An End to Suffering

  AN END TO SUFFERING

  Also by Pankaj Mishra

  FICTION

  The Romantics

  NONFICTION

  Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India

  AN END TO SUFFERING

  THE BUDDHA IN THE WORLD

  PANKAJ MISHRA

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  NEW YORK

  We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements. We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and action.

  FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

  Contents

  Map

  Prologue

  The Invention of ‘Buddhism’

  The World of the Buddha

  The Death of God

  The Long Way to the Middle Way

  A Science of the Mind

  Turning the Wheel

  A Little Dust in the Eyes

  Looking for the Self

  The Fire Sermon

  A Spiritual Politics

  Empires and Nations

  Western Dharmas

  Overcoming Nihilism

  The Last Journey

  Committed to Becoming

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Prologue

  IN 1992 I MOVED to a small Himalayan village called Mashobra. Later that year, I began to travel to the inner Himalayas, to the Buddhist-dominated regions of Kinnaur and Spiti. These places were very far from Mashobra, but travel to them was easy and cheap: rickety buses that originated in the nearby city of Simla went hundreds of miles, across high mountains and deep valleys, to a town near India’s border with Tibet. I often went on these long journeys attracted by nothing more than a vague promise of some great happiness awaiting me at the other end.

  I remember my first trip. The monsoons had just ended, with several dull weeks of fog and rain abruptly cancelled out by a series of sharp clear days. On that chilly, bright morning, the bus was late and crammed with nervous Tibetan pilgrims, peasants and traders, its dusty and dented tin sides already streaked with vomit.

  Luck, and some pushing and shoving, managed to get me a seat by the window; and then, after that bit of luxury, the crowd, the bad road and the dust seemed not to matter. Everything I saw – the sun leaping across and through dark pine forests, the orange corn cobs drying on slate roofs of houses lost in immense valleys and, once, a tiny sunlit backyard with a pile of peanut shells on the cowdung-paved ground – seemed to be leading to an exhilarating revelation.

  The day flew quickly past my window. But evening came cautiously, and the bus lost some of its cranky energy as it struggled up a narrow twisting road into the Sangla valley. Pink-white clouds blurred the snow peaks of the surrounding tall mountains as the river in the ravine below roared. The valley broadened at last. The mountains became even taller and more self-possessed. Long shadows crept down their rocky slopes and then over the green rice fields beside the river. Lights shone uncertainly through the haze ahead. Then, a long curve in the road brought them closer and revealed them as lanterns hanging from the elaborately carved and fringed balconies of double-storeyed wooden houses.

  The bus began to climb again; the houses and the riverside fields receded. Boulders now littered the low barren slopes of the mountains where occasionally a glacier had petered out into muddy trails. Finally, at the end of the flinty snow-eroded road, the air growing thinner and thinner and Tibet only a few desolate miles ahead, there was a shadowy cluster of houses on a hill.

  I was panting as I walked up a narrow cobblestone ramp. The bluish air trembled with temple bells. But the sound came from some other temple, for at this temple – shyly nestled under a giant oak and festooned with rows of tiny white prayer flags – there was only an old man hunched over an illustrated manuscript, a Tibetan, probably, judging by his face and the script on his manuscript, whose margins shone a deep red in the weak light from the lantern next to him on the platform.

  The temple, though small, had a towering pagoda-like roof; the gable beams ended in dragon heads with open mouths. The carved wooden door was ajar and I could see through to the dark sanctum where, serene behind a fog of sweet-smelling incense, was a gold-plated idol of the Buddha: a Buddha without the Greek or Caucasian visage I was familiar with, a Buddha with a somewhat fuller, Mongoloid face, but with the same high brow, the broad slit eyes, the unusually long and fleshy ears, and the sublime expression that lacks both gentleness and passion and speaks instead of a freedom from suffering, hard won and irrevocable.

  I had been standing there for a while before the old monk raised his head. Neither curiosity nor surprise registered in the narrow eyes that his bushy white eyebrows almost obscured.

  We didn’t speak; there seemed nothing to say. I was a stranger to him, and though he knew nothing of the world I came from he did not care. He had his own world, and he was complete in it.

  He went back to his manuscript, wrapping his frayed shawl tightly around himself. Crickets chirped in the growing dark. A smell of fresh hay came from somewhere. Moths knocked softly against the oil-stained glass of the lantern.

  I stood there for some time before being led away by the cold and my exhaustion and hunger. I found some food and a place to rest in the village. The long strange day ended flatly, its brief visions unresolved.

  I spent a sleepless night in a farmer’s low attic, with the smell of old dust and dead spiders, and some slivers of moonlight. I was already up the next day when the roosters began to cry.

  I went immediately to the temple, where there were worshippers – Buddhist or Hindu: I couldn’t be sure – but the monk was nowhere to be seen. The morning arose from behind the snow-capped mountains. Then, suddenly, it overwhelmed the narrow valley with uncompromising light. Sharp knives glinted in the river. The village was bleached of its twilight mystery. The wooden chimneyless houses puffed thick blasts of smoke from open windows and doors. A long queue of mules carrying sacks of potatoes clattered down the cobblestone ramp. I was restless and wanted to leave. My return journey to Mashobra blended in my memory with other journeys I made to the Sangla valley in later years. But for many days afterwards, my mind rambled back to the temple, to that moment in the shadow of an oak before the Tibetan exile silently in tune with the vast emptiness around him, and I wondered about the long journey the monk had made, and thought, with an involuntary shiver, of the vacant years he had known.

  It was around this time that I became interested in the Buddha. I began to look out for books on him. I even tried to meditate. Each morning I sat cross-legged on the dusty wooden floor of my balcony, facing the empty blue valley and remote mountain peaks in the north, which, I remember, turned white as that first autumn gave way to winter, and the apple and cherry trees around my house grew gaunt.

  It seems odd now: that someone like myself, who knew so little of the world, and who longed, in one secret but tumultuous corner of his heart, for love, fame, travel, adventures in far-off lands, should also have been thinking of a figure who stood in such contrast to these desires: a man born two and a half millennia ago, who taught that everything in the world was impermanent and that happiness lay in seeing that the self, from which all longings emanated, was incoherent and a source of suffering and delusion.

  I had little interest in Indian philosophy or spirituality, which, if I thought of them at all, seemed to me to belong to India’s pointlessly long, sterile and largely unrecorded past. I didn’t see how they could add to the store of knowledge – science and technology – and the spirit of rational enquiry and curiosity that had made the modern world.

  My
interest in the Buddha seems even stranger when I recall how enthralled I was then by Nietzsche, among other western writers and philosophers. Probably like many other impoverished and lonely young men I was much taken by the idea that one could overcome despair and win from the world, through sheer will, the identity and security it seemed reluctant to give.

  I can’t recall a spiritual crisis leading me to the Buddha. But then I didn’t know myself well; the crisis may have occurred without my being aware of it. In my early twenties, I lived anxiously from one day to the next, hoping for a salvation I could not yet define.

  Earlier that year I had left Delhi and moved with a few books and clothes to Mashobra. A Himalayan village was a strange choice for a young Indian man like myself, someone with little means and an uncertain future. But I hoped that in the silence and seclusion of the mountains I would finally be able to begin fulfilling an old and increasingly desperate ambition.

  I had wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember. I could not see myself being anything else. I had written little, however, apart from a few ill-considered reviews and essays during my three years at university in Delhi. I felt that I had wasted my time while most students worked hard to acquire a degree and find a job – the privileged gateway to the secure and stable life of marriage, children, paid holidays and pensions that the deprivations of our parents had prescribed for us.

  Although I was eager to leave Delhi, I didn’t want to stray too far from cities, to which I eventually saw myself returning. It seemed important for an aspiring writer not to isolate himself from society, the civilization from which all books, art and music seemed to emerge. A part of me was also vulnerable to the British-created romance of the ‘hill station’: the exclusive retreat in the mountains where life disarranged by the great heat of the plains could be recreated in miniature. It was why I had first gone to Mussoorie, a town in the Himalayan foothills, only to find it overrun by Christian missionaries and tourists from Delhi. It was why I had then gone on to Simla, which, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been the summer capital of British India.

  The British watched over their most valuable imperial possessions from this Himalayan town. They also played hard there: ballroom dances, polo, amateur theatre and scandals defined the self-enclosed world of Anglo-India that Rudyard Kipling first commemorated in Plain Tales from the Hills. There were few books on British India that did not attempt to evoke the pleasures of this most prestigious hill station. I had read these books attentively. In the spring of 1992, when I went looking for a cheap cottage in Simla, I was looking forward to promenades on the Mall, to spending brilliant snowy mornings in dimly lit coffeehouses, to browsing away the afternoons in dusty bookshops, and to the evenings that died silently on a neglected dirt path through the fir trees.

  I was swiftly disabused. On the winding road to Simla from the railhead, Kalka – the road that revealed at every turn another vista of green hills against a blue sky – there were sandbagged checkpoints. In the adjoining state of Punjab, Sikh separatists had been fighting for over a decade for their own state. A violent insurgency had just broken out in nearby Muslim-majority Kashmir. From both states came the news of terrorist murders, bombings, extrajudicial execution and torture – the news from a world that had existed at my university only in the posters warning of bombs in public places but was now urgent in the faces and voices of the policemen, who, cradling automatic rifles, brought their fear into the cramped bus on that hill road as they ordered the passengers to open their baggage and shouted at those who were slow to respond.

  On the narrow mountain road, these checkpoints seeded long traffic jams. The bus shuffled through black clouds of diesel fumes and a cacophony of truck and car horns. After many hours, there was Simla. Sighted from afar, from a sudden bend, it seemed a big heap of concrete-box buildings, less a picturesque hill station than an Indian small town recreated vertically amid green hills; and the view didn’t improve much as we got closer.

  The Indian economy had just begun to awaken from a four-decade-long socialist torpor. Cable TV, Häagen-Dazs ice cream and shopping vacations in Singapore were still some years away for an emerging middle class. For now, ambitious, mostly young men and women from the cities of Delhi and Chandigarh, savoured their growing wealth at the mock-Tudor shops and video-game parlours on the Mall Road. Their glowingly clear skin tones and brand-name jeans and sneakers, their emblems of class as well as caste, gave off an appearance of general well-being, of the kind the British probably had at the height of their power. They gave Simla a touch of glamour. But on the street just below the Mall, hectic with hunchbacked coolies in rags, the city began to deteriorate, packed alley by alley until it seethed at the very bottom of the hill in a favela-like squalor of low tin shacks and exposed stagnant drains.

  The old wooden cottages of the kind I had seen myself living in (muslin curtains in the windows, rose beds in the backyard) were mostly gone, burnt to the ground – the rumours blamed arson – or demolished to make room for blocks of flats. There were hardly any places to rent cheaply. A lethargic estate agent showed me round a few of the new flats with damp cement walls that already spoke of decay and gloom; he then stopped returning my phone calls. I persevered for a few days, walking around the city, browsing through the two bookshops on the Mall Road, eating at expensive restaurants and worrying about money.

  I remember the morning I took the bus to Mashobra, to what had been described as a ‘nice picnic spot’ in my guidebook. I was hoping only to kill some time before starting on the dreary journey back to Delhi.

  The half-empty Himachal Roadways bus never stopped groaning, even long after it moved out of the constriction of Simla and emerged into the broad open valley that slumbered peacefully in the pale sunshine. Soon, we were surrounded by damp cedars and didn’t regain our freedom for some time. The harsh winter had lingered here in the form of miniature mountain ranges of snow that sat dirtily beside the rutted road. At tea shacks in dark little clearings, men in woollen rags hunched over pine-cone fires.

  The bus left the highway, stuttered down a road between tottering houses of wood and tin, and then abruptly stopped. The driver killed the ailing engine, and everyone got out.

  I was the last to leave. After the pungent warmth of the bus, the cold came as a shock. I saw that I was on a long ridge, facing a vast abyss filled with the purest blue air. The overall view, extending far to the east, was clear and spectacular: a craggy row of white mountain peaks rising above several tiers of hills and ridges, all of them supervising the deep wooded valley before me.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, to live here? I thought of asking someone about places to rent. But the bus had emptied fast – I had been the only tourist on it – and there was no one around. It was then that I noticed the red tin roof of a largish house, and the spiralling dirt path that seemed to lead towards it.

  The house was indeed big and handsome, in an old-fashioned unostentatious way, with windows running round the balconies on its two floors – it had been built, I later learnt, in the early seventies, when timber from cedar trees was plentiful and cheap. I would come to know well the smell of old quilts and incense contained in its walls, the smells that overrode the change of seasons and evoked whole lives of virtuousness, regular habits and religious piety.

  On that first morning, it stood confidently on a broad ridge, facing the mountains towards the east, its windows opaque in the sun. Baskets with peonies hung from the eaves. On the wide sunny porch some red chillies lay drying on a bright yellow sheet. A window on the second floor was open; so was the main door that opened, I could see, onto a wooden staircase.

  I knocked and then heard the thump of bare feet on the floor. Someone appeared in the second-floor window: a thin boy. I tried to explain what I was looking for. He disappeared and then a little later Mr Sharma came down the stairs.

  He was a tall man, and seemed even taller in his long woollen cap, giving off an air of sombre di
gnity. I told him – a bit awkwardly, his young nephew appraising me from the first floor – that I had been a student in Delhi, and was now looking for a place in the mountains where I could read and write for a few years.

  Mr Sharma looked uncertainly at me for a moment, and then said that he would show me a cottage he had just built.

  We walked through an orchard – I didn’t know then that these were apple and cherry, peach and apricot trees – and came to a narrow spur at the corner of the hill. It was here that the small cottage stood, directly above a cow shed and what looked like storage rooms for fodder.

  The cottage was functional: there were three rooms altogether, built in no particular order or design but placed next to each other; a bathroom and kitchen had been tacked on almost as an afterthought. The rooms still smelled of wood shavings – the aroma stayed for many months until pushed out in October that year by the fragrance of freshly picked apples stored underneath.

  It was the balcony, however, that held me. Just beneath it was a small field of corn, barren and worked over by an old hunchbacked peasant. From the edge of the field, pine forests sloped down far into the valley, as far as the paddy fields and wooden houses with shiny slate roofs at the very bottom, in what seemed another season and climate. If I leaned to my left, I could see Mr Sharma’s orchard. Looking up, I held the same view I had as I came off the bus – the valley, the snow-capped mountains and the sky that seemed locked in a trance so private that you could only watch and be still yourself. In my mind’s eye, I could already see myself sitting on the balcony on long evenings and gazing at the darkening world.