally forgotten ever writing that letter. And there it was: me talking to me, across the years. All the stories in that book were there, and I preserved them, but I knew they weren’t any good. And it was such a thrill to go, Oh, hey, that guy, that 29-year-old me, he’s a little tight-assed, but he makes sense, you know; he cares.

How much do you still agree with him? I think that guy had one more thing to learn. At that time I was still thinking I was going to write about my actual life, and about childhood and all that kind of stuff. But otherwise, yes, that letter still speaks to me.

I have a very controlling mind, which is how I get a lot of work done. I do a lot of revision, but there’s a magical, essential moment when I just veer off the track of control and let something bigger get in there. So he was onto something, you know. But what he hadn’t realized yet was, if you want to tell your deepest truths, you don’t necessarily have to stick with the biography. You don’t have to stick with realism, you don’t have to stick with your actual lived experience. You don’t have to have the story all mapped out in advance. You can approach it another way.

A person might have an idea of who she wants to be as a writer, or as an artist, but her actual tendencies—her actual strengths, the things she’s good at doing, the things she likes to do, the things she can make really leap off the page—might be telling her something different.

“If you want to tell your deepest truths, you don’t necessarily have to stick with the biography. You can approach it another way.”

Writing can have the positive effect of making us realize that we have so many different voices in us, and so many different personalities. Then you choose one, but you don’t really choose one, you just, let’s say “give vent to one,” temporarily.

One person gets on stage for a second. Right, and that’s great, because then, if the person you happen to be at that moment turns out to be not the best, you go, “That’s OK, she’s just passing through.  She’ll be out of here soon.” That is, we can do things—through revision in writing and, I guess, through spiritual practice, in “real life”—to urge better, more interesting versions of ourselves to come forward.

What’s the better self? Well, I don’t know. I guess you know it when you feel it. But for me, there’s a feeling of quiet-mindedness and fondness for everybody and everything, and a little more sense that things are workable, like: OK, whatever happens, it’ll be all right. And certainly there’s a reduction in my anxiety level—because that’s my worst enemy, anxiety.

So I know it when I feel it, but it’s not reliable. I can’t just say, Oh, let’s be our best self today, you know? It depends on how I wake up feeling. Which is a pretty wobbly arrangement.

That’s how I’m understanding Buddhism these days; I’m not meditating a lot right now, but I’m thinking, “Well, I can still be working with my energy, trying to arrange my mind so that if I’m needed, I’ll be more useful.” But that’s a hard thing to do mechanically, just by willpower. Which is why we practice.  But my main “practice” at the moment, seems to be “noticing how wobbly I am when not meditating.”

I remember first talking with somebody who knew a lot about meditation, and I made some joke about, “Absolutely not, I’ll never be able to do it,” and the response was, “Well, no! Nobody can!” Right. It’s like working out, or something: “Oh, I could never lift weights”—Yeah, you can lift weights. You might suck at it, but you can get in there and give it a shot.

You can lift, like, a pound. Yeah. You can lift air, come on!

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