An End To Suffering - The Buddha In The World

Is the Buddha still relevant today and, if so, in what way?

Pankaj Mishra tries to answer this question as he travels through poverty-ridden South Asia to gilded Europe and America. Along the way he discusses Western explorers’ “discovery” of Buddhism in the nineteenth century, finds out how Buddhist thought has flowered even in a materialistic world, and reveals the parallels between the age of the Buddha and the contemporary world.

Mishra shows how the Buddha wrestled with problems of personal identity, alienation, and suffering in his own, no less bewildering, times. In the process Mishra discovers the living meaning of the Buddha’s teaching, in the world and for himself. The result is the most three-dimensional, convincing book on the Buddha that we have.

What stayed with me:

1. An ambitious and uncommon book. It has three threads running through it. 1) The life and the ideas of the Buddha, especially the Self and its place in this world 2) The comparison of these ideas to the modern world, dominated by Western thought of Nietzsche, Hume, Marx, Adam Smith, Voltaire etc. 3) The author’s personal journey in learning about the Buddha and writing this book.
2. The Buddha was not a prophet – he was not a religious figure but a secular one. He had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity; he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgment.
3. He likewise ignored the question of why sin and evil exist in the world, which has obsessed nearly every major religion. The Buddha’s concern was purely practical: to relieve suffering, both material and existential.
4. The quality of all human experience depends on the mind and so the Buddha was concerned with analyzing and transforming the individual mind.
5. He was, in many senses, a modern man, maybe even the first modern man, because he put into words the anomie and angst that are the daily companions of billions of modern lives.
6. Two and a half millennia ago, the Buddha lived and preached in northern India, and primary Buddhist scriptures have come down to us in Sanskrit and Pali. By around 1300BC, Buddhism was all but expunged in the Subcontinent thanks to zealots from various religions.
7. Much of the life of the Buddha, and India’s pre-Islamic past, was still undiscovered in the early 19th century. Although similar in stature to some major religious figures, much less was known about him. Inscriptions, sculptures and monuments lay buried or covered by jungle. The Sanchi stupa, the ancient university at Nalanda, and the Ashokan pillars were gradually unearthed.
8. Western scholars, archaeologists and explorers “discovered” Buddha in the early 19th century. They slowly realized that they were not dealing with a mythological figure. In the 1820’s, British scholars at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta still thought that the Buddha had been Egyptian or Ethiopian, or a Norse god.
9. Buddhism developed from earlier Vedic beliefs. As life became urbanized in the 6th century BC, ancient rituals and rigid social classes began to be questioned. Less bound by agrarian dependence on natural cycles, merchants superseded priests. Karma explained social inequality. Rebirth ensured a never-ending cycle of future accountability. The Buddha challenged the concepts of caste, accumulation of merit and an enduring self.
10. Buddha realized that the self-mortification practiced by ascetics cannot by itself lead to any higher awareness or insight. Nor can the meditation of the yogi bring lasting benefits without a commensurate moral development. The trick was to combine “mindfulness and self-possession” with meditation, to examine the workings of the mind as a prerequisite for understanding the nature of reality.
11. The Buddha understood that nothing in his soul, the self, or the ego was eternal, unchanging, or absolute. He realized that the craving for permanence, blind indulgence in appetites, and clinging to a false view of reality lay at the root of all man-made suffering.
12. The Buddha claimed that there was nothing more to an individual than these five groups of causally connected and interdependent phenomena: bodily phenomena, feelings, labelling or recognizing, volitional activities and conscious awareness. He went on to assert that the human personality was unstable; a complex flow of phenomena; a set of processes rather than a substance; a becoming rather than a being.
13. The world is an illusion in the sense that what we can understand is bounded by our consciousness, which is by definition inadequate and partial. To the extent that we mistake our consciousness for reality, we are falling victim to an illusion. At the same time the contents of our consciousness is real. It does change the world, and is changed by it.
14. As the Buddha saw it, without the belief in a self with an identity, a person will no longer be obsessed with regrets about the past and plans for the future. Ceasing to live in the limbo of what ought to be but is not here yet, he will be fully alive in the present.
15. It is probably true that greed, hatred and delusion, the source of all suffering, are also the source of life, and its pleasures, however temporary, and that to vanquish them may be to face a nothingness that is more terrifying than liberating.
16. The texts speak of a self-confidence bordering on arrogance. But then the Buddha did not seem to have ever pretended to be humble. He had the brusqueness of a busy doctor. He seems to have been convinced that he not only spoke the truth but also that what he said could be objectively verified. It may be why he avoided getting into metaphysical speculation.
17. When you read the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the account of the Buddha’s last journey, you think of Gandhi. These two Indians had much in common: middle-caste men from regions peripheral to where they made their name, charismatic public figures who had renounced the calling of their ancestors and stressed individual awareness and self-control at a time of increasing violence.
18. Buddhism is not easily practiced in the modern world, where almost everything is predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire, exactly the thing that the Buddha had warned against.
19. To live in the present, with a high degree of self-awareness and compassion manifested in even the smallest acts and thoughts — this sounds like a private remedy for private distress. But this was part of the Buddha’s bold and original response to the intellectual and spiritual crisis of his time — the crisis created by the break-up of smaller societies and the loss of older moralities.
20. Mishra ultimately understands that following in the steps of the Buddha means living a life less reliant on ideology and releasing one’s self from the constructs of identity, class, race, and history. It’s about freedom from the past. It’s about becoming, instead of being.