An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  On my travels I saw the particular sensibility this class had brought into being, one reflected in the opulent small-town mansions with Palladian facades, the raunchy songs, the violent films, and a vivaciously ignorant and biased media. This new wealth amid the restive slums and villages knew it was vulnerable, a minority of mostly upper-caste men among low-caste Hindus and Muslims. And so, like the European bourgeoisie, it had a defensive ideology, nationalism, through which it sought to represent, and legitimize its rule over, the majority of the country’s population.

  This nationalism derived its energy from a special kind of history: one that spoke of Islam destroying Hinduism and Buddhism in India, of lost Hindu glory, and of the national strength and international eminence that could be regained through nuclear bombs. The message spread quickly, embraced by people newly empowered and seeking to define themselves in the big world in which they suddenly found themselves.

  The aggressiveness it had provoked did not need to conceal itself in euphemism. In a famous temple complex in Rajasthan, a teenage boy from Gujarat, where Gandhi was born, declared to me that the only way to deal with the ‘Muslim problem’ was to kill them all. I found soft-spoken, well-educated men revealing suddenly an inexplicable murderous rage they harboured towards Muslims, Pakistanis and low-caste Hindus.

  What I saw was at least partly the effect of the Hindu nationalist movement which had developed fast in the 1990s. Middle-class people from small towns had been among the crowds that in 1992 demolished a sixteenth-century mosque in an ancient North Indian city which the Buddha had once known. They had turned into solid supporters of the Hindu nationalists who promised to guarantee their political and economic dominance, and keep all their rivals, real as well as imagined, poor Hindus as well as poor Muslims, at bay.

  Vivekananda, of whom Vinod had spoken to me so admiringly, had become the patron saint of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), a political party of mostly upper-caste, middle-class Hindus who strove to boost India’s capabilities in the fields of nuclear bombs and information technology and also revered the cow as holy. Even Vinod couldn’t have expected that the BJP would come close to realizing his project of fully westernizing Hinduism and turning it into a full-fledged nationalist ideology: one which had pretensions to being all-inclusive, but which demonized Muslims and sought to pre-empt the long overdue political empowerment of India’s lower-caste groups with its rhetoric of egalitarianism.

  That empowerment seemed inevitable, and destined to incite more violent struggles between classes and castes over India’s limited resources. In the meantime, power still lay with the upper castes, and those who clamoured too stridently for justice and equality, such as the young men I met in Bihar, could only appear doomed.

  The promise of violent change, of security and dignity in a new political order, was all that kept them from sinking into utter hopelessness and despair. Yet while sitting in their dark and shabby one-room office, where the world appeared infinite and threatening, I could not help feeling how absurd and futile was the task to which these young men had devoted their lives.

  In many ways, this task had barely begun, but the Communist young men already seemed to wear an aura of heroism and tragedy. I saw them destined to be the usual victims, like many thousands of ‘troublemakers’ before them, of the periodic middle-class outcry for ‘law and order’, for ‘ruthless crack-downs’. Easily trampled upon, they were likely to become a statistic: among the thousands of men who were tortured and executed each year while in police custody.

  These emotions of dread and pity were still with me when I went to Bodh Gaya one drowsy winter afternoon and saw again the place where one night the Buddha had his great awakening.

  In the sunken courtyard of the tall Mahabodhi temple, peasant Hindu women waved diyas before the small statues and stupas, making egg-shaped circles of fire. The shrine was very dark, and heavy with incense. Behind the temple was the Bodhi tree, allegedly a descendant of the one the Buddha knew, with its trunk tattooed all over with gold leaf and ochre, and strings of coloured prayer flags running wild across its branches.

  Policemen played cards on a lawn not far from the Mahabodhi temple, where a famous Tibetan monk was giving a lecture. I went and stood at the back of a bright yellow tent, where an audience made up exclusively of foreigners, some of them in ochre robes and with tonsured heads, sat on the grass, their clear solemn faces turned towards the monk on a platform draped with marigolds.

  The monk – surprisingly young for someone so famous, slightly plump, but serious in his glasses – spoke of how rebirth was the most difficult thing to understand for people born outside the eastern traditions. He said that most people asked him: how could a person be reborn if he had no enduring self? What was it that was reborn?

  He spoke of how the Buddha had altered the Brahminical notion of karma, exalting intention above action. This was because he knew that every deed couldn’t possibly contribute to rebirth in all circumstances since action is unavoidable and there would be no release from painful existence.

  The Buddha didn’t think it necessary to be reborn in order to gain the benefits of good actions. What he stressed was self-control. The more successfully one disciplined the mind, the less likely rebirth became. The speaker quoted the Buddha:

  If, bhikshus, an ignorant man produces a good intention, then his consciousness will incline to the good. If he produces a bad or neutral intention, then his consciousness will incline to the bad or the neutral.

  I couldn’t hear all the words, which boomed across to the back from an antiquated sound system. I lingered for a while, and then, growing tired of the indistinct earnestness, decided to visit a Communist activist called Dharmendra. I had heard about him from one of his colleagues in Allahabad. He worked as a servant in a Tibetan monastery in Bodh Gaya. Unusually for a Communist activist, he was also a Buddhist, or a ‘neo-Buddhist’, as the followers of B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the untouchables (Dalits) and the framer of India’s constitution, were called.

  Ambedkar, a disciple of the American philosopher John Dewey, had grown disillusioned with the egalitarian promise of independent India soon after 1947. He had wished to lead the Dalits out of Hinduism and give them a new religious and political identity as they fought against upper-caste prejudice and violence. He chose Buddhism over Islam and Sikhism – the other options he considered – since he saw the Buddha as a radical thinker, the Karl Marx of his time, for rejecting the caste system, positing the equality of man and advocating the end of misery and sorrow. In 1956, a few weeks before his death, Ambedkar ceremonially converted to Buddhism along with more than three hundred thousand other Dalits.

  But the Dalit converts had not revived Buddhism, which had vanished from India centuries before. As a political movement, too, neo-Buddhism seemed to have stalled. And at the monastery, where white men and women in kurta and lungis sat meditating in the front garden, and where a small, stocky Tibetan suddenly appeared and in a low, sibilant voice demanded to know what I wanted, I began to wonder about the kind of status the Indian neo-Buddhists had among the richer Buddhists of other countries.

  Dharmendra was not among the boys in the backyard, squatting over the dusty ground, raking it with a short broom. It turned out that he had gone for the day. On the way to my guest house, I passed a chai shack. The stall with its grimy kerosene stove and blackened and dented kettles stood next to a stagnant open gutter. The stench was overpowering and had kept away, it seemed, most customers, except one Buddhist monk.

  He sat on a tiny bench, drinking sticky-sweet tea from a glass tumbler. He was either from Europe or North America: tall, in his late thirties or early forties. His head looked freshly shaven and gleamed in the afternoon sun. He was watching two boys in rags fish what looked like a newspaper boat out of the slimy water of the gutter. He appeared amused by them.

  He was a common enough sight in Bodh Gaya, which received Europeans, Americans, Tibetans and South-east Asians in large numbers. They c
ame more often as seekers than as monks, sometimes as curious tourists. They usually stayed half hidden in the monasteries and guest houses around Bodh Gaya, meditating in the gardens or listening to discourses by Buddhist teachers. But when out in full strength at the temple they seemed to easily outnumber the natives.

  The monk looked new to Bodh Gaya and to India, easily distracted by unfamiliar things, still to learn the self-absorption of experienced travellers. There was nothing more remarkable about his appearance or manner. But abruptly, on that alley with its reminders of the wretchedness of Bihar that no revolution could ameliorate, walking back to the gloom of my mosquito-infested room, I found myself full of resentment.

  It occurred to me – words bubbling up to match thought – that the monk was play-acting, like the people meditating in Indian clothes at the Tibetan monastery, that the privileges of wealth and travel had allowed him to become a Buddhist monk just as they would allow him to return to what he had been before.

  I don’t remember thinking more about him. But some of the resentment he abruptly incited must have clung to me when I travelled to Benares and learned that Helen had become a Buddhist nun.

  I had first met Helen while I was in Benares for a few months in the late 1980s, just after finishing my undergraduate degree in Allahabad. My admission to a university in Delhi had been delayed for a year, and instead of going home to my parents, I had decided to spend the year in Benares. Helen was a student of literature, from San Francisco, spending a year in Benares as an exchange student at the Hindu University. She lived in the alley next to mine in the southernmost part of the old city, where, among the cows and small shrines to Hanuman, she was an intriguingly exuberant presence in a salwar kurta, her long blonde hair tied in an Indian-style pony-tail, one hand holding a poetry paperback, as she walked with quick purposeful strides, smiling and nodding at the boys playing cricket on the cobblestone path.

  One evening, the son of my landlord introduced us as I walked with him back to the house. I knew few people in Benares. Much of my day was spent at the library at the university, randomly reading books and magazines that I thought might help me become a writer. In the evenings, when I came back from the university, I walked to the ghats and sat on the stone steps there watching the light fade over the placid river. I returned home through half-lit alleys to a dinner served by my landlady in her smoky kitchen. I rarely spoke to anyone, and when I first met Helen, standing in a dark alley, I struggled at first to make polite conversation.

  There was her obvious foreignness: the open white face, frank stare and quick smile. I didn’t know at first how to deal with her curiosity about my life of reading; wasn’t it unusual, she wondered, that I wasn’t pursuing a professional career, like most Indian men? I didn’t want to tell her about my literary ambitions, which I cherished privately, reluctant to expose them to the cold light of reality. So I gave her an involved explanation. She listened attentively. And then her face was sparkling again. She had a suggestion. She had many books in her room, which I could borrow any time I felt too tired to walk to the university library. In fact, she said, I could come tomorrow.

  Shyly, I went up to her room the next evening. It was small, like mine, but colourful with printed bedcovers, pillows, small rugs, Tibetan wall hanging, and cluttered with many things – an electric kettle, a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of olive oil – that appeared new and exotic to me. She invited me to sit on the floor on a cushion and made me peppermint tea – another attractive novelty – with a teabag. We spoke of literature. It quickly became apparent that she and I had few books in common. She hadn’t read much European fiction. She said she loved the American Beat poets: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I had heard only of Ginsberg, and hadn’t read anything by him. It came as news to me that he was also a Buddhist, and had spent many months in Benares, and had travelled to the sites connected with the Buddha’s life.

  She told me of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and the row of bookstores in Berkeley. I then looked at her books. There was little there along the row of American small-town fiction and Beat poetry that I wanted to read. But the books were new and beautifully printed, compared to the dust-laden, termite-ravaged volumes I handled every day at the library, and I was very pleased to be able to borrow, and overwhelmed when she insisted on giving me, one of the volumes of Ginsberg’s poetry.

  I came away that evening elated. I had never been so close to a woman outside my family, or talked to one with as little awkwardness as I felt with Helen. I wasn’t unaware of her attractiveness. But there seemed something so particularly zestful and sympathetic about her, so without guile, that fantasy couldn’t but come tainted with guilt.

  Still, I was slightly disappointed to know that she had a boyfriend, back in what Helen called the Bay Area, marking it off, as it were, from the rest of America. He came visiting one day, a pleasant-faced, wiry young man, radiating the same effusive friendliness as Helen, and as eager to savour the alienness of Benares. I went walking with them on the ghats, where he challenged the kite-flying boys to a match and accepted a drag of cannabis from an ash-smeared Naga sadhu.

  He spoke of Ronald Reagan, his conservative administration, of the hard decade it had been for many people in America, and I was struck by how people could define themselves and whole periods through reference to such remote things as presidents and administrations. It came out that he and Helen had gone coffee picking in Nicaragua in order to express their solidarity with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who were then fighting guerrillas trained and armed by the Reagan administration; they had also worked for Mother Teresa’s home in Haiti. All this they had done while still in their early twenties.

  I told them about the violent student politics I had experienced at my university in Allahabad. They seemed shocked; they hadn’t associated places of learning with homemade guns and bombs and daylight murders. I told them about my marginal involvement with a revolutionary student outfit. I gave them many more details than they probably needed. I may have been trying to impress. I had so little to speak of, so little to claim for myself. I couldn’t stop being awed by what seemed to be their confident sense of who they were and what they could do. The privilege of having settled opinions and a steady view of the world: this was what people like Vinod and myself, all of us who had yet to know even ourselves, longed for in different ways.

  I wrote to Helen after I left Benares, and she wrote back. She went back to California the next year. Her letters now came to me from San Francisco, bearing on their stamps the stern faces of Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln. She wrote of going to protests, meetings, lectures; the Bay Area grew in my mind as the intellectual and spiritual capital of America. My life of reading and writing appeared complacent and futile in comparison; I tried to present myself as being aware, if not active, politically. The correspondence continued for some time. A few letters even came to Mashobra; then, they ceased. I heard nothing from her for some years, and when I thought of Helen I had the disquieting sense of her lost somewhere in the seemingly endless expanse of America.

  Now, six years later, I had returned to Benares to write about it for my travel book. On my first morning, I went to a bookshop near the river in the old city. The amiable young man there seemed to know much of the expatriate population of Benares. I overheard him talking to a white-haired American woman in a sari who was complaining to him about sexual harassment in Sarnath, which had apparently grown worse in recent years. When the American woman had gone, he came over to me and began to mock her. Then, suddenly, he said, ‘Do you know? Helen is here.’

  It was one of those beautifully clear winter mornings I had come to love during my months in Benares, kites hanging high in the blue sky, and the river full of sparkle. The name ‘Helen’ rekindled the nostalgia I’d felt earlier as I walked through an alley where a radio in a paan shop played an old film song, and I remembered my months in the city, which, though shadowed by anxiety about my future, appeared, in
retrospect, and especially when touched by the memory of her perennial confidence and optimism, a time when everything had gone well.

  I thought how nice it would be to see her. I asked the young man if he knew where she was staying. He didn’t know, but said he could easily find out. Looking at, but not seeing, the row of books before me, I began to imagine the conversation I would have with her. There seemed so much to tell. I was full of what I had seen in Bihar, but had not found anyone to talk to about it.

  I was standing there, daydreaming slightly, when the young man added, ‘You know, she is a Buddhist nun now, hard to recognize. She shaved off her hair.’

  I was jolted out of my daydreams. Strange, unsettling images arose in my mind. I had known a few foreigners in Benares who claimed to be Buddhists; it did not seem to require more than an acceptance of the Buddha’s teachings, regular meditation and a few wall hangings with mandalas. I hadn’t known any nuns, except the stern Catholic ones who ran the small-town schools I had attended. Helen suddenly appeared remote, more distant than when I used to think of her as lost somewhere in America.

  I had read enough about Buddhism by then to realize that it was not easily practised in the modern world where almost everything was predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire, exactly the thing that the Buddha had warned against. What the Buddha identified as the source of suffering – greed, hatred and delusion – and wished to extirpate, was also the source of life, and its pleasures, however temporary.