Mary Frances Carney

The Buddha of Eastern Parkway Mary Frances Carney

Nara is a woman beset by grief in witnessing a painful tragedy. She enters a Zen temple in Japan to overcome suffering and find her true self. Called back to her home on Eastern Parkway to help her dying mother, she learns that the father she has never known is a Catholic priest. Mother, priest, and daughter embark on the task of sorting the past, facing the anguish of death, learning the route beyond anger and lies to acceptance and love as Nara searches for her own completion. In the new genre of Buddhist fiction, we find the Buddhist elements of the search for the true self, impermanence, life and death, liberation from suffering, the problem of ego, and the existential challenges that confront us in our quest for meaning. Through literary characters dealing with grief, secrecy, anger, abandonment, death, and myriad life problems, we meet our own trials and find a response to life in the basic everyday teachings within Buddhist thought.