The Saint of Bright Doors Q2 – Buddhism and South Asian Culture

kcaryths

The book has a clear parallel with Buddhism, with Fetter, The Perfect and Kind, and Mother-of-Glory being lifted directly from the religion. Sprinkled throughout are perspectives on castes, power structures, and bureaucracy within a cultural framework that Chandrasekera seems to understand well. What did you think of this aspect of the story? Did any of the views surprise you, inform you, or change your mind in these areas? Was it brand new to you, or perhaps just accented your own understanding on these topics?

RichardAbbott

It certainly made a change from the large numbers of monolithic religion/culture that one comes across. I liked the idea of being thrown in to the mix of perspectives, though at the same time I'd be hard-pressed to describe to anyone what the exact mixture was.

I suppose one major impression I was left with was that the culture was steeped in religious feeling, and religious performance (in the best sense of that word - I don't mean it was all a sham), without really expounding on any particular tenets of religion. I suppose I mean that it was kind-of guru based rather than doctrine based, and that was both compelling and confusing.

NeilNjae

I didn't pick up that it was close to Buddhism, but it's obvious now you mention it. I think the standard view of Buddhism in British pop culture is all about monks and meditation, and we get to hear almost nothing about what Buddhism is like as an everyday religion, as practised by ordinary people.

The layers of caste and race seemed characteristic of South Asian culture, but again it seemed new because it was unfamiliar to me. I'm sure the cultural framework is very familiar to anyone from that part of the world.

So yes, it was all new to me, and pointed out a clear gap in my understanding of that part of the world.

Apocryphal

I don’t have much to say about this, except that I think it’s a really interesting topic, and to point out that we have a genuine expert in the group in the form of @BarnerCobblewood , so I’m interested to see what he has to say.

BarnerCobblewood

I have some things to do, so I will return to this later. However I want to say that I found this interview is really helpful for understanding the intentions of the text.

BarnerCobblewood

This is very long. Sorry. There are really two points, which I labelled 1 and 2. If one bores you, skip to the other. If both bore you, well I guess it's just R(eally)TLDR.

If you already know this, just ignore my self-importance in trying to speak about it please. No doubt it is full of mistakes. It's also full of generalisations, but my garndmother taught me that the only thing worse than making generalisations was not making them, so here we go.

So there are many parts of the story which clearly relate with Buddhism and South Asian culture which I found fun to think about.

1) In the interview I mentioned before (https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2024/06/19/at-the-periphery-of-the-grand-narrative-vajra-chandraskera-on-rakesfall/ - note the spelling mistake in the link) Chandrasekera mentions a few of the sources he used for his next book: the Kathāsaritsāgara and the Rāmāyaṇa. These are now classified as "Hindu," but they spring out of a complex society. There are links in the interview if you want to read them. One of the odd things (odd to us I mean) about South Asian culture is that there is an ongoing discussion among various "religious" elites who influence each other, and (this is the odd thing) admit the influence. This has led to the development of a simply massive literature grounded in a shared cosmology wherein texts and cultural and cosmological elements are used by several different communities.

What does this shared cosmology mean? It means that several distinct cultures all agree that e.g. the world (loka) is a place to be liberated (mokṣa) from, but what the world is, and what liberation is, are explained in radically different ways. This leads to conflict among communities, but also to congruence, which leads to further conflict, and so forth.

For example, most every Indian thinker of every type after the 6th century has adopted the skeleton of logical argument developed by the Buddhist thinkers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, and acknowledges them as important thinkers in their own philosophical tradition, while asserting they were mistaken about the Buddha.

Likewise Tantrism (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantrism), which appears by 4th century, has influenced most every religious tradition except the most conservative, and Bhakti (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti) devotional movements (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti#Bhakti_movement), which appear in the 8th century and have likewise been very influential.

If you look at those articles, pay attention to how the understanding of the same word varies among communities and times. This is part of the way one tradition influences and incorporates another. There is also the fact that the same name is provided as the "author" of many texts, leading to situations where, for example, the Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna seems to live for over six hundred years, and exemplifies many disparate, and even contradictory, traditions and philosophical traditions.

This shared cosmology has spread throughout Central, South-East, and East Asia, where it has encountered many other cosmologies and civilisations.

We saw this our book: By the end it seemed that Fetter was meeting people who were thousands of years old. This is not atypical at all.

I have visited temples which are shared among several competing religious communities, with some friction but no animosity that I could detect. I have heard senior Tibetan Buddhist Teachers use clearly "Hindu" scriptures to positively illustrate a point they are making, with no self-consciousness whatsoever. The Buddhist Jataka (life-stories of the Buddha during many lives as he progressed to enlightenment) stories are full of non-Buddhist tales. Certain elements of Buddhist doctrine are clearly labelled as existing prior to the historical Buddha - they fit with reality, and so the Buddha said they are worthy of practice. It is just how the discourse is done.

Of course there are, and always have been, people who take these literatures in what I would call fundamentalist (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism) ways, but what else is new? And there are periodic reformations within all the various religious communities which are framed as removing impurities that have infected the truth. As I said, what else is new?

2) So why am I explaining this? There was a terrible civil war in Sri Lanka (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lanka) that played upon and was fed by many sectarian divisions between an ethnic Tamil and Hindu minority and a ethnic Sinhalese Buddhist majority (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_civil_war). I could clearly see many aspects of the story that related to those historical events. Buddhism and Hinduism in that context took on forms that are not found elsewhere, but which have many parallels and resonances with Buddhism and Hinduism throughout their long shared history.

Because of my particular background, this books feels very "thick" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description). However I get why it can seem overwhelming if you haven't had the opportunity to get a feel for the author's context. In that interview Chandrasekera says

... With The Saint of Bright Doors, I was… You’re always very conscious of your position in the market, when you’re a genre writer especially, which is meant to be a commercial field, right? You’re not a literary fiction writer, who is not really expected to sell books. As a genre writer there is a certain expectation from publishers that you’re going to be moving units. There’s somebody somewhere that’s tracking that, and that will have repercussions on your livelihood. When you’re a new writer and you haven’t actually had a book published yet, you don’t know how any of this actually works. So there’s a high level of stress with a first book: you’re simultaneously trying to figure out how to write a book, and also worrying about publishing, the industry, the marketing, the potential sales or lack thereof, will I be able to pay my rent with this. There’s a lot going on with the first book. So The Saint of Bright Doors was very much my, “okay, this is my foot in the door” book, this is a book I think publishers will like and that readers will not find too alienating, too strange or whatever. But at the same time a lot of people did find it very strange, so maybe I was not estimating this correctly.

He also says

Something that happens, especially when you’re a science fiction writer in the Third World, is that you read a lot of science fiction that’s necessarily Western science fiction, because that is the bulk of what has been published to date—the volume is massively unbalanced, for obvious historical reasons—and people like you are always on the fringes of the story. America solves the problem, or else America doesn’t solve the problem and there’s an American wasteland. Either way, America or England is the center of the world. The West is the center, and you and people like you are on the periphery. This is old hat, obviously, but this is the consequence of the history of science fiction and how it’s been written. You grow up feeling that peripheral sense. It seems odd when people recenter—some people do this successfully, many Asian and African authors have done it, this recentering of narratives into this half of the world and writing science fiction that way. For me it’s always seemed a little odd, in a way, to recenter that. My take on it is to always write from the periphery of the grand narrative. For example, in The Saint of Bright Doors, what’s happening to my characters is not the center of the world. It’s not even the biggest apocalypse happening at the moment. There’s multiple apocalypses, these people are dealing with one of them. Similarly, in Rakesfall, a lot of what’s happening is not necessarily the center of the narrative. There’s always this sense that there are other people just off screen doing things which are also important, that don’t necessarily impact this narrative, but you understand that you are one of many stories.

I think that Sri Lankan sensibility is part of why the book works as well as it does - it's not built on a vague generalised theory, but grounded in a specific particular experience.

Too long. I'd love to talk with you all about this though.

Apocryphal

There’s a certain amount of dualism in the book - pairings, perhaps. Acusdab, the place, is alternately Cusdaba. And there’s a character named Siculu which a sister named Ucalas. Does this reflect your theme #1?

Also, thinking about Fetter as light (a comment you made elsewhere), I was thinking that light is what causes shadows. If Fetter was light, he would give everyone else a shadow. Perhaps Fetter is actually a shadow - which would neither cast a shadow itself, nor cast shadows on others. Is he a shadow of this Father? Father/Fetter duo wordplay? Just playing with some ideas.

I agree Fetter seems to be the Saint of Bright Doors, but I have yet to really grasp what makes him a saint, or what is the significance of the Bright Doors, except I guess they are portals that only the exceptional may pass.

kcaryths

@BarnerCobblewood Fantastic stuff! Not too long at all - love it. I feel like I almost read a book in another language - that's how disconnected I am from the culture, religion and historical context that was swirling along inside the pages. The interview you posted was great and really demonstrated how smart Vajra is, but also how he seems to feel relatable as well. It's a shame I couldn't get that same feeling from the book but it just might be a case that I am simply unable to on the level required due to how different of a world I grew up in and still inhabit.

I found myself looking things up as I read along and I certainly learned little tidbits about Buddhism that I never knew about (which wouldn't be difficult given my ignorance!) and I would say this was one of the best parts of the book for me.

RichardAbbott

Thanks all especially @BarnerCobblewood for this discussion!

NeilNjae

Yes, thank you. I appreciate the notion that there are multiple, conflicting versions of "the truth" co-existing. That reflects the notion of the various Chosen Once in the book.