Author Ruth Ozeki merges Zen Buddhism and storytelling

Ruth Ozeki. David Levenson / Getty Images

Novelist Ruth Ozeki’s spiritual companion is a Zen master named Dogen. Although he’s been dead for nearly 800 years, when you listen to Ozeki, you know he’s there.

Ozeki, who recently spent a week as artist-in-residence for Literary Arts, a non-profit organisation that promotes literature and writers in Portland, Oregon, explained that each day consists of 6,400,099,980 moments. In the time it takes to snap your fingers, 65 have passed – the Japanese Zen master wrote in the 13th century.

Of course, this is “rhetorical sleight of hand”, Ozeki explains. Counting moments is like trying to grab a fistful of water. But Dogen has a purpose: to get humans to slow down and think about their actions at every moment and not rush through the days. Be aware. Be alive.

“I find his view of time astonishing,” Ozeki says of Dogen. “There’s always enough time, if you just slow down.”

Ozeki’s commitment to Zen Buddhism has grown over recent years. Her spiritual and creative lives are intertwined. Raised in Connecticut by a Japanese mother and an American father, her very first memory is her grandparents’ visit in 1959. The 3-year-old girl went to tell her ­grandparents that breakfast was ready. When she entered the room, they were sitting in Zen meditation.

“They were at eye level with me. I wasn’t used to seeing adults sitting on the floor,” said Ozeki.

Ozeki’s Japanese heritage tugged at her. After graduating from Smith College in 1980, she received a fellowship to study Japanese literature at Nara Women’s University. While in Japan, she also worked as a bar hostess, studied Noh drama, started a language school and taught English at Kyoto Sangyo University.

After moving to New York City in 1985, she designed props and sets for low-budget horror movies. In the 1990s she started making her own documentaries, including the award-winning autobiographical film Halving the Bones.

Her first two novels were about the eco-dangers of American food production: My Year of Meats and All Over Creation, published in 1998 and 2003, ­respectively.

Ozeki had long been drawn to meditation, and she became more serious about it as her parents aged and died. Ozeki's spiritual beliefs helped shape her most recent novel – A Tale for the Time Being – a Man Booker Prize finalist in 2013. The title borrows from an ­essay by Dogen on time titled Uji, ­often translated from the ­Japanese as "the time-being".

The novel features a Hello Kitty lunch box that washes ashore on an island in British Columbia, a Japanese-­American woman named Ruth who finds it, a teenage girl in Japan who owns the lunch box, and a 104-year-old Zen Buddhist nun at a ­remote monastery in Japan.

Magic is woven into the book. Words vanish, ghosts appear, characters change shape and time does weird things. These metaphysical elements come right out of the box of Buddhist principles, intended to convey messages that all things are interconnected, nothing is ­permanent and there is no abiding self.

Ozeki’s book is literally an act of Zen. She uses literary techniques that seek to collapse time and space in the readers’ imagination. The effect on readers can be similar to what practitioners of Zen feel as they sit in meditation.

Ozeki, who lives on an island in British Columbia's rainy Desolation Sound, just like Ruth in A Tale for the Time ­Being, was ordained a Zen priest in 2010 – and continues with her training.

“I’m a priest with training wheels,” says Ozeki.