Storied Companions: Cancer, Trauma, and Discovering Guides for Living in Buddhist Narratives - Softcover

Karen Derris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1614295751 ISBN 13: 9781614295754

Publisher: Wisdom Publications,U.S., 2021

Synopsis

A student of His Holiness the 17th Karmapa helps readers discover new ways of facing and experiencing life, death, and impermanence. \x26#34;With my diagnosis of grade IV brain cancer, I no longer observe the truth of impermanence from a critical, analytical distance. I am crashing into it, or it into me.\x26#34; Facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, Karen Derris\-\-professor, mother, and Buddhist practitioner\-\-turned to books. By reading ancient Buddhist stories with new questions and a new purpose\-\-finding a way to live with her dying body\-\-she discovers new ways to make them immediate and real. For instance, reading with her terminal prognosis, she becomes one of the four omens (the four signs of impermanence and suffering) the young Siddhartha sees in his excursions from the palace. What would it mean for her to be in the crowd, straining to see the prince with her own sick and impermanent body\-\-to be pushed aside and out of sight by the palace minders, just as our society so often tries to brush aside anything uncomfortable, but to nonetheless be seen by the young bodhisattva? Or reading as a mother, maybe she shares something akin to what Queen Maya may have felt, knowing she was dying, giving her newborn son over to her sister\x27s care? What will it mean for her own children to be motherless? She follows the knotted threads connecting Milarepa\x27s angry, vengeful mother to Karen\x27s own mother, who physically abused her throughout a traumatic childhood. By placing herself into these stories, she turns them from distant and static narratives into companions, and from companions into guides. Storied Companions<\/i> interweaves Karen\x27s memoir of her life of trauma and illness with stories from Buddhist literary traditions, sharing with the reader how she found ways to live with the reality that she won\x27t live as long as she wants and needs to. Honest, powerful, and insightful, Storied Companions<\/i> itself becomes an invaluable companion, guiding the reader to discover new ways of facing and experiencing life, death, and impermanence.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Karen Derris is a scholar of South and Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions and professor of religious studies at the University of Redlands. Her research focuses on the intersection of literature and feminist ethics in pre-modern Buddhist traditions, particularly focusing upon the central importance of community in Buddhist ethical and spiritual development. Dr. Derris received her PhD from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University in 2000.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications,U.S.
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1614295751
• ISBN 13: 9781614295754
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216