The World is Made of Stories

by David R. Loy
Wisdom Publications, 2010
$15.95 (list price – paperback)

A modern retelling of the Buddha’s diagnosis of human suffering might be told this way: you are trapped in stories, but the stories aren’t the real problem; it is your attachment to stories that keeps you trapped.

In a time when we are trapped in dangerous narratives more than ever, David R. Loy’s book, The World is Made of Stories, is an important book for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. Buddhists who become focused on the technical aspects of practice might benefit by being reminded that attachment extends beyond what they might identify as their own thoughts and actions–their attachments are reinforced by their cultural milieu and the stories that edify the culture.

Loy’s book is also important because it effectively communicates the contemporary relevance of the Buddha’s message to a media-laden society of advertising slogans, political jargon, news sound bites, and the minimalist Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets. Manic and aphoristic, our modern communication has lost its context in regard to the underlying narratives, and as such, remains trapped within them.

The writing style of Loy’s book mirrors but transcends the new media landscape by presenting his extended meditation on narratives in aphoristic paragraphs placed between relevant quotations from a wide range of writers (Borges, Philip K. Dick, Neil Postman), philosophers (Wittgenstein, Socrates, Nagarjuna), musicians (Grateful Dead) and even fictional characters (Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter books). Through the use of these quotes, the reader can appreciate that insight into suffering and narrative isn’t exclusive to Buddhism–in fact these other perspectives may even help us better understand our attachment to narratives in a Western context.

Despite his weaving of intellectual perspectives, Loy’s book isn’t an academic exercise, the message of the book is vital to all of us:

The dominant story of modernity has been progress. Although still hardwired into our institutions, that story has lost most of its plausibility. New genres are taking its place: apocalypse and nihilism. Apocalypse is the imminent and triumphant conclusion of our most treasured stories. Nihilism is their collapse. Both are stories about the end of stories.

Loy is looking for a way out or beyond these two perspectives. Emptiness–also known as shunyata–serves as Loy’s Archimedean Point:

The Buddhist terms most commonly used to story shunyata–that which cannot be storied–are unborn, uncreated, and unproduced. The Heart Sutra declares that all things are shunya because they are ‘not created, not annhiliated, not impure and not pure, not increasing and not decreasing.’ There is no death and no end to death[...] According to Buddhism our basic problem is not death but ignorance of this unborn. If it is our essential nature, why is it so difficult to realize? The unborn is ungrounded, in the sense that there is nothing to grasp and nothing to grasp it. The freedom that comes from understanding how I story and how to re-story is also the ultimate insecurity. Being storyless in itself, no-thing-ness is also meaningless. We gravitate toward the refuge of determinate roles within predictable narratives (including Buddhist ones). We crave the comfortable, ready-made meanings that such stories provide, which objectify a world where we know what is important and what we are meant to do. Realizing our stories and meanings are shunya is a burden greater than most of us are prepared to bear. It is easier to pretend that the stories we enact together are fixed and that the roles we play are real. But then dukkha suffering they create also becomes real. (Loy, 49-50)

Loy recognizes that understanding emptiness provides a diagnosis of our own storying and can make us aware of the storying of others (including the meta stories of ideology), but the diagnosis doesn’t stop the spinning of the tales. We tell stories big and small. Some of our big stories provide a simplistic explanation of good and evil (God and the Devil) and provide comfort and diversion from our more complicated contemporary stories that require our attention. Denial of climate change and fictional WMDs in Iraq are two such contemporary stories with deadly consequences.

But not all stories are bad. Loy notes that some stories increase suffering and others decrease suffering. If we have to spin stories, we might as well spin good ones. After all, a story doesn’t have to be built on fictions or falsehoods, it can be built on our knowledge, our best intentions, our compassion and our imaginations. Loy points to a possible way out.

With that teaser I’ll leave you to read Loy’s excellent book for yourself.