The Importance of the Catuṣkoṭi in Ruth Ozeki’s Novel A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki’s novel explores the Zen notion of paradoxical uncertainty via a narrative structure of fluid intratextuality. The novel establishes two worlds: the first is narrated in the first person by Nao, a teenager living in Tokyo, and the second is narrated in the third person. It centres on Ruth, a writer, who lives with her partner and a cat on a remote island surrounded by the waters of Desolation Sound in British Columbia, Canada. These two narratives interact and, at crucial points, provide a critical, dialectic intratextuality via the application of the Madhyamakan formulation of Catuṣkoṭi, which, paradoxically, permits radical subjectivity simultaneously to breathe Being into the characters and open their existences to multiple paradoxical probable existences as time beings. Catuṣkoṭi is a four-part structure of Buddhist logic which enables contradiction of two conflicting propositions both being true or neither being true or false within logical argument. Madyamaka dates to second century CE and marks the beginning of Buddhist philosophy in the Mahāyāna tradition. Ozeki, a lay Zen Buddhist priest, skilfully incorporates Catuṣkoṭi into the novel. This article investigates her incorporation of Buddhist logic in A Tale for the Time Being showing how she subtly questions the foundations of time and place within the novel’s wordscapes.