You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction Book

The radical notion of collecting Buddhist fiction presents a sort of koan: Is fiction the dharma? Is the dharma fiction? The stories in You Are Not Here, like most anthologies, are hit or miss. The hits are very good, and even the misses offer fine writing and a valuable response to the koan.

The first story, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler, concerns an elderly man from Vietnam now living in the US where his children and grandchildren have grown up. His family is still actively anticommunist, but he is being visited by the ghost of his old friend, Ho Chi Minh. There are direct Buddhist references in the narrative, but more importantly the story evokes the contemplative aesthetic.

Butler uses the sensation of smell, a sense that develops pre-language, in a narrative that exists only as language, mimeticly demonstrating the contemplative experience. Consciousness is not a thing but a process of experiencing. By describing the memory of smells in a kitchen, the fictive quality of the old man's consciousness is highlighted. He smells sugar but it is a scent that has been gone for decade, it is a scent that is not there. By describing the smell as having "nothing to do with flowers", the fictive quality of the reader's consciousness is highlighted. What a reader, so moved by the story, actually smells is the process of consciousness, a scent that is not there.

Any story could be read with a contemplative interpretation, especially within the context of this anthology, but other readings are also possible. Ringworm by Kate Wheeler is explicitly Buddhist and almost entirely set in a Burmese monastery. The writer created a plot emblematic of capitalist realism and a narrator mired in its ideology. As this Guardian article points out, Western-style Buddhism's palliative qualities might actually allow the suffering of modern life to continue. This approach sidesteps the destructive aspect of the Four Noble Truths, essential to the Buddha's first teachings. At the conclusion of Ringworm the narrator has left the monastery and is having dinner with her father.

Of course, the wine and the dinner with the father are emblematic of Christianity but also of capitalism. The wine is French wine. The father is Republican. The narrator has returned from her exotic quest in strange lands to live in the heart of the empire, the real world, a world that is both unacceptable and necessary. As Mark Fisher would describe, the means by which the dinner restructures of her social reality back into her father's world is contingent on the cynical distance provided by her contemplative attitude that enables the ideology of capitalism to function. Her experiences in the monastery have made her the ultimate cynic, allowing her to simultaneously disavow and consume.

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