AN END TO SUFFERING: THE BUDDHA IN THE WORLD By Pankaj Mishra Picador Price: Rs 495 Pages: 422

Two journeys, separated by time and temperament, history and geography, and both semaphored by sorrow, but united somewhere along the way by knowledge. Two thousand and five hundred years ago, the first traveller, a prince fed up with privileges, left the palace where his wife and child slept in unknowing bliss, and took the rocky road to nirvana. He sought and struggled, meditated and grew melancholy, collected men in search of soul therapy as disciples, felt abandoned and alone as his footprints progressed from hills to forests, his body shrunk by denial, his mind whispering in frustration as meditative moments failed to transport him from the tentative instant to the definitive light, until he, the wandering monk, for so long a seeker in self-mortification, reached the pipal tree under which he became the Enlightened. From Kapilavastu to Bodh Gaya, from Gautama Siddhartha to the Buddha, it was one of man's longest journeys in life-not in distance but in quest.

Centuries later, a small-town Brahmin boy would take another journey, from Allahabad to Delhi to the snowy remoteness of Mashobra in the Himalayas and to the liberal pages-more of the Guardian variety-of the West. Behind him lay vast spaces of ancestral dispossession, political injustice, textual utopias, occasional book reviews, campus disillusion and memories of a life trapped between words and dreams. The epiphany came when he, then a tenant of one Mr Sharma, a man who lived in Sanskritised isolation in Mashobra, saw the prayer flag, then the monk, and beyond them a narrative that was not captured by all those books he had read. Then he read more, and sought to achieve a balance between places and philosophy, and, as the rustle of the pages grew around him, as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer began editing his thoughts on the idea of suffering, he came closer and closer to the Buddha. Pankaj Mishra's journey became a journey within the journey of the Enlightened. It became An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.

PICTURE SPEAK

THE BUDDHA: The great seeker is now the most sought after

Part memoir, part dissertation, part biography, Mishra's book comes at a time when the mandala is fast turning out to be one of the most sought-after items in the soul bazaar. Salvation junkies, mostly refugees from the republics of disillusion, are flooding the market: the East is bliss, and the smile of the Dalai Lama is as benevolent as the Buddha's smile. That much has been endorsed by Hollywood; also, the Scientology club is too exclusive and the Kabala chic is only taking off. And politics and publishing industry have ensured that the Buddha route will run through Tibet-a necessary diversion for the sake of the cause. Mishra, it must be said, refuses to be part of the pack. He is no Lama-ITE; he may have gone to the meditation centre but hasn't abandoned argument. He doesn't argue from the position of total submission either. He is on the higher mission of finding an ideal place for the Buddha in the world of ideas.

It is a triangular mission. The Buddha biography is a story retold. The Mishra narrative-memory and travel-is one of growing up in books and places, with the Buddha as a cerebral destination. It is the Buddha of the world-a world defined by the Vedas as well as the philosophical traditions of the West-that makes this book different from the usual East-is-Wise narratives. That is because the Buddha himself is unique: the least dogmatic of teachers did not found a theology. Rather, as a structuralist of sorrow, he traced the origin of suffering to the mind. Trishna, or craving, was his word for that. He was the compassionate preacher, and the religion that took his name was seen by philosophers like Schopenhauer as a religion of pessimism. The Buddha didn't promise heaven though he did make happiness possible. As Mishra writes, "To be enlightened was to understand the sources of suffering not only within oneself but also within all beings. The wisdom this brought could not remain a personal achievement; it was inseparable from the feeling of universal compassion, or karuna."

Mishra, a good student, does a comparative study of the Buddha's science of the mind and his worldview. Nietzsche is the most quoted one here, and the one who gets along rather well with the Enlightened. "Like Nietzsche, the Buddha too had attempted to reaffirm the natural dignity of human beings without recourse to the ambitious schema of metaphysics, theology, reason or political idealism." But it is political idealism-rather the tyranny of the ideal-that has exiled the Buddha from the world and aggravated the suffering of humanity, and in Mishra's pages, it is a story stretching from the assassination of Gandhi to the war on terror. Bamiyan was only the starkest and the most direct instance; the Buddha demolished is an abiding motif of the times. Mishra rehabilitates the Buddha of the mind; and he does it with the elegance of a research scholar, though he would like to see himself as a wandering seeker with the right questions-and the right books.

The questions are intelligent but not as enlightening as they are in, say, The Monk and the Philosopher, a dialogue between Jean-Francois Revel, a political philosopher, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, in which father and son argue on life and freedom, and on religion and reason. Still, when Mishra talks of "an end to suffering", you can't miss the historical irony, the colour of which is ebony black. That was the great pretence of the ideology that aspired to be Christianity without the cross; "I'll make you happy" was every dictator's slogan. The legacy of one like that has started the first full-scale war of the 21st century. The Buddha has taken asylum in the mind of the seeker. And in Mishra's he has found a safe one.

TOP 10 BESTSELLERS    A monthly national list of bestselling books compiled for India Today by ORG-MARG    based on data from 13 retail outlets in six cities.

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