Religious Biography, Buddhism

End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

Name: End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
Author: Pankaj Mishra
ISBN: 9780312425098

by Pankaj Mishra

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Overview

An End to Suffering tells of Pankaj Mishra's search to understand the Buddha's relevance in today's world, where religious violence, poverty and terrorism prevail. As he travels among Islamists and the emerging Hindu Muslim class in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Mishra explores the myths and places of the Buddha's life, the West's "discovery" of Buddhism, and the impact of Buddhist ideas on such modern politicians as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Mishra ultimately reaches an enlightenment of his own by discovering the living meaning of the Buddha's teaching, in this "unusually discerning, beautifully written, and deeply affecting reflection on Buddhism" (Booklist).

Synopsis

The New York Times - William Grimes

Mr. Mishra presents these concepts simply and clearly. He also lends them dramatic immediacy, tying them closely to specific events and places in the Buddha's life, highlighting the arguments and counterarguments that they provoked at the time. At every turn, he draws parallels between the social problems of the Buddha's era and the myriad social and political torments of our own age. Mr. Mishra paints a vivid, painful picture of the developing world, bewildered by the disruptive forces of modernity.

About the Author, Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Granta, and the Times Literary Supplement.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Part biography, part history, part travel book, part philosophic treatise, [and mainly] intellectual autobiography, [by someone who] 'couldn't sit still' long enough to meditate successfully . . . Mishra's book is in the best tradition of Buddhism, both dispassionate and deeply engaged, complicated and simple, erudite and profoundly humane."—The New York Times Book Review"Succinct, lucid, and coherent."—Los Angeles Times "[A] journey of self-discovery . . . [Mishra] struggles to reconcile lessons of the Buddha's life with his own shrinking world."—The New Yorker

"The only sane response to the post-9/11 world."—Elle

William Grimes

Publishers Weekly

Mishra (The Romantics) offers an ambitious "book-length essay" that combines an overview of the life, times and teachings of the Buddha with personal anecdotes and extended multidisciplinary forays into realms such as ancient and modern history, philosophy, politics and literary criticism. If Mishra's approach is broad, it is also deep and often effective. For example, his close reading of early Indian scriptures and his historical-political examination of the Buddha's society bring to life a "half-mythical antiquity" that, in turn, helps the reader see the Buddha's teachings afresh: not as generic spiritual truisms but rather as specific responses to particular religious and social conditions. Yet the book fails to anchor its broad perspective in a strong central thesis. While it follows the chronology of the Buddha's life, Mishra intersperses whole chapters exploring topics such as "The Death of God" and "Empires and Nations." These discussions of Nietzsche's opinions of the Buddha or Zen Buddhism's endorsement of Japanese imperialism are themselves compelling, but feel disjointed. Mishra also frequently shifts the focus to his own life; sometimes this artfully illustrates a point, but at other times it borders on the self-indulgent. Nevertheless, for serious readers the book is a rich and challenging-if sometimes meandering-invitation to explore the Buddha's legacy across centuries, continents and cultures. (Dec.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In this extremely well-written, almost crystalline narrative, Mishra (The Romantics) escorts the reader on a journey from the small-town Hindu culture of his birth to his tawdry university experience, contemplative life in India's rural north, and finally his life in Europe and America. The larger part of this treasure, though, consists of Mishra's account of the mythical and historical lives of the Buddha and Indian Buddhist culture. The carefully interwoven account results in thoughtful and lucid juxtapositions of contemporary India, including a possibly more glorious Buddhist past, contrasted with the modern West. Highly recommended for public and academic collections to join Karen Armstrong's Buddha and works by Thich Nhat Hanh.-James R. Kuhlman, Univ. of North Carolina at Asheville Lib. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The life of the historical Buddha, his legacy, and his enduring relevance. Indian-born novelist Mishra (The Romantics, 2000) begins in a secluded Himalayan valley with little more than an impulse: he wants to write about Siddartha Gautama (ca. 563-483 b.c.e.) but needs to know more. The quest evolves into a personal pilgrimage. The twist: actually visiting the Buddha's birthplace in Nepal, or trekking to other long-forgotten and ignored sacred sites in his native northern India, turns out to be not all that evocative of the pampered princeling who renounced material comforts to seek enlightenment. More resonant, the author finds, is his cumulative impact on Western thinkers in the modern era. Neatly subsumed into the Hindu pantheon eons ago by India's threatened Brahmins, edged out of ancient China by the great wave of Confucian ideas, the Buddha bobs up again with Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, et al., in a world facing the great conflagrations of the 20th century. Suffering, after all, was his bag-as Allen Ginsberg surely must have put it-but it's still been an impressive revival, Mishra proposes, for someone who apparently wrote nothing down and may not even have been literate, about whom far less is known for certain than either the historical Jesus or Mohammed. Writing flatly and unemotionally, more as an intellectual admirer than a disciple, the author does manage to gather up and fit together a lot of Buddhist lore and codified principles, including a range of variations in worship among directly surviving enclaves from Tibet to Southeast Asia. The Enlightened One's supposed last words alone, rendered somewhat inelegantly here as "all conditioned things are subject to decay, strive onuntiringly," probably contain enough mystery to keep scholars and disciples delving for centuries more. An impressive compendium with a sense of shared discovery.