Buddhist Trilogy
About
Three volumes of autobiographical fiction, each structured around a relationship that cannot be resolved — only inhabited. The trilogy follows a narrator across years of Buddhist practice, tracing how encounter, rupture, and return reshape what it means to have a body, a teacher, and a faith.
Each title holds a split. 我佛 — I and Buddha. 師子 — master and disciple. 法身 — dharma and body. The Chinese characters sit together but never fuse: two terms held in tension, the space between them becoming the territory of the writing.
《我佛》 — My Buddha draft complete
我佛
The distance between a person and a tradition they entered uninvited. What does it mean to arrive at Buddhism not through lineage or study but through collapse — and to remain, uncertainly, after the collapse recedes?
The first volume traces the narrator’s initial encounter with Buddhist practice: retreats, communities, devotion, doubt. The question is not whether Buddhism works, but what it means to need it — and what remains when the need changes shape.
Current status: First draft complete. Awaiting revision.
《師子》 — Lion in development
師子
The teacher-student relationship — its authority, its intimacy, its capacity for harm. What happens to faith when the person who transmitted it is revealed to have betrayed the structure they embodied?
師子 means lion, but the characters also read as master (師) and child (子). The second volume sits inside this double meaning: the ferocity of transmission, the vulnerability of receiving it, and the rupture that follows when the lineage itself fractures.
A shorter version has been published on Negotiating with My Ghost. The full volume has not yet been written.
《法身》 — Dharma Body in progress
法身
After rupture, what returns — and in what body? The third volume is the longest and the most retrospective: a narrator who has come to understand his own body differently, revisiting every temple, every teacher, every practice through that changed understanding.
法身 — the dharma body, the body of teaching — becomes a question about which body receives the dharma, and whether the dharma can survive the body’s transformation. What does Buddhist practice look like when the practitioner is no longer the person who first arrived?
Current status: Five chapters complete. Actively writing. The longest and final volume of the trilogy.
Arc
The three volumes move through a single trajectory: encounter → rupture → return. But each stage undoes the previous one. The encounter in 《我佛》 is not innocent — it is driven by need. The rupture in 《師子》 is not simply loss — it reveals what was always unstable in the transmission. And the return in 《法身》 is not restoration — it is a different person arriving at a practice that can no longer pretend it was ever stable.
The trilogy’s deepest question may be: can you keep a practice that failed you — not by forgiving it, but by understanding why you needed it to fail?
Timeline
First long-form work
A literary prize submission becomes the seed of 《我佛》— the first sustained attempt to write about Buddhist experience in fiction form.
《我佛》 drafted
The first volume takes shape over several years, growing to approximately 100,000 Chinese characters. The writing follows the pace of the experience it describes.
《師子》 short version published
A condensed version of the second volume appears on Negotiating with My Ghost.
《法身》 in progress
The third and longest volume is actively being written. Five chapters complete, with the retrospective structure demanding a different kind of attention than the earlier books.