Two young Indians seek enlightenment

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2006 by Peter Heinegg

Pankaj Mishra

An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

FSG, 2004, 422pp., $25

Pankaj Mishra (b. 1969) will be forty before too long, but his affably smiling face on the book jacket could belong to anyone from 17 to 27, and hardly seems to fit a person who is technically nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. This is, in every way, a young man's book, a sort of journalistic Bildungsroman; and readers who know Mishra from his sophisticated, keenly argued articles in The New York Review of Books may have trouble recognizing the bright-eyed wandering scholar, the naive but stunningly intelligent pilgrim we meet in these pages. Blending his hard-won, earnest, bookish insights into the challenge of modernity with his discovery of the Buddha and Buddhist philosophy, Mishra tells an engaging if necessarily inconclusive tale.

After graduating, without much distinction or direction, from Allahabad University in the early 1990s, Mishra moved to the small Himalayan village of Mashobra, which served as his base camp for travels through regions near the border with Tibet, where the spirit and memories of the Buddha, erased in so many other parts of India, are still strong. He soon found himself following the traces not just of Siddartha Gautama (and his disciples), but of 19th century European travelers and scholars, like Victor Jacquemont, Alexander De Koros, and William Moorcroft, who helped to discover and reconstruct the hitherto obliterated history of Buddhism. Struck by the irony of learning ancient Indian traditions from western outsiders, Mishra also began reading voraciously in the philosophy and literature of the modern West, even as he was trying to find his own voice as a writer.

He made rapid progress in that department, publishing, among other things, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995) and The Romantics (1999), a partly autobiographical novel. And his travels led him far beyond northern India, across the entire country, and eventually to England and the US, while he brooded over the dilemmas of post-colonial India (notably the tormented situation in Kashmir) and the rest of the world (9/11, globalization, and the various discontents of contemporary civilization). The thread uniting all these disparate themes is Buddhism, which not only informs the lives of people as disparate as the Dalits (the former "Untouchables" who embraced Buddhism to escape the Hindu caste system), the Tibetans murdered and oppressed by the Chinese communists, the ravages of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, monks caught up in the Vietnam War, Buddhist supporters of Sinhalese nationalism in Sri Lanka or, before that, of brutal militarism in Japan, affluent Zen meditators in California, and so on, but which turns out to be both the Holy Grail of Mishra's quest and the ideal cure for the endless miseries that he sees bedeviling humans from Simla to San Francisco.

For at its core Mishra's book is a primer--and a beautifully lucid one--of Basic Buddhism. His own "conversion" is somewhat iffy: for the most part, he's intellectually convinced by the Buddha's teaching, but he has a lot of trouble meditating; and by the end it's not clear what "right livelihood" Mishra has chosen or where his path is leading him. (In fact, it's a tribute to his unassuming charm that we gladly accompany him on a journey that has no blinding flash of satori, no stunning ahamoments, not even a multi-cultural love affair.) And he certainly has no utopian prescriptions for the planet, although he ends on a strongly positive note that stresses the Buddha's 21st century relevance:

      In a world increasingly defined by the conflict of individuals and      societies aggressively seeking their separate interests, he      revealed both individuals and societies as necessarily


        
    			
       
		
        			
		
	
    
    
    
    
     interdependent. He challenged the very basis of conventional human

        
    
    
    
    
     self-perceptions--a stable, essential identity--by demonstrating a      plural unstable human self--one that suffered but also had the

        
    
    
    
    
     potential to end its suffering. An acute psychologist, he taught a      radical suspicion of desire as well as of its sublimations--the

        
    
    
    
    
     seductive concepts of ideology and history. He offered a moral and      spiritual regimen that led to nothing less than a whole new way of      looking at and experiencing the world. 

In other words, he went beyond Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky by providing therapy for, as well as diagnosis of, the woes afflicting us. Well, actually some critics would claim that such illustrious nay-sayers do carry antidotes (and vitamins) in their little black bags; but Mishra makes a defensible case to the contrary.

Mishra is such a thoughtful and open-minded spiritual explorer (e.g., he acknowledges the Buddha's sexism--nonvirulent, but still troubling) that one feels an immediate urge to ply him with questions: for instance, given the way that Buddhism welcomes the findings of science, wouldn't the fierce intensity of the yearning for pleasure programmed into our genes over millions of years by natural selection suggest that only a tiny elite will ever achieve, or want to achieve, nirvana? (Look how long the Buddha needed to reach enlightenment.) Along the same lines, how can we take reincarnation seriously nowadays, except perhaps as a metaphor for the persistence of DNA? Isn't the mendicant life more or less unthinkable in capitalist countries with cold winters? (The Franciscans had to abandon it.) Isn't Buddhism ideologically underdeveloped when it comes to tackling complex political and social problems? And so on.