The middle path

AN END TO SUFFERING: THE BUDDHA IN THE WORLD
By Pankaj Mishra,
Picador, Rs 495

Every man is necessarily the hero of his own life-story, somebody once said. It?s one of those self-evident truths that startle when put aphoristically. And few can complain if an autobiographical bent leads an individual to dramatize what happens to him in the course of a day, a week or a lifetime; to see himself as acted upon by events during his life and all that came before; by the culture and economic context of his times; by philosophy and religion. But it takes a genius to transform all that conflict in the theatre of self-consciousness into enduring literature, to grip the reader with the immediacy of it all, without sermonizing or lapsing into sententiousness ? especially if the individual is not someone in whose life people would be interested in for more obvious reasons. A Nirad C. Chaudhuri can pull off such a conceit with aplomb, perhaps succeeding because he makes no compromises for the reader who may find him difficult. Pankaj Mishra nurses such an ambition. But unlike the bracing difficulty of Chaudhuri?s writing, Mishra seems to prefer endless explication.

An End to Suffering began as an ?idle daydream? about ?a historical novel? on the life of the Buddha, a daydream that Mishra had while living in Mashobra, the Himalayan village to which he retreated for a life of contemplation and study in preparation for that of a professional writer. But what the book has turned out to be could be more accurately described as a ?personal? history. For the recounting of the Buddha?s life and times, his philosophies and their effect in his times and later, is interwoven with a lot of Pankaj Mishra himself. There is the account of Mishra?s family, his education, his travels, his readings among ancient Indian and modern Western philosophy and literature. The structure of a personal history, in this sense, is a rather convenient one, except that the reader may chaff at the long, self-indulgent meanderings.

It can get quite tedious, this seeking after first principles. The chapter, ?Death of God?, is representative of the all-encompassing logic of the book. It intends to show how, with forms of production and society becoming complex, people?s belief in god and priests eroded and they turned to sramanas, like the Buddha, who preached a private ?religion of self-redemption?. Since Mishra sees a parallel between the fractious conditions in the late-Vedic times and the upheavals in the West after the Industrial Revolution, he decides to bring in Nietzsche and his critique of the Buddha. This leads Mishra to how he first encountered Nietzsche in university. He then proceeds to his friend, Vinod, and includes a long speech by him about how his sister?s burning to death for dowry led him to Vivekananda and Hindu nationalism. Comparing his own intellectual development with Vinod?s, Mishra then turns to his family ? how colonialism had left his farming-class ancestors untouched until the new Indian state, decided to redistribute land, and forced his father to shift to a big city. This brings him to Marx, and Marx?s admiration for the industriousness of the bourgeoisie. Then comes a discourse on what constitutes ?modernity? ? Hobbes, whose philosophy underpinned the rise of ?individuals ruled by appetites and aversions? and a ?ruthless centralized state? that suppresses them. By this circuitous route, Mishra turns to Sir Thomas Roe, the depredations of the British colonizers, and the obsession of the colonized to catch up with their oppressors. Towards the end of the chapter, Mishra returns to the Buddha by way of his desire to be a writer. He also returns to how his reading of Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Proust, Emerson, Thoreau and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Marx had reinforced his idea that to be a writer was to concern oneself with one of the central tenets of the Buddha?s teachings ? ?one had to engage rationally with, rather than retreat from the world? and ?concern oneself particularly with the fate of the individual in society?. Whew!

Nothing ? no name in literature, culture or history, no major philosophy, no major event ? gets left out in Mishra?s grand narrative.

Of course, the attempt to weave a grand, foot-noted narrative is itself commendable. It shows off a breath of reading and experience that is truly catholic. It allows Mishra to bring alive the Buddha as a man, to explain his philosophy and its practice in terms of, or as a reaction to, what preceded them and to also put the Buddha?s success in perspective. Mishra has a way of connecting events and phenomena across cultures and time that makes the past come alive. Thus India before the Buddha is explained in terms of the more familiar history of the West in the 20th century. He compares the political organization of the city-kingdoms before and during the Buddha?s lifetime with the Greek city-states, the inviolate authority of the Vedas with that of the Bible, and so on.

At its best, this synthesis of East and West is the intellectual heritage of all educated Indians. In fact, this is the readership Mishra addresses ? the Westward looking Indian middle-class young men and women educated in convent schools and universities. In the end, one suspects that it is the revival of Western interest in the Buddha that arouses Mishra?s interest in him, more than the relevance or greatness of his teachings. And that is a pity.