Retellings, Buddhisms, and Other Fantasies: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors just won the Nebula and it's part of my Hugo reading, so this seemed like a good time to finally review it (I read most of it on a trip and didn't have time to review it until now).

The Saint of Bright Doors is a difficult book to describe: South Asian inspired magical realism about doors leading to mysterious realms? A critical retelling of the life of the Buddha from the Buddha's son's point of view? A queer love story? A story of revolution? All of the above, and more?

I enjoyed Chandrasekera's prose quite a bit, and I love how he put all of the above elements together. The only thing that didn't work for me is that the plot seemed a bit hard to follow at times (maybe it was the pacing?), but overall I really enjoyed it and think it's well-deserving of all the awards.

As someone who has been heavily influenced by Buddhist philosophy but with little experience with Buddhism as a lived religion (as it is in Chandrasekera's native Sri Lanka), I was deeply interested in the critique of Buddhism. According to most versions of the story, the Buddha left his wife and newborn son to pursue the life of a religious renunciant, figuring out what later became Buddhism several years later. In the Buddhist texts, his wife and son later forgave him and joined his religious community.

But is that really how it went? Chandrasekera doesn't give anything like a straightforward answer as this is not anything like historical fiction, but he uses this retelling to explore some ideas about family trauma, violence, and what happens when your overbearing mother wants you to kill your absent father while you just try to life your life in the big city avoiding demons, investigating strange doors, looking for love, and joining a revolutionary army/theater troupe.

Buddhism has mostly great PR in Western countries (due partly to the counterculture of the 1960's, the public image of Buddhist leaders like the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, the phenomenon of "Buddhist modernism" encouraged by scholars like me, etc.). Many Americans, for instance, are shocked to learn about Buddhist violence in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and elsewhere, not to mention all the sorts of bodily and sexual repression you find in most major world religions. 

Chandrasekera deals with all of this in a way that an appreciator of Buddhism like me constantly wanted to "Yes, but..." And stopping myself from doing that was an important part of the reading process for me. Buddhism, like anything so large and so old, is incredibly complex. It can contain all the philosophical insights that I appreciate (nonself, suffering and its solution, impermanence, nondualism, etc.) while also being a social, political, and philosophical force that has caused suffering in the name of eradicating suffering. And putting all of this into a fantasy world is a brilliant way to explore the complexities of any religious, philosophical, and social system.

Of course, there's a lot more going on in this book that's far more complex than it's 300-some pages might suggest. There's probably a lot I missed, too. You'll have to walk this path for yourself to see what you might get out of it.

See also my Goodreads review.