AN END TO SUFFERING
The Buddha in the World
By Pankaj Mishra
Farrar Straus Giroux. 422 pp. $25
ADVENTURES WITH THE BUDDHA
A Buddhism Reader
Edited by Jeffery Paine
Norton. 410 pp. $27.95
There is something charmingly old-fashioned about the basic premise of Pankaj Mishra's new book, An End to Suffering, which opens in the early '90s with Mishra as an aspiring writer, heading off to a remote part of India to rent a cheap place where he can write and read for "two or three years." He rents a small cottage from a man who puts out a journal about Sanskrit (circulation: 500), meets the locals at a small dal shop where he takes his midday meal, and gives his life a "broad margin" (as Thoreau once said) for work.
What he was reading, at least some of the time, was the history of Buddhism and the life of the Buddha, who was born 2500 years AGO in what is now Nepal, quite close to where Mishra was living. Today there is hardly a trace of Buddhism in India, the land where the Buddha wandered and taught; most of the books Mishra read were by Westerners, who had begun unearthing the teachings in the 19th century. Yet Mishra often traveled to the sites that were mentioned in the Pali scriptures of the Buddha's teachings. One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is how it allows one to see the landscape where the Buddha walked, in country that in some places hardly seems to have changed since he was alive.
Mishra tells the by-now-familiar story of the life of the Buddha, the prince who had a profound realization of impermanence and left home to become a religious wanderer, finding enlightenment six years later under the Bodhi tree -- which Mishra lets us know was actually a pipal, or fig, tree. Mishra strips the story of its mythological trappings and pictures the man living in that place and discovering a message about ending human suffering that still seems astonishingly modern.
He didn't limit his reading to the Buddha's life, but continued with later thinkers like the philosopher Nagyaharajuna, who discovered deeper implications in the original teaching. He also read modern writers influenced by the Buddha, especially Nietzsche, who seems to come in a close second in Mishra's pantheon of intellectual heroes.
Mishra also asks himself whether the Buddha's message still has relevance in a 21st century in which India trying to make itself into a modern state, antagonism among various religious groups seems as vociferous as ever, and Buddhism has become in large part a practice for affluent Westerners. He decides finally that Buddha's message does still have relevance, though he reaches that conclusion only after a long, intricate intellectual journey during which he became a successful freelance journalist and published a novel, The Romantics. He writes from the standpoint of a third-world person, trying to find a place -- and make a decent living -- in a dizzyingly complicated modern world. This is a man who, as a journalist, covered a Taliban meeting in Afghanistan where 200,000 people heard a message preaching death to America, then later watched 9/11 coverage in the shack of a neighboring farmer in that remote town in India.
Yet Mishra did not -- and this is the book's major weakness -- actually enter into Buddhist practice, perhaps because of the specter of those affluent Westerners. He has a deep intellectual understanding of the Buddha's teaching, but misses their deeper point.
Jeffery Paine's Adventures With the Buddha is quite the opposite. Paine has gathered excerpts from autobiographical writings of nine modern Buddhists, beginning with the renowned explorer Alexandra David-Neel, the first Western woman to enter the Tibetan city of Lhasa, and extending all the way to American businessman Michael Roach, who has brought Buddhist ethical principles into the diamond business in New York. All of these people have given themselves over not to a theoretical exploration of Buddhism but to the practice of its multifarious forms. One wonders what the Buddha himself would make of what his teachings have led to.
Many of these people were courageous and hardy pioneers in their forays into Buddhism: Alexandra David Neel undertaking her six-month hike to Lhasa at the age of 55, Lama Govinda (born Ernst Hoffman) leaving his native Germany to travel in Ceylon and India, the translator John Blofeld exploring China. Even the contemporary writer Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the "Amsterdam cop" mystery novels, showed up at a Japanese temple at the age of 26 knowing little about Buddhism and less about the Japanese language.
Though Paine selected from a wide variety of sources, his book feels dominated by Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps because it is so colorful and exotic, full of flying monks, practitioners who can warm their bodies by meditation in the frigid Himalayas, instances of mind-reading and evidence of reincarnation. More than one writer feels the mere presence of a lama to be a teaching, his physical touch like a bolt of lightning. Yet what impressed me most about these lamas, as Paine's contributors describe them, was their humility and tolerance, their belief that truth is found in all religions.
"All Prayers, rites and methods of concentration which open up the inner man must bring forth the inner Light," one lama told John Blofeld. "I have . . . met two missionaries of the Heavenly Lord [Catholic] Sect who are fully Enlightened Bodhisattavas." Another lama summed up the vastly complicated practice of the Tibetans in a few simple words: "Be tolerant, love, understand. The whole universe is but yourself."
I was so inspired by these pioneers that I turned skeptically to more current practitioners whom Paine includes, such as Jan Willis, professor at Wesleyan University, and Sharon Salzberg, a founding teacher of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. Yet their stories are in their own way just as remarkable and touching. Willis overcame low self-esteem and the pain of racism; Salzberg transcended a horrifically tragic childhood to become a renowned teacher of metta, or lovingkindness meditation. Even Michael Roach, enmeshed in the cutthroat diamond business of midtown Manhattan, manages to lead a deeply spiritual life in the most materialistic of circumstances.
Alan Watts, '60s icon and author of The Way of Zen, once said that "For me, this rich and venerable tradition of Mahayana Buddhism . . . has seemed one of the most civilizing and humanizing and generally amiable movements in all of history." These two books give a marvelous introduction both to the life that inspired that religion and the multifaceted practice it has become. •
David Guy's most recent book is "The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex."
