Sophiya didn’t talk much about her father and grandfather. She once described the wars they had fought in as ‘white man’s wars’. I was impressed by what seemed then both a considered view of the world and her ability to express it in casual conversation.
In Simla, the place where her grandfather had made a living by lifting heavy sacks of coal on his back, she had seemed consumed by her curiosity. But in London that morning, although as primly pretty as before, she was barely distinguishable from the crowd in her short skirt, sheer stockings and neatly cut hair. The lone item of Indian clothing she had on was a shawl, not spread around her shoulders Indian fashion, but wrapped around her neck – a sign of her personal style. In her own world – the streets and crowds of London, the vegetarian restaurant near London University where we presently went to have lunch – she appeared diminished.
And it was of this diminishment that she spoke to me, her voice low with complaint, when she told me that afternoon – assuming a personal intimacy we had never had before – of her frustrations at her as yet temporary job, the competitive spitefulness of her colleagues, the excessive formality and sterility of social life among academics – all this in the cramped restaurant, the pavement outside bright with the banter of students bathing in unaccustomed autumn sun.
We travelled together to the suburb of Southall. One of my briefs in England was to write about a gathering of Indian soldiers who had served in the Second World War. The soldiers had spent close to half a century in Britain; they felt that the British government had treated them shabbily during the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the end of the war, and had not even considered them for honours they had bestowed on former soldiers from Australia, Canada and other British Commonwealth countries.
Sophiya was restless in the room full of men with thick white moustaches and sticks and shiny medals, who sat on white plastic chairs, staring into space, animated only when lunch was served, when they queued up obediently before the table heaped with Indian food. Her own father wasn’t there. He had done well out of Britain, she said bitterly, with a house in London and another house in the country, and his children in good jobs. He didn’t much care about how other immigrants lived.
She carried her discontent back to the pub in central London where we had a drink. She was, she said, fed up with the Indians in London: they were self-seeking, aggressively ambitious, unscrupulous people. It turned out that her boyfriend was one of these Indians: a journalist who had used his ethnic identity strategically in the mostly white professional world that strove self-consciously for diversity and multiculturalism. He had risen fast at his moderately left-wing newspaper, from the sub-editor’s desk to the newsroom. In the process, he had become conservative in his politics and insincere in his private life. He had bought a Saab convertible and started an affair with the female boss in his office.
I listened to her, slightly embarrassed and awkward, not always understanding the import of particular events, such as the buying of the Saab convertible, but also deeply fascinated. It was like being given another view of the hectic office workers of that morning, of the peculiar motives and tensions that swarmed at their workplaces and appeared to form the material of the arch young columnists and the writers of risqué novels about office life whose excepts I had seen in the newspapers – things which that morning had added to my nervousness and made me think that I had arrived in the middle of a long and complicated film.
It was a little later that evening – the pub full and often erupting into raucous laughter – when she told me she had a new lover, a French journalist she had met at a party in Islington. The story came out briskly. I couldn’t make myself heard in the noise of the pub and was content to listen and nod. I must have seemed curious. She was slightly drunk.
As she described it, he had pursued her relentlessly, and she had finally given in, ‘fed up’, she said, with her loneliness. It had worked out for a while. She saw the French lover several times every week. They went out to a film or play, or simply came straight to his flat in Islington and made love; the vacant evenings ceased to be a threat.
But she was now fed up with him. The Frenchman was no reader, had no interest in art. He was also stingy. Sophiya said, ‘He never brings me flowers, never brings me presents, there is never any food in his kitchen.’
On the train back to East Sheen that evening, standing among the weary pale faces of people in dark suits, sinking deeper into my solitude and strangeness, I had a sudden vision of Sophiya: of her rummaging through the fridge and empty cupboards in a dark kitchen, loud TV voices echoing out of the bedroom, the light dead outside on rows and rows of identical houses of the kind I saw from the train.
From England I went to France and then to America. I passed through famous airports – Heathrow, De Gaulle, JFK, LAX – always gazing in wonder at the Mexicans, Russians, Indians, Nigerians, Iranians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Koreans who swarmed in those vast, shiny bazaars. It seemed that while I was growing up in India, many people like myself had longed for the richness of the world. Whether businesspeople, students, tourists or immigrants, they wanted to be accommodated beyond the life they had so far known, where they could shed the narrow racial or national identity they had been born into and devote themselves to the making of money, the pursuit of learning and the search for love and freedom.
I was relieved when, returning to Mashobra later that year, Mr Sharma did not ask me any questions about my travels: what I had seen, whom I had met. I never brought up the subject myself. I didn’t want to encourage him. I was far from being able to articulate my experience even to myself.
I was surprised by this failure. I had had some experience of travel before I left the country. I had admittedly travelled late to London, after many of my opinions had already been fixed. I thought myself different from the Indians who had left India early in their lives. These were usually the sons and daughters of upper-class Indians, who after three or four years as students in England or America returned to inherit their privileges, with little more than a brittle sense of superiority and a sour-sweet memory of interrupted romances and friendships to mark their time in the West. I was not a tourist, looking for cathedrals, museums and monuments. I wanted to see myself as separate from the shamefully large number of Indian tourists shopping for bargains in electronics and kitchen gadgets. Nor was I an immigrant, predisposed to embrace, whatever its quality, his new life.
My motives were much more romantic. Walking across the island in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, where Proust had set his own and his characters’ longings for fame and love, visiting the New England town of Concord where Emerson had preached self-reliance, or nearby Walden Pond, where Thoreau had translated Buddhist texts and read the Vedas, I was hoping to bathe in the aura of men whom I had revered since the time when, in places scarcely unimaginable to them, I had first read their works and began to build a usable self and life.
Just outside the well-preserved haunts of famous writers and sages, there were shops selling souvenirs: wine bottles and parasols imprinted with the dark-eyed melancholy of Proust, coffee cups showing Emerson’s gravely bearded profile. I let myself go at these shops, which with their imaginative merchandise seemed to me like the stalls that lined the path to famous temples in India, selling flowers, incense, sandalwood paste and other items of ritual worship.
It took me time to realize that my love of western writers and philosophers had been a form of idolatry, and that it had not prepared me to see them as people shaped by, and responding to, specific events – the break-up of the old moral and religious order, the economic and political revolutions, the making and unmaking of empires, and the rise of the bourgeois individual with his particular desires and pleasures. I still assumed then that people could be considered apart from the forces that had conditioned them.
On that first visit to the West, I had travelled mostly to a place in my mind. I was more surprised than I could have imagined by the sex-obsessed advertisements, m
agazines and newspapers, which I had already seen in India; by the graffiti-ravaged outskirts of Paris, which I had seen in a film about North African immigrants but never thought real; and by the stark wilderness of the malls and parking lots of suburban America, not far from Concord and Walden Pond, that I had read about in the fictions of John Updike. The platitudes of sociology – the mechanization of life, the culture built around the gratification of individual needs – that I had encountered many times before came back to me; they clarified nothing and only led to more platitudes.
This was why I couldn’t have explained to Mr Sharma the everyday sight in London of black-clad commuters with expressionless faces pouring out from the trains in railway and underground stations and striding wordlessly towards their offices; or about the boisterous crowds of office-goers spilling out from street-corner pubs, the restless queues outside nightclubs on Friday evenings, the men and women staggering back late at night to the rows upon rows of houses with hard unyielding fronts; about the impulse to divide life into manageable parts, about the city as a collection of solitary individuals brought together briefly by a few shared interests.
It was also why I couldn’t have told him about the dissatisfactions of a single girl in London; or even about something he, who had contentedly spent all his life in a village, might have recognized: the oppressive solitude that one could know in the large city, the lives of private longing and frustration which many of the people in the crowds seemed to lead, on whom the glittering past of the large metropolis that attracted a visitor like myself no longer cast its spell.
Looking for the Self
THE BUDDHA SPENT SEVERAL weeks in Sarnath. He made no attempt to conquer the orthodox centre of Benares, which lay disdainfully aloof a few miles away. Perhaps he was satisfied with what he had: there were the first loyal disciples, the five Brahmins from Kapilavastu, then Yasa had sparked a veritable rush to convert among his contemporaries.
The monsoons came after the long weeks of heat. The continuous rains swelled the rivers, flooded the roads and made travel impossible. There were then hardly any buildings in Sarnath, and the force of rain and gale must have threatened to bring down the leaf or bamboo huts of the monks. But amid what to the Buddha might have seemed minor inconveniences, he continued to develop variations on the themes he had sounded in his first discourse. He spoke of the need for systematic thought that had taken him towards enlightenment; he spoke of the need for bhikshus to rigorously examine themselves for flaws and faults.
The most important sermon he gave during this time developed his sceptical view of what individuals took to be their identity. This is probably the most difficult part of Buddhist doctrine, along with the related notion that all things in the world have a ‘dependent origination’. Even the Buddha’s personal attendant, Ananda, could not understand it, despite having listened to his master explain it several times. I couldn’t cease to feel that no matter what the Buddha said about the insubstantiality of the self, there was an ‘I’ which performed the daily tasks of life, and ate, slept, read and thought in a consistent way over a long period. I couldn’t deny this continuity, or accept that the person who went to sleep was different from the one who woke up the next morning.
Perhaps the problem lay with my early perception of the Buddha as a thinker, somewhat in the mould of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, or like the academic philosophers of today, presenting their own and debating each other’s ideas. I looked for a coherent and systematic metaphysics and epistemology in the words attributed to the Buddha, when his aim had been clearly therapeutic rather than to dismantle or build a philosophical system.
In fact, the Buddha had made clear his distrust of abstract speculation. There were problems, he claimed, that eluded all linguistic and conceptual nets and whose solutions were inexpressible. It is why he famously remained silent when a wandering ascetic called Vacchagotta asked him if he thought there was an atman, or soul.1 Faced with the Buddha’s silence, the seeker asked, ‘Then, there is no atman?’ Again, the Buddha was silent.
After Vacchagotta had left, the Buddha was asked by Ananda why he had remained silent. He explained that if, when asked if there is a self, he had said, ‘There is a self,’ he would have sided with those who held the theory of the eternal soul, and if when asked if there is no self he had said, ‘There is no self,’ he would have sided with those who hold the theory of those who denied the self.
As always, the Buddha sought a middle way between these theories. Before the Buddha, the Upanishads had sought to console men with the promise of an everlasting atman. Residing in each human being, this soul or self was the thinker of thoughts, the feeler of sensations and the performer of actions, good or bad, for which it received the appropriate rewards and punishments after the death of the body it lived in. This self was furthermore an absolute entity; it was the same as the unchanging substance, brahman, that lay behind the changing world, and liberation, or moksha, consisted in realizing the unity of atman and brahman.
But the Buddha seems to have rejected more than the Upanishadic idea of an eternal self or soul. He rejected too the self residing in the mind that Descartes assumed when he declared that he was ‘a thing that thinks’ – a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and imagines and has sensory perceptions.2 According to the Cartesian view, the self is a single unified substance with the capacity to experience, desire, think, imagine, decide and act. It does not change through time, and is ontologically distinct from other selves.
The Buddha seemed to reject this notion of the individual self as a distinct substance with identity. He said that it didn’t correspond to any reality observable within the mind and the body, and, furthermore, its awareness of itself as separate from the world and other selves was false and the source of craving, pride, selfishness and delusion.
The Buddha’s view sounds counter-intuitive, mostly because the linguistic term ‘I’ that we use to describe a whole range of simple or complex experiences – for instance, ‘I am sad’ and ‘I am happy’ – presupposes the existence of an unchanging self that experiences these varying states. In fact, we lay claim to those experiences precisely through that ‘I’ or what we imagine to be a separate autonomous self within us, and they then go on to shore up our selfhood and identity.
The Buddha and Buddhists didn’t forgo the word ‘I’ or individuals; they remain practical words, belonging to the realm of conventional or relative truth. But the Buddha denied them any stable reality. In many of his discourses and dialogues, he came back to the subject of the stable self, or the false views of it that an individual was prone to develop, leading him into habits of craving what he thinks is ‘mine’. Unlike Descartes, he presented the self as a process rather than as a substance, by claiming that what we call a ‘being’ or an ‘individual’ is only a physio-psychological machine in which mental and physical energies constantly combine and change.3
In a sermon at Sarnath, he went on to list and analyse painstakingly the physical and mental events that he said constituted the human individual. He organized these events into five groups or aggregates called skandhas.4 The first of these refers to material form: the body and its aspects – solidity, fluidity, heat and motion – which make possible the five material sense-organs, the faculties of eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. The second group refers to sensations produced through the contact of the five senses and the mind with the external world and their quality. Then, there is the group of perceptions, which involves labelling and judgement of the feelings of pleasure, gloom, or indifference – experiences triggered off by the senses in contact with the physical world. We are constantly classifying these experiences, so that there is instant recognition of physical stimuli, such as a glass of wine, or a sharp blow.
These experiences in turn provoke desires, longings, traits, a whole set of circumstances in which we act. Seeing a glass of wine may lead to an irresistible desire to drink wine, or it may trigger associations th
at lead to different desires and actions. Desires, wishes, indeed anything that brings about action belongs to the fourth group. The last group consists of a basic self-consciousness, a sense of ourselves as sentient beings who think and perceive.
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 denied that the self could exist in any or all of these because they changed constantly, were impermanent and had no independent existence. 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. It was part of his larger claim that everything in the world is ontologically connected and in a state of change.
In the Buddhist view, not even consciousness amounts to a self or soul. For consciousness is primarily a reaction or response to stimuli. Consciousness is, as the Buddha put it, ‘whatever condition through which it arises’: because of the eye and visible forms there is a visual consciousness; because of the ears and sounds there arises an auditory consciousness, and so on. Consciousness, which is always born out of contact with an object, does not exist on its own; it is not innate in objects. As a Zen poem puts it, ‘To her lover a beautiful woman is a delight; to an ascetic, a distraction; to a wolf, a good meal’.
There may be an apparent continuity, but perception and discursive thought arise and fall constantly. Consciousness is a flow of tiny instants that have no separate existence or essence; they are constantly being triggered by each of the tiny changes in the world outside – the process creating the impression of what we call reality. When broken up into its aggregate parts, consciousness reveals itself as profoundly conditioned, ever changing and relative, and far from the substantial entity we believe the individual self to be.
An End to Suffering Page 22