Emily Temple's Buddhism

Many years ago, I submitted to a writing workshop a piece about a young woman in a small town in Southern India in the early 20th century. In the hall before class the night we were to workshop the piece, I ran into a fellow student, a smart and careful reader and a talented writer. She was the only Indian American in the class, and I knew that she’d spent months at a time in India visiting extended family. That night, she gave me one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received about my writing when she said, somewhat self-consciously, “I tried to hate it.” She tried, but she didn’t.

I thought of my friend’s confession frequently as I read The Lightness by Emily Temple, a retrospective coming-of-age story of 16-year-old Olivia, who runs away to a Buddhist summer camp for troubled girls, in part to look for her father, who was last seen there years earlier. Olivia falls in with a trio of friends trying with typical teen intensity to learn to levitate, and the novel casts the girls’ passions and identity-making in a Buddhist light.

I’ve practiced Buddhism in the Therevada tradition – the strain from which Westerns have extracted “mindfulness” – for two decades, including about 250 days in silent retreat, and I can be un-Buddhist-ly defensive when it’s misrepresented. Many years ago, when I told a colleague I was a Buddhist he quipped, knowingly, that the central tenet is “Life is pain.” Buddhism according to “The Princess Bride,” I retorted, but it wasn’t funny to me. The first time I heard the dharma, the Buddhist teachings, I remember thinking, Finally, someone is telling the truth around here. I had found a subtle but sublime set of teachings which, it was clear from my first exposure, had the potential to transform me into a more contented version of myself. I still feel protective of those teachings – as if they need me to protect them – so, when I read Sarah Gerard’s review of The Lightness by Emily Temple (William Morrow, pub 6/16/20) calling it “a beautiful meditation on meditation, with readings of sacred texts and light Buddhist history,” I was intrigued. I am not a hater, as the LA expression goes – I don’t typically read to sneer – but I found it impossible to enter the novel open-minded. I admit, self-consciously, that I tried to hate it.

Most of the Buddhism in The Lightness is Tibetan, a form from the Mahayana tradition, which split from Therevada two thousand years ago. Rinpoches, sand mandalas, Kyudo, Ikebana, and the Shambala Institute all make appearances. I have little experience with these cultural aspects of Mahayana, but the novel’s deeper treatment of Buddhism resonated. For instance, I related to Olivia’s description of the effect on her father of intensive retreat: “He always seemed different to me in the days following his return: there was a new delicate rawness there, a lingering sense of sublimation, as if his external layers had been steamed loose and peeled away. After a while, they would grow back. A while after that, he’d leave again.” Later, she invokes a common metaphor for the inherent unreality of identity when, after being disillusioned with her friend, she says, “I can liken it only to the moment when, during a climactic scene in a film you’re watching in the theater – perhaps it’s a horror, perhaps a romance – you notice, for an instant, the texture of the screen itself.” Even emptiness, that notoriously slippery subject, is presented in a robust way.

One of the novel’s central concerns is craving, a concern at the intersection of all Buddhist traditions. Olivia, and Temple, are transparent about the intensity of teen desire and the undercurrent of violence that accompanies such passion. Temple’s characters will do whatever it takes to get what they want, and Olivia is intermittently aware of the liberating alternative to being caught in craving. Through much of the novel, we are suspended between wanting’s two valences: the fist of desire that prevents contentment, and the sweet longing that propels us to freedom.

Temple never rejects Buddhism (although Olivia does, at times), but neither does she romanticize the West’s version of it. I loved Olivia’s comment on American Buddhists: “I’ve seen a pattern. Upper-middle-class white people, looking for meaning. Looking to hook themselves to someone else’s old magic.” Harsh, but she’s got a point.

I wasn’t always convinced that Olivia had a strong grasp of Buddhism. But she isn’t supposed to. She is not a reliable narrator, as she herself will tell you (perhaps a bit too often), or a particularly enlightened one. Even at the retrospective distance of early adulthood from which she tells this story, she waffles between rejecting religion outright and gravitating back to the lure of emptiness and mystery. What mattered to me was not whether Olivia got the dharma, but whether Temple did. And by the end, she had convinced me.

The key to Temple’s success, I think, is that she never shies away from ambiguity. Several of the characters are left ambivalent, most notably the twenty-something heartthrob Luke, who may or may not be taking advantage of the girls’ innocence. Olivia’s thinking waffles constantly, with much negative capability, as when she muses about her missing father: “Here’s a version: my father loved me. He just loved his religion more. And here’s a version: he was right. He made the right choice.” With each new epiphany, intimacy, and betrayal, Olivia, both the teen and the older narrator, pulls us into her view-of-the-moment. We get a good dose of Olivia’s rejection of Buddhism – the cliched “religion has done more harm than good” – so that when she does an about-face, we feel the longing, the questioning, the indecision. Olivia doesn’t know what the truth is, and that is exactly the right place to be.

The novel’s end is beautifully ambiguous, and in my view, utterly successful. In the closing scene, the reader is at liberty to choose what’s true. As in practice, as in life, we are left a bit in the dark, having to peer closely to decide what is real.