I listened to the radio; talked on the phone to friends in New York. Terrible images arose in my mind, images that seemed to have accumulated over the last twenty years, during the several militant uprisings in India, scenes from the aftermath of the tens of thousands of murders and hundreds of suicide attacks on individuals and institutions. They obscured what I struggled to articulate to myself: that the brutality of the world I had grown up in had come to America.
It was some days later that I watched the images of the burning and collapsing towers on a small, grainy black and white screen in the tin shack of the hunchbacked peasant who worked in the orchard below my cottage.
By then, the machinery of war had begun to grind. Leaders with emotional speeches and meticulous dossiers – the scientific evidence of evil – were preparing their frightened masses for fresh subjection to the state. The realpolitik experts, academics, and journalists were out in strength on CNN, advocating the end of states and the change of regimes, trying hard with their big words – Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, fascism, totalitarianism, democracy, freedom, humanity – to seize a sense of reality, to somehow arrest and crystallize the ceaseless flow of events.
I sensed the labourer standing behind me. I had never spoken to him. I did not even know his name; and when I went up to him in the orchard to ask if I could watch TV in his shack he had become very shy, nodding his bent head and then quickly turning away.
His large family was busy cooking a meagre meal over a kerosene stove in one corner, amid a litter of dented aluminium plates and bowls and a smell of peanut oil. They were made nervous by me, as if not sure why the man who lived in the big cottage and seemed well off was present in their cramped dingy quarters, watching intently something they had already seen and quickly forgotten.
Once, during one of the replays of the collapsing towers, the labourer said, his quiet voice almost drowned out by the excited men on CNN, but chilling in its heart-felt conviction, ‘This is all God’s will,’ and for a disturbing instant of perfect lucidity I saw what he meant on the screen, where the mighty work of man was being brought down to earth by a power which had been made devastating by modern technology, and which suddenly appeared, in what it had achieved, to have been abetted by a malevolent divinity.
The previous day I had heard on the radio about a speech that the US Defense Secretary had made at a memorial service for the victims of the attacks. He had spoken of the attackers as believers in the ‘theology of self’, and in the whispered words of temptation: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ I had thought then about the young jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan: how quickly they would have moved from their sense of besiegement and impotence to exultation at the sight of the rich and proud superpower brought to grief and anger.
The sons of peasants in remote, backward countries, too, had come to possess the technical secrets that had made other men presume to divine status; and they had finally registered their arrival in the modern world, in the history that the experts said had ended, with an atrocity.
There seemed to be no refuge from the nightmares of a history that was now truly universal. The makers of this history, and its vigorous chroniclers, weren’t fazed by the perplexities of a world grown too big for the human intellect to grasp. They were too infatuated by their own concepts – totalitarianism, liberalism, fundamentalism, imperialism, terrorism, etc. – to examine the crude assumptions – for instance, the belief that human beings have a single identity – that underpinned their thinking.
Ideology – democracy, freedom, Islamic virtue – gave them the moral certainty with which they spoke of the necessity of violence for remaking the world. It made them assume, almost as a matter of course – reverting on a terrible scale to the bloody rituals of tribal societies – that some must die so that others can live and be happy and free.
Given their immense power to manipulate and coerce, it was easy to see individuals everywhere reduced to spare parts of an imaginary humanity. But there was something missing in this bleak, compelling vision of individuals delivered to vast blind forces.
It was what I began to see more clearly that autumn in Mashobra: what the Buddha had stressed to the helpless people caught in the chaos of his own time: how the mind, where desire, hatred and delusion run rampant, creating the glories and defeats of the past as well as the hopes for the future, and the possibility for endless suffering, is also the place – the only one – where human beings can have full control over their lives.
The mind is where the frenzy of history arises, the confusion of concepts and of actions with unpredictable consequences. It is also where these concepts are revealed as fragile and arbitrary constructions, as essentially empty. What seems like necessity weakens in the mind’s self-knowledge, and real freedom becomes tangible.
This freedom lies nowhere other than in the present moment – the concrete present, the here and now, that the Buddha had affirmed over the claims of an abstract past and an illusory future.
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 the deepening and ethicizing of everyday life 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. In much of what he had said and done he had addressed the suffering of human beings deprived of old consolations of faith and community and adrift in a very large world full of strange new temptations and dangers.
This was the human condition that Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had also described, with much intellectual passion, anguish and irony. But the Buddha had not been content with vivid description or eloquent lament. He had not only diagnosed the new intellectual and spiritual impasse faced by human beings at a time of tumultuous change: he had also tried to overcome it. In the process, he undermined many assumptions that lie behind the political and economic arrangements of the modern era.
In a world increasingly defined by the conflict of individuals and societies aggressively seeking their separate interests, he revealed both individuals and societies as necessarily interdependent. He challenged the very basis of conventional human self-perceptions – a stable, essential identity – by demonstrating a plural, unstable human self – one that suffered but also had the potential to end its suffering. An acute psychologist, he taught a radical suspicion of desire as well as of its sublimations – the seductive concepts of ideology and history. He offered a moral and spiritual regimen that led to nothing less than a whole new way of looking at and experiencing the world.
I couldn’t have understood this in the hopeful days when I first arrived in Mashobra and thought of writing about the Buddha. He was then part of a half-mythical antiquity, where I imagined myself roaming pleasurably for a few years.
I was to alter my view, but as a rigorous and subtle therapist the Buddha still belonged, in my mind, to the past. It was to take me much longer, and require more knowledge and experience, to discover him as a true contemporary.
I now saw him in my own world, amid its great violence and confusion, holding out the possibility of knowledge as well as redemption – the awareness, suddenly liberating, with which I finally began to write about the Buddha.
Acknowledgements
This book grew over a decade of travel and reading, and has accumulated many debts. I can acknowledge only a few of them here and in the notes that follow. Barbara Epstein’s encouragement and support has been invaluable. Jason Epstein brought his usual intellectual rigour to the manuscript, which also benefited greatly from the close reading of Jonathan Galassi, Andrew Kidd, Sam Humphreys, John H. Bowles, Craig Murphy, Margery Sabin, John Gray, Mary Mount, Paul Elie, Jeremy Russell and Robyn Davidson. I am also grateful to Norma Bowles, J. F. Christie, my parents and sisters, and the Sharmas in Mashobra for their various kindnesses to me.
Notes
The notes are intended for the general reader who wishes to explore further the subjects I have discussed in this book. For the sake of readability, I have often altered the translations of Buddhist texts quoted.
Abbreviations
AN
Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: An Anthology of Suttas from the Anguttara Nikaya, trans. Nyanaponika Thera and Bhikkhu Bodhi, Delhi, Vistaar, 2000.
DN
Digha Nikaya, trans. as The Dialogues of the Buddha, 3 vols, by T. W. Rhys Davids, rpt. London, P.T.S., 1973.
MN
Majjhima Nikaya, trans. as The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, by Bhikkhu Nanamoli, Boston, Wisdom Publications, 2nd edn, 2001.
SN
Samyutta Nikaya, trans. as The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, by Bhikkhu Bodhi, Boston, Wisdom Publications, 2000.
The Invention of ‘Buddhism’
1 Dialogue between Nagasena and Menander, adapted from The Questions of King Milinda, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids, 1890, rpt. Delhi, Motilal Banarasidass, 2 vols, 1965, pp. 43–4.
2 Translation of the pillar inscription in Lumbini by Thapar Romila, Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1997, p. 261.
3 For more on Hiuen Tsang, see René Grousset, In the Footsteps of the Buddha, trans. Mariette Leion, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, rpt. 1972. Si-yu-ki, Buddhist Records of the Western World, translated from the Chinese of Hiuen Tsang by Samuel Beal, 1884, Delhi, Oriental Books Reprint Corp., 2 vols, 1969. Hui Li: The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang, Samuel Beal, trans. 1911, rpt. Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1973.
4 For a spirited presentation of the Buddha as a critic of Brahmin ideology see Kancha Ilaiah, God as Political Philosopher: Buddha’s Challenge to Brahminism, Kolkata, Samya, 2001. Some of Ambedkar’s writings on the Buddha are collected in Valerie Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002. Also see Sangharakshita, Ambedkar and Buddhism, London, Windhorse Publications, 1986.
5 Asvaghosa, Buddhacarita, chs. 1–17, E. B. Cowell (trans. and ed.) in Buddhist Mahayana Texts, New York, Dover Publications, 1969.
6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973, p. 503.
7 Osip Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, London, Collins Harvill, 1991.
8 Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library: Non-Fiction, 1922–1986, London, Penguin, 1999, pp. 3–9.
9 Visiting India in the seventh century, Hiuen Tsang saw destroyed and derelict Buddhist monasteries in Kashmir and elsewhere. For an interesting Tibetan perspective on the decline of Buddhism in India see Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (ed.), Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India, trans. from the Tibetan by Lama Chimpa and Alaka Chattopadhyaya, Delhi, Motilal Banarasidass, 1990. For a Marxist view of the encounter between Brahminism and Buddhism see D. D. Kosambi, ‘The Decline of Buddhism in India’ in Exasperating Essays: Exercises in the Dialectical Method, Pune, R. P. Nene, 1986.
10 For early links between India and the West, see W. W. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, 1951; George Woodcock, The Greeks in India, London, Faber, 1966; E. M. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megesthenes and Arrian, London, 1877, rpt. Delhi, Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1979; Demetrios Vassiliades, The Greeks in India: A Survey in Philosophical Understanding, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000; Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, book 1, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1965.
11 Victor Jacquemont, Letters from India, 2 vols, 1834, rpt. Delhi, AES, 1993; vol. 2, p. 200.
12 Jacquemont, vol 1, p. 199.
13 Ibid., p. 228.
14 For an account of Kennedy and Simla’s origins see Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990.
15 Jacquemont, vol. 1, p. 252.
16 For an overview of the scholarly British engagement with India, see P. J. Marshall (ed.), The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970; John Keay, India Discovered: The Achievement of the British Raj, Leicester, Windward, 1981; Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988; Charles Allen, The Buddha and the Sahibs: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion, London, John Murray, 2002. For a critical analysis of western and Indian suppositions about Indian religions see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999.
17 On Buddhism in China see Stanley Weinstein, Buddhism Under the T’ang, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987; Arthur Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History, 1959, rpt. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1971; K. Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973. On contacts between India and China see P. C. Bagchi, India and China: A Thousand Years of Cultural Relations, 1950, rpt. Westport, Greenwood Press, 1971; Liu Xinru, Ancient India and China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1988.
18 Macaulay’s tone, as of many British people in the nineteenth century, was set by James Mill’s influential History of British India, 1817. Mill never visited India but lack of direct experience did not prevent him from attacking the ‘absurdity and folly’ of Indian religion. His son, John Stuart Mill, rejected all European claims to racial superiority but still believed that the ‘East’ was a backward place. For a stimulating discussion of Mill’s view of imperialism see J. S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: India in British Liberal Thought, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999.
19 Jacquemont, vol. 1, p. 235.
20 On the German Romantics and India see W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1988; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, New York, Columbia University Press, 1984.
21 Jacquemont, vol. 2, p. 306.
22 Ibid., p. 307.
23 Ibid., p. 283.
24 For more on William Moorcroft and Alexander Csoma de Körös see John Keay, Explorers of the Western Himalayas, 1820–1895, London, John Murray, 1996; Edward Fox, The Hungarian who Walked to Heaven: Alexander Csoma de Körös, 1784–1842, London, Short Books, 2001.
The World of the Buddha
1 On India before Buddhism see F. R. and B. Allchin, The Birth of Indian Civilisation, Delhi, Penguin, 1997; A. L. Basham, The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism, Boston, Beacon Press, 1989; Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, London, Allen Lane, 2003; Romila Thapar, Interpreting Early India, Delhi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992; D. D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 2nd edn, Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1975. On ancient Indian cities, see R. S. Sharma, Material Culture and Social Formation in Ancient India, Delhi, Macmillan, 1985; D. K. Chakrabarti, The Archaeology of Ancient Indian Cities, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992.
2 On the ancient theory of sacrifice see Georges Bataille, especially the chapter on Tibetan Buddhism, in The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, London, Zone, 1989. Also see Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, trans. William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1994.
3 For a controversial but stimulating discussion of the origins of the Indian caste system see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 1970, rpt. Delhi, Oxford, 1998. Also see B. K. Smith, Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989.
4 For social and political conditions of North India during the Buddha’s time see H. C. Raychaudhuri, The Political History of Ancient India, 1965, rpt. Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996; N. N. Wagle, Society at the Time of the Buddha, Bombay, revised edn, Popular Prakashan, 1995; B. C. Law, The Geography of Early Buddhism, Delhi, Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1979.
5 AN, p. 55.
6 The story of the Buddha is found in B
uddhist Birth Stories: Jataka Tales: The Commentarial Introduction entitled Nidana-Katha, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids, London, George Routledge and Sons, 1925, pp. 151–4.
7 Quoted in A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, 3rd revised edn, New Delhi, Rupa & Co., 1967. See another version of the Creation Hymn with a sparkling commentary in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda: An Anthology of One Hundred and Eight Hymns, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981. Also see A. B. Keith, The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads, 2 vols, 1925, rpt. Delhi, Motilal Banarasidass, 1989; The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism, Boston, Beacon Press, 1989.
8 In A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, p. 250.
9 On Pythagoras and transmigration see Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, London, Penguin, 2001, p. 33.
10 For a scholarly yet accessible account of yoga see Mircea Eliade, Patanjali & Yoga, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1969.
11 On karma see Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (ed.), Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, Delhi, Motilal Banarasidass, 1983.
12 Patrick Olivelle, Upanisads, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 65.
13 Ibid., p. 142.
14 Hesiod and Theognis, Theogony & Works and Days; Elegies, trans. Dorothea Wender, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, pp. 54–5.
15 On early Indian asceticism see A. L. Basham, History and Doctrine of the Ajivikas, London, 1952, rpt Motilal Banarasidass, Delhi, 1982; G. C. Pande, Studies in the Origin of Buddhism, 1957, revised edn, Delhi, Motilal Banarasidass, 1995; Deviprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1981.
16 The sayings of the Buddha’s radical contemporaries are found in DN, vol. 1, pp. 69–70. Also see SN, pp. 991–1003. For a broad-ranging discussion of the India of the Buddha’s time see Uma Chakravarti, The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1987.
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