New Genre Developments in Autobiographical Buddhist Literature

This book review essay explores two works that examine new hybrid genres of Western Buddhist autobiographical writing: John D. Barbour’s Journeys of Transformation (2022) and Ben Van Overmeire’s American Koan (2024). In Barbour’s exploration of Western Buddhist travel narratives and Van Overmeire’s examination of American Zen autobiographies based on koan, the scholars face an inherent paradox: Buddhist doctrine teaches no-self, yet autobiographical narratives are fundamentally self-centered. Both scholars demonstrate that Western Buddhist autobiographical narratives succeed precisely by refusing to resolve this tension. This essay examines how both scholars define these emerging genres, explains how they navigate narrating self-dissolution, and assesses how they survey the ways in which marginalized authors strategically foreground oppressed identities as a necessary foundation for spiritual transformation. Barbour and Van Overmeire illuminate how genre innovation serves both literary and soteriological purposes, while broadening the study of Buddhism, as well as religion and literature.