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Rafe Martin was born into the perfect training ground for a storyteller. He grew up immersed in told stories, hearing his father’s tales of flying dangerous rescue missions in the Himalayas during World War II, fairy tales read aloud by his mother, and his Russian-Jewish relatives telling entrancing, often hilarious, stories about their lives. His early exposure to stories about Asia, his reading of Alan Watts and other Buddhist authors, and a chance meeting with Allen Ginsberg in a bar in Greenwich Village fueled his interest in Zen practice. In the late ’60’s, Martin found himself becoming disillusioned with graduate school at a time when the Vietnam War and social unrest were peaking. “I made a vow to myself in graduate school that if things got really bad, I’d go practice Zen,” he said.

Things did get really bad, and he began sitting with Philip Kapleau Roshi [1912—2004], the founder of the Rochester Zen Center, in upstate New York, becoming a student and, later, a disciple. It was at the Zen Center that Martin began telling stories, most of them Buddhist Jataka tales (stories of the Buddha’s former incarnations), and began learning firsthand the power of told stories and the role of a storyteller. It was also at the Zen center that he began melding his storytelling and writing with his Zen practice, which has included working with koans. Koans—sometimes called spiritual puzzles—pose questions or situations we can’t answer or understand using logic, and thus force us to go beyond the discursive mind. Martin recognized that the traditional tales he was using in his storytelling and writing might in fact function like koans. These simple tales may indeed point to our place in the universe.

Martin is the author of twenty-one books, ranging from picture books to novels, and he was the editor of Roshi Kapleau’s final two books. He has won numerous awards both as a storyteller and as an author, including the Storytelling World Award, American Library Association Notable Book Awards, and Parent’s Choice Gold Awards. His most recent novel is Birdwing (excerpt on final page).

I spoke with Rafe Martin this summer at his home in Rochester, New York.

—Joseph Sorrentino

Which came first, storytelling or Zen practice? It’s very hard to distinguish, in a way, because I’ve always been interested in story, if not an actual storyteller. But by the time I came to Rochester Zen Center, I was interested in just sitting, in practice, just in getting my life together.

You once said, “I don’t think I could be a storyteller without Zen.” I needed Zen practice because my mind was really not peaceful enough, not empty enough, not sensitive enough except to its own pain. And without sitting and experiencing the intimacy of everything around me, there’d be no foundation, no way for the words to emerge that would have real power.

How did sitting affect your storytelling? I worked on stories as koans, and my job was to demonstrate the life of it, not to think or analyze. There are interesting experiences you get to when you tell stories. It’s not like you’re there telling stories. It’s like you’re not there telling stories, and the stories kind of emerge. I think a lot of that comes from sitting, of just not getting in the way of the story and not trying to promote yourself or protect yourself in the telling—you kind of drop away. For me, storytelling is like koan practice in front of a large group of people.

Is it as terrifying as dokusan [private instruction with a Zen teacher during which a student may demonstrate understanding of a koan]? No, because there’s nobody there to tell you that you screwed up.

Does the audience experience this dropping away as well? If I shout in telling a story, you stop thinking about the bills you have to pay, what’s going on in your life—your heart rate accelerates, your adrenaline releases. It’s suddenly not pretend, it’s real. That’s part of what happens in telling stories. It’s not discursive language. I could sit here and tell you about stories. You’ll think it’s smart, intelligent, thoughtful, but something different will happen when someone starts telling you a story: You’ll sink into it like it’s an ocean. And you’ll let go of stuff.

Why do we need stories? Why not something that says, “This is exactly what happened?” Because we’d be lying. We don’t know what really happened. And even though they’re fictions, stories give us a doorway to truth, which is a great thing. Fiction is an untruth, but it’s a lot truer than anything else we can say because it tells us about what’s constant in the human experience—fear, suffering, courage, compassion. We also seem to have a psychological propensity for stories that carry deep emotion and deep meaning, and these are somehow more fundamental to us than our explanations and philosophies.