He sought out both perpetrators and victims, asking them to admit their guilt and to renounce revenge. He was usually met with hostility. On the narrow pathways on which he walked, villagers would often spread human excrement. Once a Muslim spat in his face. Gandhi wiped the spit off and kept walking. People spoke of the danger to his life. His feet bled; he suffered from high blood pressure. He was tormented by his failure, and half longed for death – he spoke more than once of being killed. But he still persevered. He started early each morning and walked all day, often singing with his few companions the haunting song Tagore had written:
Walk alone.
If they answer not thy call, walk alone;
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou of evil luck,
Open thy mind and speak out alone.
Committed to Becoming
The world, whose nature is to become other, is committed to becoming, has exposed itself to becoming; it relishes only becoming, yet what it relishes brings fear, and what it fears is pain.
Years ago, returning from the first of my trips to the Buddhist Himayalas, I had thought of writing a historical novel about the Buddha, something that I thought would help me learn about India’s past and also help me acquire some much-needed ancient wisdom. I accumulated books and notes, and travelled to Buddhist sites.
But other things held me more strongly as I emerged from my secluded life in Mashobra, and the Buddha began increasingly to appear an unpromising subject; there seemed something fixed and sterile about it, like the specimens in the museums to which Europe had confined its past.
Then, one warm afternoon in London in the spring of 2001, while I lay in a park, feeling lost and homesick, the idea returned.
I had just got back then from Afghanistan and Pakistan. I had gone there partly to look for traces of Buddhism and also to learn more about the political situation in Afghanistan. It was not a good time to be doing so. Some months previously the Taliban had defaced the tall statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan valley and destroyed the Indo-Greek statues of the Buddha remaining in the museum of Kabul. In the streets of Peshawar, where gaunt Afghan refugees sold drugs and guns, and mosque preachers railed against various infidels, there was no memory of Asanga and Vasubhandhu, the fourth-century Buddhist philosophers who had lived in this ancient town; and only fleetingly, amid the lonely ruins of Takht-e-Bhai and Taxila, was I able to imagine the Greek colonies, the Buddhist monks, the universities, the travellers from China and Central Asia – the whole cosmopolitan life of Buddhism that had so irrevocably vanished from even its greatest centre in the Indian subcontinent.
In the same place, a new kind of multinational religion and politics had grown in recent years. In squalid madrasas, where the Taliban had been given the most rudimentary education in the Koran, and where another generation of young men prepared themselves for jihad, men spoke calmly of how the oppressed Muslims of the world had come together in Afghanistan to destroy one superpower – the Soviet Union – and would, with the grace of god, also take care of America and Israel if they did not relent in their persecution of Muslims.
I went to an international conference of radical Islamists near the border with Afghanistan, where 200,000 men – many of them from North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia – listened to speeches on similar themes. The atmosphere there was of a medieval desert fair: thousands of men walking urgently around the sprawling township of tents under a vast cloud of dust, past the pushcarts with fresh sugarcane juice and piles of chewed-up canes, past the stalls selling beautifully illustrated copies of the Koran in Urdu and Arabic, along with posters of Osama Bin Laden, who was clearly the star of the event.
Many of the older men attending were Pakistani peasants who I later discovered had been paid, in the Indian subcontinental way, to swell the gathering. But the larger part of the crowd was made up of young men in their late teens and early twenties. These were students from the madrasas in the region south of Peshawar that borders Afghanistan. They had travelled to the conference in a variety of vehicles, crammed in cars, buses, pick-up trucks, three-wheeler tempos and even horse-drawn carts, flying the black-and-white striped flag of the organizers, a fleeting touch of colour and excitement among the mud villages in the flat drab landscape around the Grand Trunk Road. In the speeches, they were referred to, more than once, as the reserve army of the Taliban, ready to martyr themselves in the noble task of jihad.
On the first day a ferocious dust storm blew down some of the tents. The long white shirts of the men flapped and rippled in the wind as they ran out from under the dangerously swaying tents; the new Afghan rugs lost their bright colour and blended into the dust-white ground. But the speeches remained fierce: speaker after speaker recounted a long history of humiliation and atrocity, the Crusades, Granada, Iran, Palestine, Kashmir, and urged Muslims to join the worldwide jihad against the United States and its allies.
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It took me some time to sort out my own responses to all this. I knew about the corruptions of jihad; of the leaders grown fat on generous donations from foreign and local patrons, sending young men to poorly paid shahadat (martyrdom) in Kashmir and Afghanistan. But I hadn’t expected to be moved by the casual sight in one madrasa of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets on the floor. I hadn’t thought I would be saddened to think of the human waste they represented – the young men, whose ancestors had once built one of the greatest civilizations of the world, and who now lived in dysfunctional societies under governments beholden to, or in fear of, America, and who had little to look forward to, except possibly the short career of a suicide bomber.
The other kind of future once laid out for them had failed. This was the future in which everyone in the world would wear a tie, work in an office or factory, practise birth control, raise a nuclear family, drive a car and pay taxes. There were not nearly enough secular schools to educate these young men in the ways of the modern world – and few jobs awaited those who had been educated.
The forward march of history was to include only a few of them. For the rest, there would be only the elaborate illusion of progress, maintained by a thousand ‘aid’ programmes, IMF and World Bank loans, by the talk of underdevelopment, economic liberalization and democracy. But the fantasy of modernity, held up by their state, and supported by the international political and economic system, had been powerful enough to expel and uproot them from their native villages.
This had also been the fate of my father and countless others like him. But the journey from the old to the new world had become harder over the years for most people. Now this journey seemed never-ending, and it seemed to consume more and more people as it lengthened: hundreds of millions of stupefied and powerless individuals, lured by the promise of equality and justice into a world which they had no means of understanding, whose already over-strained and partially available resources they were expected to exploit in order to hoist themselves to the level of affluence enjoyed by a small minority of middle-class people around the world.
To the more frustrated among them modernity already appeared as a tall mountain where a few people occupied the summit, watching others inch up the steep slopes, occasionally throwing down a tattered rope but, more often, giant boulders. They knew that there remained no unknown lands and peoples for them to conquer, control and exploit. They could only cut down their own forests, pollute their own rivers and lakes, and seek to control and thereby oppress their own people, their women and minorities.
Having lost the protection of their old moral order, their particular bonds and forms of authority, they hoped to stave off chaos and degeneration by joining such authoritarian movements as Hindu nationalism and radical Islam, by surrendering their dreams to demagogues like Bin Laden.
It was obvious at the fundamentalist gathering that neither the angry speakers nor their fervent audience knew, or could know, much about America. Out of fear and confusion, they had built an arbitrary notion, to whi
ch they ascribed their own suffering, and all the evils in the world.
And, armed with the idea of the enemy, they had begun to dream the old western dream of revolution: the swift and complete transformation of society in all its aspects, economic, legal, political, religious and cultural, the making from scratch of a pure state and society which alone could guarantee human happiness and virtue, the utopia that could only come about after its corrupt adversary had been laid low. The dream of revolution came with an additional religious romanticism: of an Islam which had supposedly offered security and justice in the past, and which now held a blueprint for the ideal future.
Uprooted men from societies that were once small and close-knit trying to organize themselves into large collectives; a people falsifying their past and turning a privately and diversely followed faith into political ideology; focusing their rage against such imagined entities as ‘America’ and the ‘West’ and working to rouse people the world over for the sake of revolution – it was hard not to see these men as trying to find their being within history and only floundering in vast empty spaces.
But on that afternoon in London, a few weeks after my return from Pakistan, when I thought again of the Buddha, I had become aware too of the futilities in my own life. For the previous few months I had been living near the East End, writing a series of long articles about the political situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the long days, when the harsh light and crowded streets and parks robbed London of its sombre air, there had come over me a homesickness which did not open out into nostalgia, and which in its heaviness was almost a kind of grief.
I was in my early thirties. I had written a few things. I had travelled a bit. Given my modest beginnings, it was hard not to see all this as a kind of achievement. For much of my life, I had been oppressed by the shame of being poor and ignorant and belonging to a backward-looking community, of not fully possessing a language, and of not having any clearly defined gift or talent.
I had in time overcome these fears, partly by learning the ways of the modern world, picking up its primary language, English, and educating myself through the immense literature available in it. I had become one of the privileged few who had overcome their disadvantages and found a provisional home in the West. In time, all that had initially struck me in England as inscrutable – faces, gestures, clothes, houses, accents – had lost its power to alienate. I spent much of the year in London. I had never ceased to consider my presence there as a small miracle – something I couldn’t have imagined living in Mashobra. I still remembered that first day when I emerged from Heathrow into a bright autumn day and found a calm green land, overlaid in places with broad concrete strips on which cars glided with toy-like precision.
Yet this strange journey had also made a strange man of me. When I looked back, I saw many different selves: the callow student in Allahabad hoping for revolution, and also seeking to buy a baseball cap in Nepal; the young man in the Himalayas, reading the Milindapanha and thinking ambitiously about a book on the Buddha; the self-righteous and fearful journalist turning away from Helen, the weary person learning from her about Buddhism in America. In few of these restless, grasping selves, these nexuses of desires and impulses that had spread themselves around the world, could I find as much as a trace of humility, or compassion.
Far from being unique or individual, as I had once imagined, my desires contained nothing of any vital importance or consequence. And I couldn’t always suppress the quiet panic at the thought that the intellectual and spiritual vagrancy I had come to know was all I had to look forward to, no matter how much I knew or travelled.
I thought then, as I had on many occasions, of returning to Mashobra. During my years there, I had come to know no one in the village well. My memories of it were private, awakened occasionally, in very different landscapes, by long summer evenings, the sound of rain on the roof, a smell of resin. But in my fantasies it had begun to serve as home, the place to return to, where I could reliably find familiar faces and friendliness and generosity, and the illusion, perhaps necessary to uprooted people, of changelessness, of a stable and coherent past.
For years now I had arrived in Mashobra in the evening after a day’s journey from Delhi and stood uncertainly with my bags on the road where I had first seen the broad view of the mountains and the valley and noticed a path running down to a house with a red roof.
And then to walk down to the house and to see Mr Sharma’s mother sitting at the open windows, to watch Mr Sharma slowly come down the stairs with the keys jangling in his hands, to walk through the apple trees wearing their first blossoms, to enter the house and walk into the stale darkness and smells of the previous winter, to open the door onto the balcony and see the hills and the valley with their shifting shadows, the sickly lump of snow wasting away in the shade of pine trees and the cows looking well-fed and healthy, was to return to a feeling of relief and quiet elation.
It was raining this time when I arrived in Mashobra. Clouds and mist drifted around the valley, veiling the high mountains. When they lifted I went walking again and found new houses and hotels in the village. Real estate speculators with alleged Middle East connections had built condominiums, offered them at very high prices and sold them to suspiciously rich army officers. A five-star hotel stood in place of Wildflower Hall. Mr Sharma was building a new house just above mine; he had also installed a telephone in my cottage. Cable had reached Mashobra, with white wires strung tightly across electric poles penetrating even the flimsiest shack in the village.
A young entrepreneur at Daojidhar, who had once shared with me his schemes for transforming Mashobra into a tourist destination, had died abruptly. Tall monsoon grass stood in place of the brightly coloured tents he had put up on his property; excited singing voices no longer drifted in from the east.
Mr Sharma’s big house felt empty. The second-floor window, where Mr Sharma’s mother had sat on sunny afternoons, lay open as before, but the void there now brought a pang each time I walked past it. I noticed grief beginning to work upon Mr Sharma’s face, deepening the melancholy in his eyes, lining his mouth.
He came once, to ask about my book. I told him that I was working hard on it. I didn’t tell him that I had yet to resolve an important question about the Buddha in my mind.
For many years now I had read and thought about the Buddha’s life and teachings. I was far from calling or thinking myself a Buddhist – I hadn’t even attempted the hard and continuous self-scrutiny required of serious Buddhists. But I had got over many of my initial difficulties with the more metaphysical aspects of Buddhist teachings. I had come to understand that the Buddha had offered an internally coherent set of ideas, in which abstruse-sounding theories were never far apart from practice, and I had given up much of my scepticism about them.
It was 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. Nevertheless, the effort to control them seemed to me worth making. I could see how, whether successful or not, it could amount to a complete vocation in itself, as close as was possible to an ethical life in a world powered mostly by greed, hatred and delusion.
But I was still uncertain where the Buddha’s teachings stood in relation to the unmanageably large political and economic conflicts that increasingly decided the fates of most human beings. They may have helped Ashoka and other absolutist rulers. But I couldn’t see how they could be applied to the conduct of modern nations and empires, the clash of ideologies that had shaped much of the contemporary world, and the globalization that reflected an actual state of economic and political interdependence.
What did the Buddha, who had lived in a simpler time, have to offer people fighting political oppression, social and economic injustice, and environmental destruction? It was easier to say what he hadn’t promised. He had never conceived of the radical, la
rge-scale social engineering that almost all modern ideologies on the right or left – socialism, free-market democracy, radical Islam, Hindu nationalism, and liberal imperialism – advocate. His indifference to ambitious political projects was part of his belief in individually achieved, rather than collectively organized, redemption. An early Dalai Lama had said that the meditator faced with an intractable world starts with repairing his own shoes instead of demanding that the whole planet be covered immediately with leather. But how did this assuage the political impotence felt by many people in the world today?
I had been in Mashobra for a month, imprisoned by rain and mist, reading about the Buddha and making notes, when one evening the telephone rang. It was a friend in Calcutta; he told me about the extraordinary scenes from New York unfolding on his TV screen.
I knew that Mr Sharma rarely switched on his television set. Nevertheless, I walked through the orchard as the light begun to fade and knocked on his door. Opening the window on the first floor, he was surprised to see me. I tried to convey to him the strange urgency of the moment; I told him that suspected terrorists had crashed planes into two of the tallest buildings in the world. He did not seem to understand. Then he said that it was his prayer time.
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