Stephen Maine is running away. “There were so many bad moments, an as-yet unwritten 800-page memoir entitled ‘My Mistakes,’ full of the things I’ve said and done to my wife Joanna,” he confesses at the outset of “The Zen Time Traveler: A Pilgrim’s Journey Through the Koans.”
So through his half-hearted practice at his local sangha, he meditates his way out.
And in.
In his latest novel, Stephen Billias, a speculative fiction writer from Deerfield who has practiced Zen for decades, uses “timescaping” to explore the koans, ancient stories that “serve as teaching tools, designed to enlighten us or jolt us into consciousness.” One night, his protagonist, lost soul Stephen Maine, sits in the zendo, eyes focused softly on the ground, while in his mind — or more accurately, his spirit — he travels to medieval China, where the year is 1225 and he inhabits the body of a Japanese visitor named Wukong.
“I glanced down at my body. It was not my middle-aged, slightly paunchy shape, but a thin, wiry frame, and my skin had a dusky yellow color,” Maine reveals. “I was dressed in a loose-fitting monk’s robe. I was walking with another monk.”
We learn that Wukong is on a journey to enlightenment, and Maine is along for the ride, puzzling over a new koan every time he meets another spiritual teacher. “But how did these eremitic souls, living in their grass and bamboo huts on remote summits, acquire cosmic knowledge?” he wonders — a question whose answer is key to his own healing.
Back in Northampton in 2024, Joanna’s patience is wearing thin. “Come back down to Earth, Spaceman,” she tells Maine, “or you’ll have real problems.”
“I could have said something clever about how I was traveling in inner space, or encompassing all space, but I didn’t,” he practically winks at the reader.
Maine’s wry sense of humor and his penchant for wonder allow us into his intimate journey, where ultimately he is grappling with universal questions like where and how and why he wants to be. While we bear witness to his self-examination, we’re invited into our own.
“I keep bouncing back and forth between these two worlds,” he says. “Which one is the most real to me?”
After Joanna kicks him out, Maine goes to the Zendo as much as possible, determined to stay in the past to figure out why he’s here at all.
He meets a beautiful, powerful woman named Yabaku, and can’t help noticing the parallels between her and Joanna — unlike him, they both know who they are and what they want.
Overcome with guilt but also driven by a compulsion he likens to addiction, Maine writes, “I was meddling in a past hundreds of years and thousands of miles away. Amid all this, all I could think about was sex.”
How he resolves his attraction to Yabaku, what happens with Joanna, what Wukong has to do with enlightenment, and where Maine ends up are all questions for the reader to sit with.
Learn more at the book launch party on Sunday, July 12 at Windhorse Hill Retreat Center in Deerfield from 2 to 4 p.m., where the author will read an excerpt and field questions from the audience, or visit billiasbreslauwriters.com. Billias, who has worked as a professional actor, street-performing juggler, dishwasher, New York City taxi driver, technical writer and project manager, is the published author of seven fantasy novels, one collection of short stories and a literary novel, “Pilgrim Maya,” that he wrote with his wife, Bela Breslau.
“The Zen Time Traveler: A Pilgrim’s Journey Through the Koans” (Discovery Publishers, 238 pages, $29.90) may be purchased at amazon.com/dp/1788946898.
Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.