Rekindled interest

The Buddhism Omnibus By Iqbal Singh, S. Radhakrishnan and Arvind Sharma, Oxford, Rs 595

It is easier first to enumerate what The Buddhism Omnibus is not. It is not a definitive work on the vast and complex subject that is Buddhism, although many may expect it to be so. You will also not find here, what Matthew T. Kapstein, professor of Buddhist Studies at Chicago, calls “a sustained history of the Buddhist religion or of its role in the many Asian societies that have traditionally adhered to it”. However, in spite of this, the volume does manage to provide the reader, by default as it were, a fundamental understanding of the different facets of Buddhist philosophy and practice.

But clearly, the aim of this volume is something else. It is to establish the sudden preoccupation of Indian scholars and intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with Buddhism. The book sets out, as Kapstein says, to “testify to a modern fascination with an ancient Indian sage”, and how it so happened that a much mythologized figure from India’s distant past came to exercise a compelling grasp on India’s imagination some three quarters of a millennium after the order he founded had ceased to exist in India itself.

Not surprisingly, the three previously published books, compiled into this jumbo volume, are all representative of one thing — the way Buddhism made a comeback as a subject of immense interest among intellectuals and scholars in modern India. All three books — Gautama Buddha by Iqbal Singh, The Dhammapada by S. Radhakrishnan and The Philosophy of Religion by Arvind Sharma — deal largely with the relevance of Buddhism in the modern age.

It is argued that while the entry of other religions — namely Islam — may have resulted in the decline of Buddhism in India, its revival was surely linked to efforts by India’s thinkers to dig into the past for a rational system of thought. Kapstein explains: “It (the intelligentsia) was then redefining its varied reactions to colonialism and it is in this context that Buddhism seemed to some to offer significant intellectual resources for national aspirations”.

Each of the books reflects the authors’ personal involvement in the subject instead of being dispassionate academic analyses. This is more so in the case of Singh. About Gautama’s “great renunciation”, he writes, “His crisis was not a peculiar case of melancholia arising from the strong reaction of a somewhat hypersensitive youth to certain unpleasant facts of human life: it was of much more vital significance. We see in his experience the birth-pangs of a new, more realistic form of awareness; a highly enlightened individual struggling to demolish for himself the hopeless, yet somehow strangely universal, illusion of the permanence of this world of sense and succession”.

S. Radhakrishnan, philosopher, educator and former president of India, is less exuberant. On the character of the Buddha, he writes: “In Gautama the Buddha, we have a mastermind from the East, second to none so far as the influence on thought is concerned, and sacred to all as the founder of a religious tradition whose hold is hardly less wide and deep than any other”.

Sharma is more concerned with the principles of Buddhism to deliberate on the question of “what is god?” His is perhaps the most engaging part of the book. The reader is given a brief background of Buddhism — its origins in ancient India and the debate over dates; its different forms and practices and questions of corruption and authenticity; its spread and finally speculations over its demise in India.

In his introduction, Kapstein mentions the popular Indian parable of a group of blind describing their idea of an elephant. The analogy is most appropriate. While the authors provide honest perspectives, the truth is perhaps too vast to be contained within the covers of a book.