Dil Se From Vimla Patil Fitness Buzz My Point Of View Beauty Book Review Kolkata Calling Lifestyle Prev Issue Next Issue

Book and Author Name:An End to Suffering by Pankaj Mishra. Publisher: Picador India Price: Rs. 395

"I take refuge in the Buddha’s dharma. I take refuge in faith. I take refuge in the order." With these three vows increasingly more and more people are turning to Buddhism. For most it is a way of life governed by chants in the morning and a spell of meditation. For many it is a way of understanding suffering and coming to terms with it. But Buddhism is in its essence hard to comprehend, though the principles behind it are apparently simple. Nothing lasts therefore we should not be attached to anything. The world and its joys and sorrows is an illusion and through renunciation of this illusion comes understanding.

The book is Pankaj Mishra’s journey to understand the Buddha and his philosophy, through memoir and through history. It begins with his living in Mashobra and travels backwards in time to his trips to Nepal, his visit to Lumbini, where the Buddha was born. How can a prince abandon his family, his wealth and his happiness for a life spent wandering up and down the roads of India? What made his decided to do this at such an early age? How could a vision of the poor, the sick and the dying cause it?

Mishra admits that he failed to understand the draw that Buddhism had for people in the west until 2001 when, lying in a London park listening to broadcasts of the Taliban bombing the statues of the Buddha, the idea of the book came to him. Time he felt had put a different context on suffering, especially in a world where atrocities were committed with increasingly savagery.

An End to Suffering outlines the life of the Buddha from his birth to his death, with emphasis on his vanishing from his palace one rainy night without a word to his family. Mishra finds parallels with his life, his retreat to Mashobra, his wanderings in the Buddha’s footsteps, not that the parallels are made with any definite end. For Mishra, his interest in the Buddha began idly enough as a kind of historical curiosity that was fuelled by the number of people around him whom he found turning to Buddhism, most particularly Helen, the American girl from San Francisco who briefly shaved her head and became a Buddhist monk. And, by so doing, filled Mishra with such embarrassment that, when he came upon her by accident in Benaras, he ducked behind a tree to avoid coming face to face with her.

Buddha’s philosophies are compared with Nietzsche’s nihilism, with the innocent political violence of the Marxist rebels that Mishra met along the way. He notes that the non-violence of Buddhism seemed to coexist with extreme violence, that Buddhist monks urged Japanese excesses in Singapore during World War II. Mahatma Gandhi emerges as a kind of Buddha figure since he understood what a powerful weapon non violence could be when pitted against a world so used to violence.

The whole is seen as a kind of still centre, the eye of the hurricane where the sky shines brightly blue. Around it beats stories like that of his friend Vinod whose sister is burnt by her in laws for failing to bring enough dowry in her marriage. Vinod believes, " ‘[T]here are no rules . . . except those that strong men make for themselves and enforce upon others.’ " Mishra finds Nietzschian echoes in this belief. Buddhism, Mishra writes, quoting Nietzsche, " ‘has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems of its composition. . . . It stands, in my language, beyond good and evil.’ " Buddhism therefore is a phenomenon that stands apart from history for Mishra.

Only in the last few pages of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World does Pankaj Mishra directly address the concerns of his title. Here the "world" is defined by the planes catapulted into the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Back to back with this is the incident of the Taliban destroying the Buddha images in Afghanistan. The world reaches out to us no matter where we are – to Mishra in a hut in Mashobra seemingly isolated from the reach of violence – and the more it touches us with its violence the more do we begin to understand what the words of the Buddha really mean.

View and Post comment on this article