The Buddha antidote: an end to suffering by Jeffrey Paine

The Buddha antidote; An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, Pankaj Mishra, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 422 pp., $25
Jeffrey Paine
Jeffery Paine is the author of, most recently, "Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West" and the editor of "Adventures With the Buddha: A Buddhism Reader."
1076 words
9 January 2005
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-5
English
Copyright 2005 The Los Angeles Times

Pankaj MISHRA would seem the last person in the world to be interested in Buddhism. As this book begins, he is a young man heading for an isolated cottage to write, his head full of ambition, dreaming of literary fame to come. The difference between Mishra and other such young people on the literary make -- though he is too tasteful to say so -- is that by now he has made it. His novel "The Romantics" won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction. His articles in the New York Review of Books, particularly on Kashmir, have gained notice for combining a sociological perspective with a firsthand knowledge of the region. With the prizes falling into his hands like ripe plums, why is he fascinated by a guru from 2,500 years ago who claimed that life is suffering?

That question, Mishra's uncertain relationship to Buddhism, haunts every page of "An End to Suffering." Westerners often have a hard time with Buddhism because it is an alien religion. For Mishra growing up in India, Buddhism seemed, on the contrary, strictly a Western import. He had no curiosity about it until he saw Americans and Europeans coming to India specifically to study it. Mishra's interest deepened when he visited America and observed Buddhist practitioners devoting themselves to socially conscious labors. Still, he wondered, what was he to Buddhism or Buddhism to him?

His answer is "An End to Suffering," which is less a book with a particular subject matter than the author's hit-or-miss attempt to find one. In an old bookshop, Mishra stumbles on an obscure volume by a 19th century traveler in India, and for pages he raves about his wonderful discovery -- without, however, showing us its connection to Buddhism. "An End to Suffering" is filled with a thousand such things: seemingly every book Mishra has read, every scrap of history he knows, and fragments of autobiography (such as his conversations with his landlord and his experiences in moving to London), a large portion of which bypass Buddhism entirely. Hasty readers may wonder what the book is even supposed to be about. Some will doubtless devise their own end to suffering by impatiently tossing this apparently aimless, self-indulgent volume to the floor.

Impatient readers will, however, miss out on a lot, because "An End to Suffering" is three books disguised as one. One book is simply Mishra's retelling of the life story of the Buddha. Although there is nothing particularly original here -- how could there be, after 2,500 years? -- Mishra's version is succinct, lucid and coherent. In readability it surpasses both Karen Armstrong's academic "Buddha" (2001) and Thich Nhat Hanh's poetic "Old Path White Clouds" (1991). By comparing the Buddha to such comparatively modern writers as David Hume, Nietzsche, Proust and even Tocqueville, Mishra makes him into "a true contemporary."

Book Two: More than other studies of Buddhism, "An End to Suffering" resembles David Denby's "Great Books" or Phyllis Rose's "The Year of Reading Proust," in which the authors report on their reading. Mishra's extended book report holds interest because he has read all the classics from an unusual angle. He unexpectedly finds in 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes' description of society as "a war of all against all" a relevant guide to the violence and chaos in India. Mishra's sentimental landlord might wax poetic about India's glorious spiritual legacies, but Mishra, like V.S. Naipaul, sees in India's religious past the source of its present stagnation. His own gurus are the cultural magnificoes of the West -- Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx -- who he hopes will be like rungs on a ladder that will lift him out of the morass.

Book Three: "An End to Suffering" comes close to being Mishra's intellectual autobiography (its subtitle might more accurately read "Pankaj Mishra in the World"). It is the story of someone who journeyed from outside of history to its center. Mishra's father grew up in a remote, time-forgotten village, never seeing a Westerner, unable to imagine the larger India the newspapers told of. When Mishra later read Marx's description of people who shake free from fatalism and "show what man's activity can bring about," he recognized a description of himself.

By dint of his achievements, Mishra has moved to the center of the contemporary world, living part of the year in London and New York and writing for the most prestigious publications. Yet in the very Europe and America he had once admired from afar, Mishra was astonished to discover, in a more deluxe version, the same economic disparity, racial and religious hatred and violence he thought was the particular malaise of India.

Mishra suggests that Buddhism might offer an antidote for the world's malaise. His lately-arrived-at appreciation of Buddhism was gained not from reading dharma sutras or studying with Tibetan lamas but through two of the most unlikely guides imaginable. From Nietzsche, Mishra learned the value that Buddhism might offer the individual, and indirectly from Tocqueville the value it might offer society. In the 19th century, Nietzsche praised Buddhism as "a hundred times more realistic than Christianity," because it opposed not sin but suffering and because it valued examination and experience over theological dogma. In "Democracy in America," Tocqueville argued that to escape destruction, America required a spiritual counterweight to offset its rampant individualism and materialism. Mishra observes that "Buddhism in modern America often seemed to have ... the same role Tocqueville thought religion had once played in early American civil society.

"An End to Suffering" takes the long and seemingly inconclusive route around its subject matter because, finally, it is trying out a different approach to it. Those who have taken an interest in Buddhism have either become enthusiastic practitioners, or rejected it or studied it academically. But Mishra argues that one need not adopt any of these alternatives: You can simply do as Mishra does and appreciate the Buddha and his teachings intellectually, historically and socially. *