An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  ‘Original’, ‘inventive’ and ‘individual’ were the words often used for them – the terms of praise also used for discoveries in the sciences, which seemed the more prestigious realm of human endeavour. It was as if a society prodigiously organized for expansion and consumption could absorb everything, even the few individuals who had once stood opposed to it.

  Seen from the vantage point of a glamorous present, the past with its potentially endless store of events was simplified easily into a series of stages on the long road of progress. Indeed, to be an intellectual was partly to abstract, like the scientist, a few ‘facts’ from a larger whole, and to set them in a sequence of sorts. As for questions of ethics, which had preoccupied human beings for over two millennia, history had already provided most of the right answers.

  In the radio studios of the BBC, the think-tank experts, pundits, academics and journalists would earnestly discuss how much or little Islam, India, the Middle East, or, simply, the East had travelled through the phases – Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrialization, Nationalism, Democracy, Corporate Capitalism – that led to the summit of affluence occupied by a handful of western nations.

  Black cabs waited outside when I emerged from this warren of analysis. As I went home, past the shoppers who moved as if in a trance on Oxford Street, the voices of the experts in the studio – the voices I had once listened to in India and admired for their rich timbre and modulation, their suggestions of knowledge, even wisdom – would go round my head, and sometimes I would think about their ancestors, who had conquered the world and sought to remake it in the name of civilization, progress, history, socialism, the free market, secularism, development and science. What had brought them out of their own world? Half surprised at my ability to formulate the question in this way, I would wonder what new meaning they had brought to the idea of being human in seeking to remould a diverse humanity in their own image. Compared to the ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians, what kind of spiritual image of man had they evolved in the course of their recent history – the history of conquest and violence in which they saw their own greatness, and which they presented to others as a guide to happiness.

  I felt more at ease in America, free of a prettified past, better able to withdraw into myself and in New England, Virginia, California, to indulge my love of solitude and landscape. I knew this feeling for America as a ridiculous pang in my heart as the plane banked for the final approach at JFK airport and the towers of the city at the edge of the vast entranced continent rose serenely into view.

  It was easy to denounce that American vision of endless space and well-being and leisure as a deception; to accuse it of obscuring the inner cities and drugs and violence, and the ruthless suppression of remote and near enemies. But to people from tormented societies, America was the country whose nation-building traumas seemed to lie in the remote past, and where many individuals could afford to look beyond the struggles for food, shelter and security that still weighed upon people elsewhere.

  It was in America that I began to think again about the Buddha and Buddhism, almost a decade after my visits to the Buddhist Himalayas had first awakened my curiosity. Just as European travellers had once alerted me to the India the Buddha had belonged to, so American Buddhists made me see the new role the Buddha had acquired in the modern world.

  In late 2000, I spent a few days at a Zen meditation retreat centre near San Francisco. I was then in the midst of a long stay in England and America, working as usual, but increasingly feeling the strain of the ambition that had driven and defined much of my adult life. I had fallen into a habit of thinking about the carefree days of reading and daydreaming I had spent in Benares and Mashobra.

  In San Francisco, this nostalgia made me seek out Helen, my neighbour and friend from Benares. The last time I had seen her in Sarnath, I’d tried to duck behind a tree. Then, I had seen her as one of the many western travellers in India, people indulging their privilege – the unique licence offered to them by the power and wealth of their countries – to be whatever they wished to be: Buddhists, Hindus, Missionaries, Communists. Later, I had remembered Helen’s various kindnesses to me, and I now felt ashamed at my cowardice and self-righteousness.

  By then, I had come to know better the impulse that came over people when they decided to leave their highly organized societies – the impulse that was no less deeply felt even when it was indulged, as often happened, in apparently absurd ways. The constant striving for achievement, for the fulfilments that were small and brief and in retrospect appeared empty, the effort needed to simply maintain a way of life that affirmed one’s identity, the hardening of social roles – all of this I had begun to see in my own life and understand more clearly.

  I had begun to understand, too, the peculiar forms the spiritual life could take in America: how the excesses and disappointments of a materialist society – broken families, drugs, an unresponsive legal system, an unjust economy and cynicism about politics – could lead many people to apocalyptic forms of religion, mostly fundamentalist Christianity; and how the spiritual impulse had to negotiate many traps before it reached any place close to fulfilment.

  It was still awkward to see Helen in San Francisco, dressed in maroon robes in the middle of the busy shopping district, amid a flamboyantly diverse Californian crowd. At the Starbucks café we went to I was much more conscious than she of the occasional curious glance in our direction. She was surprised to see me order chai; she didn’t know that American coffee bars offered a good approximation of the milky sticky-sweet tea sold on the ghats of Benares. We talked about Benares, and I remembered the raw, unmade person who had looked upon the peanut butter and olive oil in her room as emblems of a distant exotic world. In an ironic reversal of roles, I was now more at home in this world than she was. Writing had brought me to the secure, stolid, middle-classness – the world of work, leisure, consumption – which was her inheritance, and which she had sought to move away from.

  She took me to her parents’ home in Sausalito, a long luxurious house overlooking a bay crammed with yachts. There were candles and incense sticks on the dining table; the food was vegetarian, and the ciabatta bread, Helen told me, had come from a famous Buddhist-run bakery. Before eating, we held hands across the table while Helen uttered a short prayer in Tibetan. Her father, a lawyer, probably hoping to get over his unease, questioned me at length about the legal system in India. Her mother said that she was getting into meditation; a friend of hers had found it a good substitute for psychotherapy. She thought of herself as a Buddhist. Helen, barely picking at her food, smiled and winked at me across the table, and later told me how accepting her parents had been one of the radical changes in her life.

  I didn’t see her again after that evening. She was busy for the rest of that week. Being a Buddhist nun for her hadn’t meant, as I had once presumed, renunciation of and seclusion from the world. If anything, it appeared to have involved her even more deeply with it. She worked with a group that ran a hospice for AIDS patients, and another group that cared for homeless people. She also worked with a forum that promoted peace and justice on a Buddhist model.

  Buddhism, she said, had helped her see that striving for political and social change could not be separated from a striving for inner transformation. There was little point in trying to restructure societies if individual minds were still cluttered with greed, anger and delusion. She gave me brochures and books about the ecological and political groups she was working with. I read them, surprised by the large claims they so briskly made.

  One of them spoke of the natural fit between Buddhism and ecological ideals and quoted the Beat poet Gary Snyder describing as ‘cancer’ the world view in which ‘men are seen as working out their ultimate destinies (paradise? perdition?) with planet earth as the stage for the drama – trees and animals mere props, nature a vast supply depot’. It also quoted E. F. Schumacher praising the Buddha for having shown a ‘Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditio
nalist immobility’.

  Another brochure asserted that destruction caused by man pursuing his self-interest with the help of modern technology had become more visible around the world in the shrinking of forest cover, the falling of acid rain, the creation of the ozone layer and the contamination of food.

  It went on to claim that biological and ecological discoveries of the relationships between living beings had proved that nothing could exist in itself and by itself. It spoke of interdependence revealed by the working of multinational corporations: how western consumers making small choices as to coffee, jeans, shoes affect the invisible labourer in Honduras and Bangladesh; how everyone is implicated in the global system of labour and trade, especially the hugely lucrative western arms trade kept going by innumerable small wars or military stand-offs in Asia and Africa. It ended with an appeal to pay more attention to the seemingly simple Buddhist idea that greed, hatred and delusion were the source of unhappiness, discontent and violence.

  In the small bookshop at Simla, where many years before I had begun reading about the Buddha, there had been many such publications. There were books with titles beginning with The Zen of… or Buddhism and… and usually ending with Psychoanalysis and Science and Ecology. The foreign visitors to the bookshop tended to be more interested in them. They had little or nothing to say about the Buddha’s life. And the ones about Buddhism and the environment sounded too much like Mr Sharma.

  Although I was intrigued by magazine articles on Buddhism by writers and artists whose work I followed or knew of – the composer Philip Glass, the writer Charles Johnson, the academic critic bell hooks, the painter Francisco Clemente – who were also Buddhists or had affinities with Buddhism, I did not learn much about the new forms of Buddhism that had emerged during my own lifetime in the West.

  I discovered much later that Buddhism, though among the oldest of religions and the latest to become a world religion, had in the twentieth century spread more rapidly than either Christianity, which, beginning in a remote province of the Roman Empire, had waited for over a millennium and a half before becoming, with the help of European imperialists and colonists, a global religion, or Islam, which was spread by traders and conquerors, and had taken an equally long time in expanding across the world.

  In all my time in England and America, I had never gone to a meditation retreat. I had always found odd the idea that one needed to take time off and go somewhere in order to meditate, or that one needed to receive expert instruction in how to sit still with an empty mind. It seemed to be a peculiarly western way of dividing time – like the idea of confining leisure to the weekends.

  But suddenly one day the longing for rest, silence and solitude came over me; and when I arrived at the retreat near San Francisco one foggy morning it seemed that the same longing had brought most of the others there, too.

  *

  There were rules everywhere in the retreat; and the severe-looking monks in black robes seemed to be in charge of enforcing them. You had to enter the meditation hall with your left foot forward. Then, while walking to your place in the hall, you had to stop and bow before the monk-instructor. After meditation you had to bow to the floor nine times. You were then asked to recite the prayer printed on a piece of paper that had been handed out. It began with these words:

  Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajna paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering…

  The prayer ended:

  Therefore, know the prajna paramita as the great miraculous mantra, the great bright mantra, the supreme mantra, the incomparable mantra, which removes all suffering and is true, not false. Therefore we proclaim the prajna paramita mantra, the mantra that says: ‘Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha.’

  The ritual with its incomprehensible words reminded me of my childhood, of the ceremonies attending birth, marriage and death. I did not understand a word of the Sanskrit mantras the presiding pandit recited. Nor, it appeared, did anyone else. But everyone looked solemn, and satisfied with mere incantation.

  These rituals demanded a collective surrender to old mysteries. I couldn’t but feel their irrelevance to the world I was growing up in. I had lived much of my adult life without them, and so, at the Zen retreat in California, I found it hard to stop after entering the meditation hall with my left foot forward and bow to an empty seat. I gave only a perfunctory nod in the direction of the monk-instructor before walking on and taking a seat towards the back of the vast hall. I moved my lips wordlessly during the prayer. The American monk who walked through the rows of meditating men and women, checking and commenting on their postures, stopped where I sat, and seemed to appraise me sceptically.

  The place had, in addition to white Americans, people of Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Chinese and Japanese ancestry. They were from around the Bay Area, upper-middle class people in their late thirties or forties, with large cars, even sports utility vehicles, in the parking lot. Most of them did not appear to have visited a retreat before. They had trouble adopting the classic meditation posture and had to use cushions to support their knees and backs. But they were eager to learn, quick to fall into line, and to approve and admire. They laughed heartily at the small witticisms of the monk who formally welcomed us, and between long stints of meditation they filled the dining room with a polyglot cheerfulness.

  I couldn’t help wondering about their presence at a Zen meditation retreat. The people with East Asian ancestry would have known the particular Buddhisms of their original homelands. There had been Buddhist temples in California since the late nineteenth century when Japanese immigrants began to arrive in America. The later arrivals from Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia had brought their faiths with them. These national Buddhisms had their own temples and rituals, where people came together periodically and affirmed their sense of community in the way their ancestors once had in the towns and villages of South-east Asia.

  But the well-to-do participants at the meditation retreat seemed to be looking for something more than the security of shared ethnicity the temples and rituals offered. It was as if the religion of their ancestors could not fulfil the special needs they had developed while living in America – the needs that only an Americanized form of Buddhism could appease.

  It was on this visit to California that I first began to learn about the many kinds of Buddhisms available in America. They had different names – Zen, Vipassana, Tibetan, Engaged – each of them had its own sects and sub-sects, with different leaders claiming separate spiritual lineages. The Asian Americans followed a more ritual-based Buddhism than the white Americans, who considered meditation the central practice of Buddhism. And the range of Buddhisms on display was matched by the ingenuity with which they reached out to their potential audience.

  The Zen Buddhists who ran the retreat centre also owned a famous vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco and another retreat in the mountains close to the Pacific Ocean. Even the large chain bookstores in San Francisco were full of books on Buddhism and Eastern religion and the magazines called Dharma Life and Shambhala, whose ads for ‘Buddhist vacations’ and ‘Buddhist investment advice’ I had once looked through curiously while in India. There were many Buddhist bookshops as well as stores specializing in Buddhist ‘accessories’ (expensive cushions, mats, incense, music CDs), where the muzak featured Tibetan gongs and chants, and on whose crowded notice boards new meditation and Yoga retreats vied with new Zen bakeries.

  It was as if California, specifically the Bay Area, had most of what Nietzsche once defined as the ‘precondition’ of Buddhism:

  a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness, absence of desire, and this goal is achieved.1

  I also learnt on this trip about the scandals which had made many people suspect that the American forms of Buddhism, though followed by up to four milli
on people, were less than perfect. The American Buddhist who had set up the meditation retreat centre and the bakery in San Francisco had driven around in expensive cars, and had conducted an affair with a married woman. The American head of a Tibetan Buddhist sect had lived a promiscuous life while infected with AIDS.

  Faced with public criticism and scorn, Buddhist sects and groups had had to democratize and invest leadership in collectives rather than individuals. They had to accommodate women in the small monastic movement, and accept gay, lesbian and bisexual people as Buddhists. Since the renunciations required of monks were deemed too rigorous, Buddhism teachers in America had to reorientate themselves to lay people, and to reconcile themselves to the absence of monastic communities such as those that traditionally existed in Asia. It was as if Buddhism in America had to adjust itself to a set of cultural assumptions fundamentally inimical to it.

  The incongruities certainly seemed deeper than those that had shadowed Buddhism elsewhere. As Alexis de Tocqueville had noticed in the early 1830s, individual self-interest was the very basis of the brand-new commercial and industrial society that Europeans had created in the seemingly unlimited spaces of the New World. The related ideas of the autonomous individual, of man as the maker of history, the carrier of progress and civilization, had first taken strong root in America. The American Revolution had preceded the French in upholding the rights and liberties of individuals, and in positing the ideal of a common humanity, held together by such inalienable rights as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. America, Tocqueville thought, was the first place where the ‘moral and intellectual activity of man’ had been diverted to the ‘production of comfort and the promotion of general well-being’. Tocqueville, who was in America primarily to learn the lessons of the French Revolution, which had degenerated into violence and terror, followed by a highly centralized, semi-dictatorial government, predicted, accurately, that Europeans would in time embrace the change in human self-perceptions brought about by their all-conquering kinsmen in America.