An End to Suffering Read online

  All the forbidden deliciousness of sex lay in Vinod’s dark bedroom when I went upstairs. It was present in the mixed smell of sandalwood incense and cheap lipstick, on his dimpled bed, the discarded strings of jasmine flowers, which were already wilting as Vinod, his handsome face perfectly composed, and still in his sleeveless vest, leaned over a small table and cut a guava into thin little slices.

  ‘Aaiye-ji, aaiye-ji, come in, come in,’ he would say, the ‘ji’ always an unaffected part of his courtesy. ‘Paan layngay na, aap? You will have some paan, no?’ I rarely had any paan and did not much like chewing either the betel leaf or tobacco. The first couple of times I met him had been at a paan stall near the university, and he never lost the notion that I was an addict. He would walk up to the window, open it and then, instead of shouting for attention – for the boy below never seemed to take his eyes off the window – calmly place his order. Closing the window – the room made enigmatic again after the moment of drab light – he would turn to me and ask, ‘What are you reading today?’

  He himself was a fanatical reader. Like many students wishing to demonstrate a modern outlook and intellectual maturity, he possessed the Hindi translations of Sartre and Camus. But much of the shelf space in the rooms was taken up by the lectures of ‘Osho’ Rajneesh, the international guru of the 1970s and 80s, who exalted both sex and meditation, and whom Vinod thought of, he once told me, as a great philosopher. There were books by J. Krishnamurti and several pamphlets by Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century monk and thinker, who in 1893 had introduced Hinduism to the West at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

  He also had different books on the various systems of Indian philosophy. But they had more to do with his course work as a postgraduate student, which he neglected, staying away from classes and living, from what I could see, a life of willed leisure: he read in the mornings; the women in the afternoons were followed by long sessions of body-building at an akhara; the women sometimes returned at night, with the boy driving more cautiously and the rickshaw hood up.

  The question about my reading was how he attempted to respond to my fascinated interest in him. Otherwise, he asked me few questions about myself. He seemed self-contained, fully consumed by the present moment, and with none of the anxiety with which the rest of us – poor students with uncertain prospects – darkened the future.

  On the map, Nepal seemed close to Allahabad, at the end of a short straight line to the north, just a few hours away. But Vinod and I left at dawn and travelled for much of the day, first by train and then by bus, under the empty sky, past townships of naked brick houses, the roadside shops with dirty glass jars full of sticky sweets, the buildings with the faded signs exhorting family planning, and the young men at auto-repair shops with dated hairstyles.

  Late in the afternoon we reached the border. We waited here for a long time, as idle as the long queue of trucks waiting to get into Nepal, which lay just beyond the customs and immigration post: a small dark room before which uniformed police officials lay half sunk in their charpoys, and from which drivers with the necessary papers emerged every few minutes and strode back to their vehicles in a triumphant flurry.

  Our own turn finally came, and then the disappointment that had been building up all day became sharper as we crossed the border and into a township. The sign-boards on top of the shacks selling cheap electronic goods and nylon T-shirts and baseball caps displayed a strange script. Some of the men in the crowds were short, and had Mongoloid features. But the rest of the scene – the heaps of roadside rubbish, the wandering diseased cows, the stalls with fried foods, the buses of abraded metal – seemed defiantly familiar.

  The landscape became empty again as we left the border behind. There was little traffic, except for a few donkey carts hobbling over the rutted verge of the road. The bald brown mountains in the distance displayed patches of weak sunshine, but white bands of haze fenced in the mud villages and the rice fields, and scraps of white paper and plastic bags lay undisturbed on the ground before the shuttered roadside shops selling beer.

  The half-empty bus meandered on narrow country roads for what seemed many hours. It was flagged down a few times, before the usual low shack selling cheap liquor and cigarettes. Vinod, sitting in the row just ahead of me, fell asleep, his head gently bumping against the sharp-edged frame of the window. Other passengers – mostly local villagers anxiously gripping cloth bundles and cheap cardboard suitcases to their chests – also nodded off, their heads gently uncertain on their shoulders. I too felt some of the soporific quality of that afternoon and I didn’t at first bother opening my eyes when the bus stopped and the driver jumped out of his cockpit, shutting the door behind him with a loud thud.

  I looked up to see a parking spot: a field of pure dust, blackened in places by diesel oil where buses and trucks might have stood, and fenced by shop shacks of the kind we had passed. Vinod still seemed asleep. Some men got off to urinate. They waddled as they unfastened the strings on their floppy pyjamas and then stood rigid, legs apart. I joined the men, and it was as I stood there with them, forming a row of sorts, leaking water into a small beshram shrub, staring ahead somewhat embarrassedly, that I saw the monk, the trees, and the partially constructed buildings in the near distance.

  He may have been from Korea or Japan – I couldn’t tell the difference then, and the pagoda-shaped buildings he was walking towards were as hard to place as he was. He was walking away from us, indifferent to our presence, even to the cloud of dust which the worn tyres of the bus had kicked up towards him, and which enveloped him, settling quietly on his ochre robe and tonsured head.

  I heard the driver say, ‘Five minutes and then we leave.’ I turned back to see Vinod emerging from the bus, his face still blurred with sleep. He staggered slightly as he walked towards me. He said, ‘Dekhiye jo dekhna hi, yahi hai Lumbini. See what you have to see, this is Lumbini.’

  His voice held the disappointment of his own first visit. And perhaps it was hard not to expect more, and not to feel let down, at the sight of the birthplace of the founder of one of the world’s greatest religions, preceded by only a field of dust and some incomplete buildings.

  The bus would leave in five minutes. I hurried after the monk. I saw him enter the hedge-fenced compound of one of the odd-shaped buildings, and then I lost sight of him. Inside the compound there was a garden with a complicated design, through which ran a narrow cement path. I followed the path, past low shrubs and cactuses, and little pools of water holding slices of the sky.

  And then, suddenly, the land cleared again, the sun low and hazy in the sky ahead of me, the light golden and still. Green rice fields stretched to the horizon, dabbed occasionally with peasant women in bright clothes and black buffaloes with gleaming sides.

  I saw a strange hillock on my left – an archaeological mound. Immediately before me, in a seemingly perfect configuration, there was a rectangular tank, a large sal tree draped with handkerchief-sized prayer flags, and what at first seemed to be a low-roofed temple with a long pillared veranda.

  I turned to hear soft chanting. It was coming from one of the buildings behind me – monasteries, I finally realized. Walking on, I saw the monk. He stood on the moss-grey steps of the tank, his hands folded, his head bent; the still greenish water before him held the interlaced branches of the surrounding sal tree.

  He did not move as I passed him, on my way to the white pillar I had seen beyond the tank and the sal tree. Around the ugly iron railing, which enclosed it and which was festooned with prayer flags, were a few clay flowerless pots, with stubs of incense sticks protruding from their dry soil. The pillar was of stone, with many cracks running down its thick girth. At its base was an inscription in an unfamiliar script. A tiny metal board offered, in fading and chipped white paint, the translation and some other information.

  It said that the pillar had been erected on orders of Ashoka, the great Indian emperor of the third century BC, who embraced the ideas of the Bud
dha and instituted non-violence as state policy.

  The translation of the inscription read:

  Twenty years after his coronation, King Devanampiya Priyadarsi (beloved of the gods), visited this place in person and worshipped here because the Buddha, the sage of the Sakyas, was born here. He ordered a stone wall to be constructed around the place and erected this stone pillar to commemorate his visit. He declared the village of Lumbini free of taxes and required to pay only one-eighth of its produce as land revenue.2

  Ashoka! Rarely a day had passed in my adult life without my encountering Ashoka’s name or works in some form. The lions and wheels carved atop of his stone pillars were the crest of the government of India; they were featured on rupee notes, public hoardings, official stationery and in newspaper advertisements. But so unexpected was the pillar, so miraculous seemed Ashoka’s presence and the surviving tokens of his generosity and goodness in the remote land of the Buddha’s birth, that I had to read the translation again to confirm that I hadn’t made a mistake.

  Ashoka was among the great names I was taught to revere at school. My textbooks presented him as Buddhism’s first imperial patron, and his life in the form of a religious legend. He was the particularly brutal conqueror who at the end of his genocidal invasion of eastern India converted to Buddhism, put the resources of his vast empire at its disposal, held an important council of Buddhist monks where the future shape of the dharma, or the Buddha’s teachings, was determined, and sent out Buddhist missionaries to Afghanistan and Central Asia. Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism, the textbooks implied, was the most significant event in the history of Asian culture.

  I read about Harsha, the seventh-century AD Indian emperor whom the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang had described as a generous promoter of Buddhism. I was also told about the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsang himself, who had made an extraordinary journey to India also in the seventh century.3 The history textbooks contained a sketch of him, carrying what seemed to be a backpack and a parasol; they also emphasized the cosmopolitanism of the Buddhist university of Nalanda, where Hiuen Tsang had studied, and where young men were taught grammar, medicine, mechanics, ethics and philosophy.

  In the millennium after Christ, the Buddha’s ideas had travelled as far as China, Korea and Japan and many other Asian countries, and had assumed new forms there. In China, they had displaced even the powerful influences of the local sages, Confucius and Lao-Tzu. A ninth-century Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra, an Indian Buddhist text, was the oldest-known printed book in the world. Buddhism was already the state religion of China by the seventh century, when Hiuen Tsang brought back rare manuscripts from India. Buddhism had been an equally powerful force in Japan and South-east Asia.

  Obviously, the Buddha had been one of the great men, if not the greatest man, born in India. But I would have been hard pressed then to distinguish clearly between his ideas and those of, say, Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru or Rabindranath Tagore.

  I had been quick to correct Mr Sharma when he claimed that the Buddha had emerged from the mouth of Brahma. I had told him confidently about my visit to Lumbini, and about Ashoka’s pillar, which I had not at all expected to find. I couldn’t admit that for a long time I hadn’t known much more about the Buddha than he had.

  Growing up in North India in the 1970s and 80s I had come across a broad outline of the Buddha’s life. He had been the young scion of a ruling clan called the Shakyas in a remote city-state in North India, leading a life of leisure and some luxury, when sudden exposure to old age, sickness and death led him first to doubt and introspection and then to the abandonment of his wife and son and a lonely search for wisdom. He had practised and grown disillusioned with extreme asceticism, before discovering one night ‘the middle way’ between self-mortification and the sensual life. He had given his first sermon near Benares, where he had also found his earliest disciples, and set up the sangha, the monastic order, which later spread his dharma around the world. He had then wandered through North India for the rest of his long life, speaking to both kings and commoners about the causes and cure of suffering, before achieving nirvana, or liberation from rebirth.

  This well-worn story, lacking all specific detail, was one reason why for a long time I, like Mr Sharma and probably most other Hindus in India, thought of the Buddha as a Hindu god, an incarnation, along with Rama and Krishna, of Lord Vishnu, rather than a historical figure. I didn’t know then it was precisely this notion of Buddhism as a branch of Hinduism that had been angrily rejected by the Dalit converts to Buddhism, who wished to liberate themselves from Hinduism and who publicly affirmed during their conversion ceremony that they ‘do not believe that Lord Buddha was the incarnation of Vishnu’.

  The Dalits were partly right. Much of what we now know as Hinduism – the cults of the gods Vishnu and Shiva, the Bhagavadagita – took shape only after the time of the Buddha, and was not called Hinduism until the nineteenth century. But it was true that the Buddha had broken with the religious orthodoxy of his time, which consisted mainly of rituals aimed at appeasing the gods of nature and so allowed the hereditary elite of priests who performed them, the Brahmins, to claim a higher estate (varna) than the warriors (kshatriya), the merchants (vaishya) and the servants (shudra). He had done so no less radically than Mohammed and Christ had spurned the religious systems of their time. But he had not offered an exclusive new God, or a theory of creation as replacement for previous beliefs. Although he attracted followers he had not called himself their leader and refused to appoint a successor to take over after his death. Nor had he demanded mass allegiance, like many other founders of religions.

  He had rejected the abstract speculation popular then among Brahmin philosophers about the nature of reality and soul. He had spoken instead of ordinary human experience: of how neither the individual self nor the world is stable, how our desire for things innately impermanent makes for frustration, turning life into perpetual discontentment, and how human individuals could achieve liberation, nirvana, by freeing themselves from greed, hatred and delusion. He had traced suffering to the human belief in the solidity of the self and the phenomenal world. He had claimed that individuals could avoid suffering through an awareness, heightened by meditation, of the self as primarily made up of, and kept on the boil by, desire, disappointment, fear and resentment.

  The Buddha had upheld release from suffering as the only worthwhile spiritual aim, and in emphasizing rigorous and regular practice, not complacent belief, Buddhism had opened itself to people from all faiths, classes and castes. This distinguished the Buddha clearly from the cult of deities and sacrifice and the upholding of social hierarchy that Brahminical religion and ideology then and later mainly consisted of.4

  The Buddha did not directly attack Brahmins or their world view. But he warned individuals that rituals were of no use to them, and he had tried to make them self-aware and responsible for their own salvation. He insisted that virtue and salvation were open to people from all estates. It is why, according to one scholarly conjecture, insecure Brahmins attacked and undermined Buddhism in India, even before Turkish invaders in the twelfth century sacked the few remaining Buddhist monasteries there.

  But one needs history to make informed speculations. It wasn’t just Buddhism, but also the religion I was born into – Hinduism – that appeared to have no history. Unlike Islam and Christianity, it had neither a founder nor a church; there was no conceivable date from which it could be said to have begun, and it appeared not to have produced, during its long existence, personalities or institutions influential enough to enter the historical record. So it was that early in my childhood, myth and legend had become my guide to the world.

  Living in a small town that had no bookshop or library, almost the only thing I read was the classical Indian literature I found at home. But even if I had looked for histories of the Buddha I would have found mostly legends. There were few archaeological and textual records about ancient India, particularly about th
e sixth and fifth centuries BC, the centuries when the Buddha is supposed to have lived. Even the life of Jesus is better known than the life of the Buddha. Not only is the historicity of the Buddha not clearer than that of Jesus, there had been no Paul among the Buddha’s followers to institutionalize and give an evangelical edge to his teachings.

  The Buddha’s own view was that individuals had to realize within themselves the truth of what he said. It was why he appointed no successors and did not seek to institutionalize his teachings. In his retreats during the rainy season, he answered specific questions from and gave discourses and sermons to laymen and monks; he had dialogues with them of the kind that Socrates is supposed to have had. He left no writings; it is not even certain that he was literate. The followers of the Buddha, many of them monks or bhikshus, held a council soon after his death in order to recite and authenticate his teachings. There was another council a century later, but the teachings were not written down on palm leaves for at least another century; and when they were they appeared in Pali, a variant of Sanskrit that the Buddha had not used.

  The collection of these Pali texts called Tripitika (The Three Baskets) contains the Buddha’s discourses and his prescriptions for monastic discipline. But they offer only a disjointed narrative of his life. As Buddhism spread across Asia, many different movements and schools emerged, each claiming to possess the original and definitive version of the Buddha’s life and teachings. The movement known as Mahayana (The Great Vehicle), which emerged in north-west India around the second century AD and travelled to Tibet, Central Asia, China, Korea and Japan, produced its own extensive canon, which it claimed was superior to the canon found in the older Theravada (Way of the Elders) movement of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma. A comparative study of these canons does not go very far. The Tibetan and Chinese traditions of Mahayana have, confusingly, different versions of even the main events in the Buddha’s life. It is not even certain in some of them if the Buddha was called Siddhartha Gautama by members of his clan, the Shakyas. Certainly, none of them makes for easy reading.