Jake Fades

Not long after I began practicing Buddhism, I was walking mindfully through Cambridge, noticing how many people were off in their own brainy worlds, when I came upon one guy who smiled and nodded to me, wearing what I took to be the garb of a Zen Monk. A Zen monk in Cambridge, I said to myself. For years that image kept coming back to me. When I actually began practicing Zen, I realized it would have to be two monks, a teacher and student, and imagined them staying at the Cambridge Y, which was residential. I imagined that there might be some poignance and confusion to their relationship; the older monk might be in failing health, and beginning to suffer from dementia, so you never knew if he was spouting the dharma or gibberish (often the dharma sounds like gibberish to me). I sat down to write the book with little more than that vague idea. But when I wrote the first scene, the whole novel opened up before me. I’d never had that happen before. I could see the beginning and the end. I just had to let the intervening scenes happen.

Other Books by David Guy