The Stranger — The Accidental Buddhist

Meursault, the narrator of The Stranger, is one of the strangest figures in modern literature. He kills a man on a beach for reasons even he cannot articulate. He fails to weep at his mother's funeral. He answers every question about his motives honestly, and the honesty horrifies the court more than the killing did. At the end, facing execution, stripped of every social convention and every reason to perform, he experiences something the Zen tradition would recognize immediately.

What remains when everything is taken away is the bare experience of being alive. The smell of the sea. The warmth of the sun. The night alive with signs and stars. The gentle indifference of the world is not its hostility. It is the cessation of the demand that the world supply meaning on the ego's terms. Meursault did not get there through practice. He got there through radical removal of everything else: status, social standing, future, even the possibility of explaining himself in language that would be heard.

This is Eckhart's process of subtraction arriving through a guillotine rather than a monastery. It is the Dark Night of John of the Cross compressed into a prison cell. It is Huineng's mirror, originally not a single thing, reflected in a man who has lost everything and discovered that what remains is enough. Camus did not write Meursault as a saint. He wrote him as a witness. The same recognition the contemplatives reach through years of practice, the existentialist's stripped condition can produce in a single night.