Petrified souls

James Joyce’s Dubliners masterfully exposes spiritual paralysis through what Chan Buddhism might call wúmíng (ignorance)—the fog obscuring his characters from their own liberation. Each story crystallizes a moment where souls brush against awakening, only to retreat into the familiar prison of habit, faith, or despair. Like Zen koans that shatter logic to provoke insight, Joyce’s epiphanies—Gabriel watching snow unmake identities in "The Dead," the boy glimpsing cruel vanity in "Araby"—reveal truth too raw to sustain. The collection’s genius lies in its negative theology of freedom. Dubliners aren’t shackled by external forces but by their clinging. Their paralysis mirrors minds trapped in ＂samsara＂—cycling through suffering while mistaking it for life. Joyce paints with cold compassion, showing how epiphanies, like Zen ＂kenshō＂(seeing one’s nature), offer no salvation unless integrated. The snow falling on "all the living and the dead" becomes the ultimate non-dual truth: liberation exists only when one stops fleeing the void and merges with it. In this light, ＂Dubliners＂ transcends social critique. It’s a mosaic of failed enlightenments—a testament that seeing the cage is the first, agonizing step toward dissolving it. Joyce, the unsentimental bodhisattva, holds a mirror to our own refusals to awaken.