Producing Experience
November, 2002
A friend of mine once wrote a novel about a storytelling contest between the gods of the Taoist heaven. In the course of the novel you read about the gods conducting their story contest — it’s the male gods lined up against the female gods, but there are traitors on both sides — and you also read the story they invent, alternating from one side to the next. The story’s full of all kinds of suffering: A young woman gets sold as a slave to get her parents out of debt; her new master is a good person, but he dies off pretty quickly; he’s got an evil brother, and all kinds of horrible things happen; there are floods, fires, suicides, lots of injustice — what makes for a great story but a miserable life. And then at the very end of the novel Kuan Yin appears and tells the Taoist gods, “Well, now that you’ve told this story, you’re going to have to go down there and live it.” The last image in the novel is of the Taoist gods all tumbling out of heaven down to the earth they’ve despised so much below. Of course, Kuan Yin here represents what Buddhism did to China: It brought in the teaching on kamma.