An End to Suffering : The Buddha in the World
- Book Review,
by Pankaj Mishra
From Publishers Weekly
Mishra (The Romantics) offers an ambitious "book-length essay" that combines an overview of the life, times and teachings of the Buddha with personal anecdotes and extended multidisciplinary forays into realms such as ancient and modern history, philosophy, politics and literary criticism. If Mishra's approach is broad, it is also deep and often effective. For example, his close reading of early Indian scriptures and his historical-political examination of the Buddha's society bring to life a "half-mythical antiquity" that, in turn, helps the reader see the Buddha's teachings afresh: not as generic spiritual truisms but rather as specific responses to particular religious and social conditions. Yet the book fails to anchor its broad perspective in a strong central thesis. While it follows the chronology of the Buddha's life, Mishra intersperses whole chapters exploring topics such as "The Death of God" and "Empires and Nations." These discussions of Nietzsche's opinions of the Buddha or Zen Buddhism's endorsement of Japanese imperialism are themselves compelling, but feel disjointed. Mishra also frequently shifts the focus to his own life; sometimes this artfully illustrates a point, but at other times it borders on the self-indulgent. Nevertheless, for serious readers the book is a rich and challenging—if sometimes meandering—invitation to explore the Buddha's legacy across centuries, continents and cultures. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
There is something charmingly old-fashioned about the basic premise of Pankaj Mishra's new book, An End to Suffering, which opens in the early '90s with Mishra as an aspiring writer, heading off to a remote part of India to rent a cheap place where he can write and read for "two or three years." He rents a small cottage from a man who puts out a journal about Sanskrit (circulation: 500), meets the locals at a small dal shop where he takes his midday meal, and gives his life a "broad margin" (as Thoreau once said) for work. What he was reading, at least some of the time, was the history of Buddhism and the life of the Buddha, who was born 2500 years AGO in what is now Nepal, quite close to where Mishra was living. Today there is hardly a trace of Buddhism in India, the land where the Buddha wandered and taught; most of the books Mishra read were by Westerners, who had begun unearthing the teachings in the 19th century. Yet Mishra often traveled to the sites that were mentioned in the Pali scriptures of the Buddha's teachings. One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is how it allows one to see the landscape where the Buddha walked, in country that in some places hardly seems to have changed since he was alive. Mishra tells the by-now-familiar story of the life of the Buddha, the prince who had a profound realization of impermanence and left home to become a religious wanderer, finding enlightenment six years later under the Bodhi tree -- which Mishra lets us know was actually a pipal, or fig, tree. Mishra strips the story of its mythological trappings and pictures the man living in that place and discovering a message about ending human suffering that still seems astonishingly modern. He didn't limit his reading to the Buddha's life, but continued with later thinkers like the philosopher Nagyaharajuna, who discovered deeper implications in the original teaching. He also read modern writers influenced by the Buddha, especially Nietzsche, who seems to come in a close second in Mishra's pantheon of intellectual heroes.Mishra also asks himself whether the Buddha's message still has relevance in a 21st century in which India trying to make itself into a modern state, antagonism among various religious groups seems as vociferous as ever, and Buddhism has become in large part a practice for affluent Westerners. He decides finally that Buddha's message does still have relevance, though he reaches that conclusion only after a long, intricate intellectual journey during which he became a successful freelance journalist and published a novel, The Romantics. He writes from the standpoint of a third-world person, trying to find a place -- and make a decent living -- in a dizzyingly complicated modern world. This is a man who, as a journalist, covered a Taliban meeting in Afghanistan where 200,000 people heard a message preaching death to America, then later watched 9/11 coverage in the shack of a neighboring farmer in that remote town in India. Yet Mishra did not -- and this is the book's major weakness -- actually enter into Buddhist practice, perhaps because of the specter of those affluent Westerners. He has a deep intellectual understanding of the Buddha's teaching, but misses their deeper point. Jeffery Paine's Adventures With the Buddha is quite the opposite. Paine has gathered excerpts from autobiographical writings of nine modern Buddhists, beginning with the renowned explorer Alexandra David-Neel, the first Western woman to enter the Tibetan city of Lhasa, and extending all the way to American businessman Michael Roach, who has brought Buddhist ethical principles into the diamond business in New York. All of these people have given themselves over not to a theoretical exploration of Buddhism but to the practice of its multifarious forms. One wonders what the Buddha himself would make of what his teachings have led to. Many of these people were courageous and hardy pioneers in their forays into Buddhism: Alexandra David Neel undertaking her six-month hike to Lhasa at the age of 55, Lama Govinda (born Ernst Hoffman) leaving his native Germany to travel in Ceylon and India, the translator John Blofeld exploring China. Even the contemporary writer Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the "Amsterdam cop" mystery novels, showed up at a Japanese temple at the age of 26 knowing little about Buddhism and less about the Japanese language. Though Paine selected from a wide variety of sources, his book feels dominated by Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps because it is so colorful and exotic, full of flying monks, practitioners who can warm their bodies by meditation in the frigid Himalayas, instances of mind-reading and evidence of reincarnation. More than one writer feels the mere presence of a lama to be a teaching, his physical touch like a bolt of lightning. Yet what impressed me most about these lamas, as Paine's contributors describe them, was their humility and tolerance, their belief that truth is found in all religions. "All Prayers, rites and methods of concentration which open up the inner man must bring forth the inner Light," one lama told John Blofeld. "I have . . . met two missionaries of the Heavenly Lord [Catholic] Sect who are fully Enlightened Bodhisattavas." Another lama summed up the vastly complicated practice of the Tibetans in a few simple words: "Be tolerant, love, understand. The whole universe is but yourself."I was so inspired by these pioneers that I turned skeptically to more current practitioners whom Paine includes, such as Jan Willis, professor at Wesleyan University, and Sharon Salzberg, a founding teacher of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. Yet their stories are in their own way just as remarkable and touching. Willis overcame low self-esteem and the pain of racism; Salzberg transcended a horrifically tragic childhood to become a renowned teacher of metta, or lovingkindness meditation. Even Michael Roach, enmeshed in the cutthroat diamond business of midtown Manhattan, manages to lead a deeply spiritual life in the most materialistic of circumstances. Alan Watts, '60s icon and author of The Way of Zen, once said that "For me, this rich and venerable tradition of Mahayana Buddhism . . . has seemed one of the most civilizing and humanizing and generally amiable movements in all of history." These two books give a marvelous introduction both to the life that inspired that religion and the multifaceted practice it has become. Reviewed by David Guy Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Mishra, author of a novel, The Romantics (2000), and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, didn't intend to write about the Buddha when he sent himself on retreat to a small Himalayan village. But he was intrigued by the Buddhist monasteries he came across, and soon found himself involved in what became a prolonged and profound inquiry into the Buddha's life, Buddhist thought, and Buddhism's global influence. A remarkably lucid and companionable writer and agile thinker, Mishra locates the Buddha within the "vigorous counterculture" of his times (the sixth century B.C.E.) and cogently explains the Buddha's revolutionary insights into the workings of the mind and the nature of the self. Interweaving a fresh take on Indian history with penetrating readings of great works in Western civilization, Mishra links the Buddha to Socrates and explicates the prescient modernity of Buddhism's emphasis on "therapeutic and ethical" goals. Mishra also explores the volatile link between religion and politics and considers the complex and dire problems associated with the worldwide abandonment of ancient sustainable traditions in favor of industrialization. Mishra's unusually discerning, beautifully written, and deeply affecting reflection on Buddhism is illuminating in myriad directions. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Praise for The Romantics:
"A work of art, a first novel of the highest achievement [by] a writer whose work will last . . . Read it and find yourself at the source of something great." --Candida McWilliam, Financial Times
"This is a novel not to be missed . . . a brilliantly vivid, lucid debut." --Lexy Bloom, The Observer
Book Description
An End to Suffering is a deeply original and provocative book about the Buddha's life and his influence throughout history, told in the form of the author's search to understand the Buddha's relevance in a world where class oppression and religious violence are rife, and where poverty and terrorism cast a long, constant shadow.
Mishra describes his restless journeys into India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among Islamists and the emerging Hindu middle class, looking for this most enigmatic of religious figures, exploring the myths and places of the Buddha's life, and discussing Western explorers' "discovery" of Buddhism in the nineteenth century. He also considers the impact of Buddhist ideas on such modern politicians as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
As he reflects on his travels and on his own past, Mishra shows how the Buddha wrestled with problems of personal identity, alienation, and suffering in his own, no less bewildering, times. In the process Mishra discovers the living meaning of the Buddha's teaching, in the world and for himself. The result is the most three-dimensional, convincing book on the Buddha that we have.
About the Author
Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Granta, and the Times Literary Supplement.
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