TOMMI CAHILL
Karen Derris Professor of Religious Studies
‘An astonishing combination of hard reality with visionary light and love’ Professor of Religious Studies Karen Derris wrote her book, Storied Companions: Cancer, Trauma, and Discovering Guides for Living in Buddhist Narratives (Wisdom Publications, 2021), in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. A scholar of South and Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions, Derris found a new purpose in reading ancient stories. Within this work, she weaves her trauma and illness with the narratives of the Buddhist literary traditions. Storied Companions provides a relatable understanding of these stories, about which she also wrote her doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. They also illuminate Derris’s navigation of a terminal illness. “My past self, that young, healthy student, attempted to understand the relationships among buddhas. My focus was entirely upon those past,
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present, and future buddhas. I wasn’t much interested in what was happening to all the ordinary people in the crowd around them,” she writes. “My illness brings me into the crowd, a crowd of people, who like me, know that their present is limited and perilously uncertain.” Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School, says: “This book holds an astonishing combination of hard reality with visionary light and love. … The result is a gift to its readers, teaching us how to see our own reality, whatever that might be; teaching us how to place ourselves directly into stories of great profundity from Buddhist tradition; and teaching us how to read our own life stories through the lucid lens of honesty with which Derris tells us hers.”
