Gently Down the Stream

Maya a novel by C.W. Huntington, Jr.  Wisdom Publications.  315 pp.  $16.95.  *****

As far as I know, C.W. Huntington—who died in 2020 at the age of 71—published only three books, The Emptiness of Emptiness (1995), a translation of and commentary on Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra; this novel, Maya, in 2015; and What I Don’t Know About Death, which he began composing after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and which was published in 2021, after his death.  I find this small number of publications puzzling, because the man wrote beautifully; what I first noticed about his posthumous book was the elegance of the prose style, despite the difficult circumstances of its composition.  I would even say—on the basis of this single novel—that he was a born novelist and storyteller, and should have done more of this.  Apparently he was very much occupied with the academic world, and published widely in academic journals.  But he was meant to write for the public (and has published a number of articles in Tricycle).

Huntington’s obituary describes Maya as a roman a clef, and even without that I would have suspected that the book was autobiographical.  Huntington was my rough contemporary, born a year after I was, and he got caught up much earlier than I in a fascination with Eastern thought and philosophy.  His narrator—Stanley Harrington—even leaves an early marriage to travel to India on a Fulbright, and though he hopes his wife will soon follow, he knows that her real life, and her vocation, are located in the states, and he was asking her to give up much more than just a few months of her life.

He has decided early on that he is only using his Fulbright to get to India—in particular the city of Banaras, to which he keeps returning—and that his true intention is to stay beyond the Fulbright (though his academic advisors tell him he’s a fool).  He’s a dedicated meditator and scholar of the Mahayana literature before he leaves, and his real goal, we suspect (though he never quite says as much) is liberation.  But he is also just in love with this whole way of thinking and way of life.  Even if his wife had come, I don’t believe things would have worked out.

In one of the most intriguing chapters of What I Don’t Know About Death, Huntington compared the awakening that all Buddhists seek to—of all things—falling asleep.  The two things are similar in that we can prepare the grounds for them in an intelligent way, but the actual act of falling asleep, or of awakening, is a gift of grace.  We can’t will it to happen.  Huntington goes on at some length about sleep—both in the text and in his extensive footnotes in the back (which are well worth reading)—and talks about the fact that insomniacs sometimes believe they are awake all night when actually they have fallen asleep and are dreaming of being awake.  (That rang true for me, as bizarre as it sounds; I sometimes pass what seems like a sleepless night but am completely refreshed in the morning, and sometimes I firmly believe I’m awake and my wife yells at me for snoring too loud.  What the hell.)  There is a fine line between waking and sleeping in Huntington’s universe; we never know whether we are one or another.  And of course Buddhist awakening is often described as awakening “as if from a dream.”

That confusion comes to the fore in one of the most intriguing—and horrifying—scenes in the novel, a long overnight bus trip in which there is an accident where the bus strikes, and apparently kills, a child.  Huntington’s India, I should say, is not the glorious beautiful country of recent movies like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; this is very much a frugal grad student’s world, where he lives in small rooms with a bathroom down the hall, eats food and (especially) drinks chai in sketchy circumstances (most of my travel has been in Mexico, and I would never have eaten at street places like the ones he describes), and travels with the great masses of Indian humanity, in crowded trains and buses.  I was seeing a side of India here that I had not previously read about.  Huntington doesn’t revel in it, but also doesn’t turn away.

In any case, on this marathon bus journey, the driver at one stop gives Stanley some of a drug that he himself is taking, and Stanley—no stranger to drugs, apparently—takes a while to come down from it.  He is nodding off in the middle of the night when the bus suddenly stops but can’t avoid hitting a child; the driver allows people to retrieve the body but then takes off, with angry townspeople clinging to the side of the bus and banging on it.  This horrific scene is probably the most vivid one in a novel of vivid scenes (not all of them horrific by any means), and Stanley is haunted by it for months, but he comes eventually to wonder, with good reason, if it actually happened.  It may just have been a dream, which inspired a later, somewhat similar dream.

Though Maya sometimes seemed to be just a picaresque Adventures of a Grad Student in India (and extremely enjoyable as that), this theme of dream vs. reality gradually came to seem a focus, as if we’ve gone down a rabbit hole with the author and can’t get ourselves out.  Toward the end he quotes the Diamond Sutra (in his own translation):

All the things of this world should be seen as
A phantom’s mask,
A shooting star, a guttering flame.
A sorcerer’s trick, a bubble swept
On a swiftly moving stream.
A flash of lightning among dark clouds.
A drop of dew,
a dream.

In a novel that includes a fair amount of adventure and enjoyment, including a substantial love affair, explicitly described, with a fellow grad student named Penny (one of the most memorable characters in the book), it takes nerve to make the climactic scene, in some ways what the whole book has been pointing to, a meeting with a Tibetan lama in the bowels of a library in Banaras.  (I want only warn you, another Tibetan man had said about this man.  Big yogi power.)  I couldn’t believe a first novelist was even trying such a thing, much less pulling it off.  But this is the scene I’ll take with me from the book.  Was it, for Stanley, a moment of real enlightenment?  Or was it, like everything else, just a dream?

Or is seeing it as a dream what makes it true enlightenment?