‘To Live the Right Way’

David Guterson: At a very early age, I think I must have been about 4, I woke up with the feeling of a disturbance that I had woken up in a world where something was wrong, something was off, and that I needed to go on a kind of search for the rest of my life in order to deal with that. So I think what happens when somebody has this experience at an early age is that they become seekers, and that sensitivity to these matters, these sort of metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual matters. That kind of sensitivity at an early age becomes the driver of your existence. And so to me, it’s the proper place to begin a novel of this sort with that sort of dramatic waking up to one’s humanity.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard David Guterson. David is a writer based in Washington State. His new novel, Evelyn in Transit, follows the interlocking stories of Evelyn and Tsering, a young woman from Indiana and a Buddhist monk from the mountains of Tibet. Their lives come together when Evelyn’s son is revealed to be the seventh reincarnation of a high lama, and Evelyn must decide what to do. In my conversation with David, we talk about how a childhood fight with a member of the Sakya family first introduced him to Buddhism, the remarkable story of the Sakya family and the real-life inspiration for the novel, and Evelyn and Tsering’s parallel quests to live the right way.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer David Guterson. Hi David. It’s great to be with you.

David Guterson: Great to be with you as well, James.

James Shaheen: So David, we’re here to talk about your new novel, Evelyn in Transit. So to start off, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

David Guterson: Well, I’d say fundamental to the plot of this book is a woman named Evelyn, a young mother living in Indiana, who one day answers her door and finds standing there a delegation of three Tibetan lamas who inform her that her 5-year-old son Cliff is the reincarnation of a prominent Tibetan lama, which puts her in the position then of having to make some decisions about what to do with that information. So that’s sort of the pragmatic and plot-driven heart of the novel. I can’t really answer exactly how I came to write about this. By the time a book is finished, the inception of it is sort of in a misty place from a couple of years ago. Generally, what happens is that I stumble along putting things on paper, and at a certain point, maybe a sentence or two sticks and I run with it. So I really don’t have a plan. I really don’t know where I’m going. I just get a couple of sentences on the page and take it from there. That’s how all of my novels have started, and I’m sure that’s how this one started as well.

James Shaheen: You know, there’s a real-life inspiration for this book, Carolyn Massey and Dezhung Rinpoche and Carolyn’s son. So first, could you give us some background on the real-life Carolyn Massey? How did you become familiar with her story?

David Guterson: Well, from childhood I’ve had a close association with the Sakya family in Seattle. Carolyn was a very loyal and devout follower and a strong participant in the work of the Sakya monastery in Seattle. And she married, in fact, a young man from a village associated with the family. They had a child together. That child was identified as the reincarnation of Dezhung Rinpoche, and Carolyn made the decision, “Yes, by all means I’m going to send him to be raised in a monastery in Nepal.” And that young man is now the fourth Dezhung Rinpoche and continues in that role to this day. So I had all of that background and context with me as I set out to write this book.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty extraordinary. This woman’s son is identified as a tulku, and she allows him to go. We’ll get to more of that later, but you say you first met the Sakya family after getting in a fight with Ani Sakya when you were a young child. So can you tell us about how you came to know the Sakya family in Seattle? It’s very karmic, you know?

David Guterson: It is.

James Shaheen: And how has it influenced your relationship with Buddhism?

David Guterson: Yeah, I fell into a fortuitous relationship with Buddhism at a very early age and in an innocent way. The Sakya family was part of the diaspora out of Tibet, and they were in India, and they were approached by somebody who had a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to bring some Tibetan scholars to the US to participate in a research project that would unfold at the University of Washington in Seattle. And the Sakyas were located, this included Dezhung Rinpoche, who was the uncle of Jigdal Dagchen Sakya’s wife, Jamyang, and so Dezhung Rinpoche, Trinley Rinpoche, and Dagchen Rinpoche. These three were identified as participants in this research project, and the entire group was brought to Seattle and settled in a home near campus and within a couple of years had moved into a modest home in my neighborhood.

And so when I was very, very young, in the fourth grade, I had a brother in the sixth grade, and Ani, the second oldest son of the Sakya family, and his older brother, Minzu, my brother and I, Ani and Minzu were all involved in a basketball game, a pickup basketball game at a junior high. You know, things can happen. It was my fault. I ended up saying something stupid, and I ended up on the ground with a broken arm. And that was because Ani reacted to my big mouth. And so we had that between us. We had this sort of moment between us that was fraught that made or developed a sensitivity between us. I didn’t blame him in the least. I blamed myself. He felt terrible about it. But over the years we became friends. I ended up in their home a lot, and I found in that home a brand of kindness and a way of interacting with people that I didn’t see anywhere else. And it really had an impact on me. Here I was 10 years old, 11 years old, and I could sense that there was something powerful and meaningful here that I didn’t understand. I didn’t even know who these people were. I had no idea that they were as prominent as they were. All I knew is that this was my friend’s house, and in this house things had a feeling that I felt nowhere else. And so, as you say, maybe there’s something karmic about it, but it certainly was a fortuitous thing for me and impacted me in a way that I’ve carried ever since.

James Shaheen: So this began a lifelong friendship with him, is that right?

David Guterson: It did. In fact, Ani and I became very close all through high school, all through college. Ani ultimately became an attorney and went to Dharmsala and prostrated himself in front of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and asked him what he might do for the government in exile and was immediately given a post. His job was to create a kind of democracy, a kind of constitutional democracy for the government in exile that would be in place in perpetuity so that the Tibetan government in exile might sustain itself once the Dalai Lama passes away. I ended up traveling to Dharmsala helping my friend work on that project, and he ultimately returned to Seattle. We remain friends, and we see each other often. It’s an important relationship in my life to this day.

James Shaheen: OK, so back to the book. You say that for a while you had been hoping to write a book about Buddhism, and to your joy, this character named Evelyn began to come together. So how did that happen?

David Guterson: Well, so I’ve had this sort of lifelong not just an interest but a participation in Buddhism, and this predates my life as an author. At the University of Washington, I studied Tibetan language, I studied Tibetan history, I became quite interested in Tibetan Buddhism, and then I discovered writing, and I never really brought those two things together for one reason or another. Not in an explicit way. I think anybody who looks at my seven novels in my two story collection would see an affinity for Buddhist precepts and ideals. You could sort of mine between the lines; it’s there. But this is the first book in which I think there’s something explicitly Buddhist about it, first of all, in the subject matter, obviously, and also in the sensibility or the temperament or the vision of the book. 

As I began to bring my Buddhist inclination together with my work as a writer, I had to look for a way in which to give it a narrative shape in which there might be characters and drama and a sense of conflict that would provide a context for the Buddhist ideas, a narrative context. And this idea occurred to me that a mother put in this position of having to make this decision on behalf of her child would provide me with just that context that I would need to explore these Buddhist ideas, and it turned out really to be the case. It really worked out well for me as a kind of context in which to do that.

James Shaheen: You know, the book begins with two moments in the parallel stories of Evelyn and Tsering, the Tibetan monk that figures prominently in the novel, and they each have the realization, “I’m alive, I’m separate from everything else.” Could you tell us about that moment? Why did you choose to begin the book in this way?

David Guterson: I chose to begin it in that way for a couple of reasons. One is that I think such experience at an early age puts somebody in a position to be receptive and open to Buddhism. This happened to me: At a very early age, I think I must have been about 4, I had a sudden abrupt and dramatic recognition that I was separate and distinct from everything else. Prior to that moment, I was in the sort of unconscious dream of childhood. I was just immersed and part of reality with no sense of myself as having an identity, as being somebody who would age, as somebody who would die, somebody who was impermanent, somebody who had to deal with the human condition. And suddenly, at this moment, at the age of 4, I woke up with the feeling of a disturbance that I had woken up in a world where something was wrong, something was off, and that I needed to go on a kind of search for the rest of my life in order to deal with that.

I think what happens when somebody has this experience at an early age is that they become seekers. They become quite distraught, I would say, as a child, as an adolescent, about the existential plight of human beings, about the human condition and that sensitivity to these matters, these sort of metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual matters. That kind of sensitivity at an early age becomes the driver of your existence. It becomes the center of your existence. It becomes the thing that you are most interested in addressing and dealing with. And so to me, it’s the proper place to begin a novel of this sort: with that sort of dramatic waking up to one’s humanity.

And I think the other thing I wanted to say about it is it’s completely in accord and completely consistent with what happens to Siddhartha Gautama, who finds himself in the most sort of heavenly paradise that a human can imagine and yet is troubled and recognizes that there’s a sort of illusory quality and that no true happiness is really possible in samsara, as it’s often called, and feels compelled to go on a search to address this sensitivity to the human condition that he feels so deeply. So it’s the right place to begin the story, and it’s very consistent with the fundamental Buddhist story.

James Shaheen: You know, a colleague of mine has a 5-year-old daughter, and when she found out that people die, she found out because they had chickens and a hawk got one of the chickens, and she also discovered that her grandmother was not there and had died. And so she started asking questions about death at a certain point. She said, “Well, what’s it all about then?” And she’s 5. So when you talked about being 4 and having that realization, I think all of us at some point have to grapple with that. Whether it continues to drive our lives for the rest of our lives is another matter, I guess.

David Guterson: You know, I assumed for a long time that this early sort of dramatic awakening to the human condition was an experience that all of us have. But the more I talk to people about it, the more I see that for some people it’s gradual. It’s not something that happens dramatically. It’s a sort of gradual awakening. But for most of the people I talked to, there was an acknowledgment that by the time they reached adolescence, they had pretty much learned to quash it, to put it down deep somewhere in their heart and mind where they wouldn’t have to deal with because they wanted to get on with life, whereas people who have suffered this acute sensitivity to it simply are incapable of doing that and keep it in the forefront.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, like you, Evelyn is wrestling with big questions about how to live from an early age, and she’s mocked for not quashing that. She’s always asking the priests at school questions they refuse to answer and seeking out examples of how to find your own way in life. So could you say more about the young Evelyn’s quest? What is it that she’s seeking?

David Guterson: Well, Evelyn grew up in a lower-middle-class home in Evansville, Indiana, and attended Catholic schools and was raised Catholic. She found there were some questions that she needed answered in order to move on philosophically in life, and she couldn’t seem to get those questions addressed. One of the ways that she puts it to herself is that there’s something wrong in the world. We all know there’s something wrong in the world. Something doesn’t feel right. There’s always a sense of dissatisfaction that goes with being human. And the Catholic answer seems to be, “That’s right, we’re fallen, and we were kicked out of Eden, so naturally it feels that way. But don’t worry. Do what you’re supposed to do, believe what you’re supposed to believe, and when you get to heaven, all will be right.” And that’s just not a satisfactory answer for Evelyn, given how she’s put together psychologically, emotionally, intellectually. And so she’s restless and continues to cast about in the world for something more, something different, something more satisfying, and eventually stumbles onto Buddhism as a potential path that might better address this fundamental sense she has that something is not quite right with life.

James Shaheen: You know, David, she’s very moved by the Mississippi Mounds, and she also writes a book report on the story of the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, which she describes as “pretty much a mindblower.” So there’s much humor in her voice and in her character.

David Guterson: There is. You mentioned the Mounds. So just south of Evansville is this phenomenon known as the Mounds. These mounds can be found throughout the Midwest, and they’re thousands of years old, and they’re these human-made hills. Nobody entirely understands their origin, but she finds them moving and mysterious, and they give her a sense that there’s more to life than what appears on the surface.

Now, Evelyn is feisty. She’s a rebel, a seeker, and she goes about the world finding it absurd and calling it out in various ways for being absurd, confronting its absurdity. And I think some of the humor in the book is generated from that, from this person who has an unusual response to others and to reality, which reads comically, but also reads as a form of integrity.

I think that Evelyn is an enormously likable person. Everybody I’ve spoken to who read the book, almost everybody, the first thing they say is, “I fell in love with Evelyn.” It’s the person who drives this book, and I feel that way too. I fell in love with her writing about her.

James Shaheen: Well, you know, as far as integrity and her determination to understand her life better and its meaning, she finally leaves her family and sets off on her own in an attempt to live the right way. Can you say more about this aspiration to live the right way?

David Guterson: Yeah, I mean this setting forth, particularly in late adolescence, is a common trope in narrative, both cinematically and in the written word, this quest, this transience, this movement through the world restlessly in search of some kind of answer, some kind of truth. The story takes that shape for many, many pages.

Evelyn is in transit. She’s on a quest. She’s moving through the world, and the fundamental driver of that is this search for to live the right way. There must be a right way to live. I just haven’t found it yet. Certainly what’s on offer to me from this culture, the kinds of things that I’ve come across so far seem to offer me are not satisfying. They’re not doing it for me. They’re not living the right way. I can’t base my life on the values that are being forwarded to me and feel comfortable and satisfied. So I’m restless and must keep moving until I find the right way to live.

James Shaheen: So the other main character, Tsering, grows up across the globe under very different circumstances, but he similarly has a tendency to question conventions and seek his own path. So can you tell us about Tsering? In particular, could you say more about his conflicted relationship with reincarnation?

David Guterson: This book starts out with an interlude in which the protagonist, Evelyn, has a dramatic experience as a child in which she becomes aware of her separate existence as a human being. And that’s immediately followed by a similar interlude or episode in which the same happens to Tsering. And so there’s a sort of connection established between them, that they’re both coming from the same central concern despite the fact that they live in such different cultures.

Tsering, like a lot of Tibetan children is taken into monastic life at an early age, enters into it, and is identified as the reincarnation of the prior Norbu Rinpoche. He’s the sixth in his line. But like any young person, the monastic life is sort of at odds with the energies of youth. All of the discipline that it takes and all of the rigor that’s brought to bear on you by it is at odds with something about being young, and he feels this tension and at a certain point decides to leave the monastery and, like Evelyn, wander about the world. And he does so, you see this in the novel, as he goes from experience to experience, from place to place.

And as he ages, he begins to make inquiries about this notion: Am I indeed the sixth in this line of Norbu Rinpoches? And if I am, in what aspect is that true? I mean, how are we to define this notion that I’m a reincarnated lama, or tulku? In what way is this a fact? As he ages and is asked this question himself, he pulls back from answering it in any sort of definitive way, and he allows for the ambiguity in the notion of reincarnation to remain intact. And we never quite hear as readers anything definitive from him on this. I’d say the closest we come is something in accord with what His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said, which is that he can see a direct connection between him and his predecessors, but the nature of that connection is left unarticulated.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, being born into that role can feel like a trap, and there’s a moving scene where he counsels a young aspiring monk, almost like he’s trying to give him a way out or another option.

David Guterson: There is. Once Tsering ascends to the position of Norbu Rinpoche and therefore the abbot of his monastery, it’s his job to interview young candidates for entry into the monastery who are presented to him, and his habit is to ask the parents to leave the room and give the young person a possibility to say no. And this is because he himself grew up with doubts. These children are really brought here, brought into monastic life in some ways without a say in it. I mean, it’s not as if they volunteered or made the decision themselves. They’re brought by their parents. And so this protagonist, Norbu Rinpoche, Tsering Lekpa, he is aware of this, and he wants to be fair about it.

James Shaheen: Yeah, he seems to wear his role a little bit more lightly than you might expect of a monk or a tulku in this case. The middle section of the book follows Evelyn and Tsering’s journeys and their attempts to find their way, and Evelyn’s travels take her across the country, from building a stupa in Washington, which is a very interesting feat, to portering for a gold miner in rural Alaska. So during that time, she meets Lama Lobsang, who tells her that she lacks freedom, specifically freedom from Evelyn Bednarz, or herself. So can you say a bit about the types of freedom that Evelyn and Tsering are each seeking?

David Guterson: Sure. Yeah. Evelyn hits the road immediately upon graduating from high school, and she allows herself into all kinds of circumstances and situations from which she might explore what freedom means. She ends up working as a fruit picker. She goes to a Hutterite colony and inquires there what that is all about. She takes a series of jobs that involve caring for elderly people who need a caretaker and sees a couple of them through to their deaths, and finally she lands at a retreat center called Peace Mountain, where this stupa is being built, and decides that she wants to participate in that.

Her idea about what freedom means is ambiguous. She doesn’t know what it means. She’s trying to find out what it means, and I’d say the central moment for her in that exploration is the one in which Lama Lobsang says, “You need freedom from yourself,” which is a central Buddhist concept, this idea that in some ways our ego and our attachment to our identity is indeed the problem, and that liberation from that, freedom from that, is central to moving forward on a Buddhist path. So what she hears from Lama Lobsang puts her into a sort of Buddhist view of what freedom might mean.

James Shaheen: You know, she drags those stones up the mountain for the stupa, and there almost seems like a karmic motivation there. Is this just part of her karma or her fate?

David Guterson: Well, one of the things we see about Evelyn from an early age is her belief that work matters. And even as a child, when she’s given a job, she wants to do it thoroughly, and she wants to do it right. She believes in action, and she believes in labor. As eccentric as she is and as off the wall as she is, she believes in a kind of disciplined effort, which of course I think is important to anybody on the Buddhist path as well, so she throws herself into it physically, and she believes in taking a job all the way to its conclusion and doing it the right way. When she gets to Peace Mountain and there’s this job of getting this stupa built and she reads in this pamphlet that there’s this notion out there that participating in the building of a stupa can shorten your path to nirvana, she takes that quite literally and decides that carrying a thousand stones might be of use to her.

James Shaheen: Well, you mentioned Peace Monastery, and it’s loosely based on the Sakya Monastery in Seattle, which you very generously emailed us a book about. It’s an extraordinary book. So could you tell us a bit about the history of Sakya Monastery, the basis for Peace Monastery in the novel?

David Guterson: Yes, I can tell you about that. I’m not sure to what extent people have a grasp of the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism. So just briefly, it’s one of the four major sects. 800 or 900 years ago, it was the foremost sect, so that the Sakya lama at that point would’ve been how we view the Dalai Lama today, that is, the leader of the Tibetan people. Over the centuries that’s moved to another sect, but the Sakya sect remains one of the four significant sects of Tibetan Buddhism.

During the diaspora in the late fifties and early sixties, a big part of the most preeminent Sakya lama family settled in Seattle. They struggled to get established. It took some years. They moved from setting to setting and ultimately bought a large building in which to build a monastery that today has a considerable number of followers. It’s a remarkable story over the course of decades of recovering from the trauma of diaspora and getting on their feet again. And really the most thrilling thing about it for me is that the next generation, the children and grandchildren of the people who came in diaspora, these grandchildren have sort of taken up and are involved. Three of them are now monastics and leaders of the Sakya sect.

James Shaheen: You know, it was amazing in the book to see the photos side by side of the Baptist church and how it was painted and transformed into the monastery. The floorboards were ripped up, previously white walls painted in vibrant colors with elaborate sky paintings and lineage trees. Can you say something about that?

David Guterson: Yeah. When they bought the building, it clearly needed an enormous amount of effort in order to make it resemble in any way or properly fit the notion of a Buddhist monastery. The Sakya lama in Seattle galvanized this effort with persistence. I mean, he himself got involved. I think there are a couple of pictures in that book that about the building of the monastery of him with a sledgehammer personally involved in demolition and galvanizing his followers to feel that creating this new space had a strong spiritual purpose and that participating in this re-envisioning of an old church into a Buddhist monastery was worth their time and effort, and it was really an amazing time. I had the opportunity to visit on a number of occasions while this was going on, and the spirit and energy that people brought to it was moving.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s funny, just as an aside, I saw a little bit of the reverse happen here in New York, when a Tibetan center with elaborate paintings on the wall and thangkas and bright cushions was taken over by a Zen sangha, and the landlord said, “Oh boy, all the walls are white now. It used to be so nice.” You know, so there that was the reverse. But back to the novel, you know, Tsering flees Tibet and ultimately ends up working as a translator at the University of Washington, where he adjusts to a new life in a new world, counseling doubting priests, I found that very interesting, and encountering Americans’ assumptions and romanticizations of his own life and tradition.

David Guterson: Yes, that’s true. In the case of the Sakya family, the Rockefeller Foundation underwrote their coming to Seattle and working at the University of Washington. So his work there helping with research and translation, my character in the novels very much based on something that indeed happened, as well as all these encounters with American realities and this learning to understand and grasp the reality of where they were. For the first two or three years of their diaspora experience, people said, “Well, this will all settle out, and we’ll go home.” And it took them a while to accept that that was not going to happen in their lifetimes, and that they had to adapt and move forward, find Western followers, and resituate themselves in another culture entirely, which is what came to pass.

James Shaheen: You know, through much of the book, you have the parallel lives of Evelyn and Tsering. But the threads of the book finally come together when Evelyn’s son is recognized as the reincarnation of Tsering Lekpa, and Evelyn faces a choice of whether or not to send her young son to Nepal. For everyone around her, it’s a no-brainer not to do it—I mean, why send your child to Nepal—but she isn’t so sure. Can you talk a little bit about her doubts or her thought process around this?

David Guterson: Yeah, that absolutely goes to the very heart of this book. We know about Evelyn from the beginning that she is a person who is at odds with what’s on offer to her in the surrounding culture. She feels at the very core of her being a dissatisfaction with the material world, that things and experiences that are meant to be pleasurable are not going to resolve for her the inherent dilemma of being human, the existential plight of being human. She puts that absolutely at the center of her life and refuses to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist, or to embrace something else. She keeps that front and center for herself, and it puts her on this journey.

And now she’s got a child, and now this same question rears at her with regard to her parental responsibility: What do I put at the center of my child’s life? What sort of life do I think might be best for my son? And it’s not the life that’s on offer in the culture around her. And so for her, it turns out not to entirely be a no-brainer to send him to Nepal, but definitely something to deeply investigate before deciding. And there’s a large portion of this book that’s dedicated to that investigation as she probes and ponders what to do about her son’s future.

James Shaheen: You know, the novel comes to a head when Evelyn appears on The Susan Orloff Show, which is a bit of a stand-in for The Oprah Winfrey Show, where this actually took place in real life, where she’s fiercely criticized and shamed for her decision. So one of the most moving passages in the book is Evelyn’s speech on the show about wanting something better for her son, something that you were just referring to, wanting him not to feel like something is missing, as she did for most of her life. Can you say more about this scene and the tensions at play between different conceptions of the right way to live? I mean, you have this Oprah-like audience attacking her for sending her son off to what they might consider to be a cult.

David Guterson: Well, the way these sorts of shows are often set up is in order to increase viewer interest, you’ve got to have some sense of conflict. There has to be something at stake, and oftentimes the guest is sort of set up. So the guest comes in and the host explains the circumstances and the situation, and then gently the host begins to frame it as controversial. And eventually the audience is invited to address that controversy in order to incite some sense of conflict, some question about this person. Sometimes people are jeered or booed on some of the more tacky versions of this. It’s a formula.

James Shaheen: A cheaper version is The Jerry Springer Show.

David Guterson: That sort of thing. But they all use the same formula, just at different levels of emotional tension. And so this happens to Evelyn: The audience is invited to speak to her decision, and she’s asked to answer, and she does give this speech of some kind in which she says, “Look, I don’t blame anybody else for making their own decisions about their children. You love your children. You decide what you think is best for them. But this is my child and this is my decision, and I don’t see anything here in this culture that I really believe in for my child. So I’m doing this. I respect what you do. I respect what your decisions are. Will you please respect mine?” It’s as simple as that.

James Shaheen: You know, here’s a bit of a spoiler alert. In case you don’t want to hear how some of these things turn out, you can tune out now. In real life, Carolyn Massey, the mother of the recognized tulku, sends her son abroad, and he stays there. He’s there to this day. But in the novel, ultimately her son leaves the monastery. How were you thinking about that? How did you decide to bring him back, or for him to experience a kind of disillusionment with sitting on a throne and having people bow down to him? Can you say something about that?

David Guterson: So yes, there is this woman named Carolyn Massey, whose son, actually the father was Tibetan, the mother was Carolyn Massey, and their son was identified as the reincarnation of Dezhung Rinpoche, who was in Seattle. And to this day, Carolyn’s son is Dezhung Rinpoche IV and continues in that role, and so he didn’t leave. But Carolyn and her son, really, for me, are just one among many inspirations for this book. I wasn’t attempting to create a one-to-one correspondence with the reality of her life. I looked at other Western tulkus, and ultimately these characters in the book are fictional, inspired by some real people, but fictional. And so my choices here are the choices about fiction, and I’m not sort of stuck in what happened in the real world, and with regard to fiction, I felt this was the better choice, the better outcome. I felt it would be surprising in a way that made sense thematically in terms of the ideas in the book, and also it would help provide a context for where Evelyn herself lands and bring a sort of irony to what ultimately happens to Evelyn, which I think is a sort of rightful irony that this journey that her son ostensibly is on toward a monastic life turns out to be, in fact, just part of her journey, which is partly why Lama Lobsang, earlier in the book, when he hears that her son is the reincarnation of Norbu Rinpoche, he says, “Good. No more obstacle,” because that means there’s no more obstacle for Evelyn.

James Shaheen: Yeah, just one last question about his returning. There is an ambivalence throughout the book about what it means to be a tulku and what being born into that role and its confinement really does to a human being. I mean, what does it mean that you’re born and you’re told that this is what you are? And yet they’re also trying to get free of themselves, just like Evelyn is advised to do.

David Guterson: Well, I would say in the real world, if you read about the various Western tulkus or read what they have to say about their experience, you’ll find a large degree of failure in that once the diaspora happens and you leave behind the Tibetan culture, the Tibetan history, how likely is it that a Westerner can really handle this role? It turns out not to be likely. It turns out to be disastrous most of the time, that that’s reality. But the really important thing to me is that ultimately, it sort of doesn’t matter whether, say, reincarnation is a real thing in some mystical way. It doesn’t matter. It matters that you embrace a set of teachings from the past and become the holder of that for your generation. That’s all that matters. What matters is that you go in as a child, you study, you learn, and you hold that. It doesn’t matter whether it happened in some mystical way or not. It’s in fact happening because you embraced it. And that, to me, is what a tulku is.

I mean, I think this is part of the larger conversation that I think Tricycle was very involved in about the transition of Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism to a place in Western life, and this sort of ongoing discussion and debate about what forms should that take? At what point does it become something else altogether? We’ve given it Western terms to the degree that it no longer qualifies at what it used to be. It’s a fascinating thing and an open question.

James Shaheen: Yeah, and also we have lay people doing monastic practices, so that’s something very different too. Well, David, it’s been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Evelyn in Transit, available now. Thank you, David.

David Guterson: Thank you.

James Shaheen: ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Brandon Shimoda. To read an excerpt from Brandon’s book, visit tricycle.org. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!