An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
by Pankaj Mishra
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
320 pp., $36
by Karen Armstrong
Penguin
205 pp., $19
Suppose for a moment that we really are in crisis. Suppose, too, that the crisis is located not so much in the latest terrorist atrocity or misguided invasion as inside our hearts and minds. It lies within the very notions of who we are, which we have constructed and now can’t sustain. The crisis is the self and, to paraphrase one orange-robed sage, the whole edifice is a house on fire.
The proposition will strike most North Americans as plain silly. For hundreds of years, the autonomous self has been the engine of Western civilization as well as a model for the rest of the planet. Once, medieval Europe had bound identity to clan, church, and king; with the dissolution of that form of life came “the plunge into the adventure of individuality,” as Pankaj Mishra describes it in his extraordinary book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. A new vocabulary for human character evolved during the Enlightenment and Industrial Age, one that emphasized “personal choice and desire and the capacity for self-transformation.” Fresh configurations of nations and economies followed, designed both to encourage and to regulate competing self-interests. Ambitions for liberty and prosperity became good for your country, good for you. One newborn state went so far as to declare the pursuit of happiness a democratic right.
The twentieth century exported this “secular assessment of human possibility” into regions of the globe where it had had virtually no historic foothold. India was a major point of contact (along with China and the rest of Asia) and it was in this country—or in the version of it bequeathed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru—that Mishra, a thirty-five year old with an ancient soul and a fierce, transgressive intellect, was raised. Here was another young republic that promised its poorest and most downtrodden citizens happiness as European-style rational individuals. Secular education and socialist economic systems, as envisioned by Nehru and his successors, would induce an emboldened India full of individuals empowered to pursue their every private need and desire, even though, as Mishra notes, that notion had “hardly any precedents in India’s own intellectual and spiritual traditions.” This was not, after all, the land of Adam Smith or Karl Marx but, rather, of Mahatma Gandhi and, further back still, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha.
An End to Suffering, a cross of biography, memoir, and essay, traverses East and West and back again to gather evidence about the nature of our global predicament. Though Mishra’s debut novel, The Romantics, published in 1999, suggested a serious talent, his reputation is still based more on his work as a literary essayist and a traveller to troubled places. Journeys taken over the past decade into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir first alerted him to the legions of mostly young men for whom the fantasy of modernity, of a future where everyone would “wear a tie, work in an office or factory, practice birth control, raise a nuclear family,drive a car and pay taxes,” was collapsing in disappointment. Fundamentalism offered these men an alternative fantasy, the one starring jihad warriors and suicide-bombers in the roles of martyrs.
Then came September 11 and the appearance, at least, of a global clash. An End to Suffering has wisdom to offer about the present state of affairs. The book’s radical proposal, however, involves applying the teachings of an Indian prince-turned-sage who died more than 2,400 years ago. Pankaj Mishra does so despite knowing that the Buddha can be relied upon to make two very contrary, and somewhat baffling, assertions.
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