An End to Suffering Page 5

  The first known biography, or hagiography, was apparently produced in the second century BC. Buddhacarita, a more detailed and literary version by a Sanskrit poet called Asvaghosha, was written as late as the second century AD, and is considered a masterpiece of Sanskrit poetry.5 It was also around the second century that the Jatakas, a collection of stories in the Pali canon about the Buddha’s previous lives, was compiled in verse. These embellished versions of the Buddha’s life encouraged sculptors and painters to portray the Buddha, most memorably in the cave paintings of Ajanta, western India, in the third, fourth and fifth centuries AD; previously, he had been represented through footsteps, a tree, a wheel or an empty throne, as in the bas-reliefs at the great stupa (sacred reliquary mound) of Sanchi in central India.

  The life of the Buddha was never as important to Buddhists as the biographies of Jesus and Mohammed have been to Christians and Muslims. For some of the earliest Buddhists, the man known by his family name of Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni (the Sage of the Shakyas), was only the latest of the thousands of incarnations of Buddhas, or the fully realized version of the Bodhisattvas (Buddhas-to-be) he had been in previous lives; and his teaching, his dharma, was deemed more important than his life or personality, which in any case was inaccessible.

  In the newer books on Buddhism I saw at the bookshop when I was living in Simla years later, scholars still worried, and argued, about whether we could know for sure the Buddha’s year of birth, conventionally noted as 566 BC, or whether he, or his disciples, said the things attributed to him in the Buddhist texts compiled long after his death. The books also told me that the Buddha’s vision – of the impermanence of phenomena and the illusoriness of the self – found larger acceptance only two centuries after his death; and that, until then, he had been only one of many new thinkers to emerge in North India in the sixth and fifth centuries BC.

  The books on the Buddha I read in Mashobra were almost all written in Europe or America. In the nineteenth century, western scholars had discovered the Buddha through the new disciplines of history and philology. It was an immense achievement. For the West had known almost nothing at all of Buddhism during its own evolution from the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, where its first philosophers emerged, also in the sixth century BC, to the industrial and political revolutions that drastically reshaped the world in the nineteenth century.

  Without the clarifying light of western scholars, the Buddha for me would have remained only one of India’s many sages, with some dated, possibly dubious, wisdom to offer. He would have stayed sunk in myth and legend, a measure of what I considered India’s intellectual backwardness, her inability to deal rationally with her past, which seemed no less damaging than her economic and political underdevelopment. And perhaps I wouldn’t have got too far with my interest in the Buddha had I not known about his renewal by the West in the nineteenth century, or how many of the European and American writers I admired had praised him.

  Indeed, the Buddha appeared to have inspired something of a cult in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and America, especially among artists and intellectuals. Schopenhauer spoke often and admiringly of Buddhism towards the end of his life and even claimed that he and his followers were the first European Buddhists. Wagner planned to write an opera about the Buddha. In America, Henry David Thoreau translated a French version of the Buddhist text, the Lotus Sutra, into English. The German writer Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha (1922), a novel about the renunciation of the young Buddha, which was embraced in the 1960s by young Europeans and Americans disenchanted with what they saw as the aggressive materialism of their societies.

  In his last books, Nietzsche renewed his attack on Christianity by comparing it to Buddhism, which he thought was a subtle product of old and exhausted civilizations. Rainer Maria Rilke carried a small bust of the Buddha with him.

  It was not just poets and philosophers but scientists and ethnologists who had spoken well of the Buddha. Albert Einstein had called Buddhism the religion of the future since it was compatible with modern science. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had ended his memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1955), with extraordinary praise of the Buddha: ‘What else, indeed,’ he wrote, ‘have I learned from the masters who taught me, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have visited and even from that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the Sage at the foot of the tree?’6

  Not everyone found wisdom or redemption in the Buddha. He was often seen as someone fundamentally opposed to western values of individuality and rationality. Nietzsche admired the Buddha but saw him as a dangerous temptation to nineteenth-century Europeans who he thought were confronted with a meaningless world after denying God and traditional morality, and were likely to find refuge in the ‘passive nihilism’ of Buddha.

  In 1922, when he was thirty-one years old, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam published an essay in which he deplored what he saw as widespread Buddhist influence on European culture in the nineteenth century. He denounced ‘the cradle of Nirvana’ since it did not ‘permit even a single ray of active cognition’.7 He saw Buddhism as forming the ‘metaphysical masts’ of the nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois religion of progress’.

  To inert, anti-intellectual Buddhism, Mandelstam opposed the ‘schematic intellect’ and the ‘spirit of expediency’ that he found in the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. He hoped that the twentieth century would leave behind the aberrations of the nineteenth century and return to the robust intellectual rationality of the eighteenth century, to the values of the Enlightenment.

  However, Mandelstam’s sources of information about Buddhism were inevitably limited and unreliable in the 1920s. Most Europeans of the period were far more familiar with their own bourgeois religion of progress, which was to take revolutionary form in Russia, than about the religions and philosophies of the East. It was only in the early nineteenth century that scholars based in Europe began to collate the religious practices European visitors claimed to have seen in China, Korea, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka and other Asian countries. Around 1820, they invented the word ‘Buddhism’ in an attempt to categorize what seemed to be widespread reverence for a figure called the Buddha. In 1844, Eugène Burnouf, an academic at the Collège de France, published Introduction à l’histoire du bouddhisme indien, the first comprehensive attempt to explain the Buddha’s teachings available in the West.

  The book moved quickly around the world. It was excerpted the same year in The Dial, the journal started by Emerson and Thoreau in New England. It inspired, among others, Schopenhauer, whose overly pessimistic and largely misleading take on the Buddha influenced Nietzsche in turn and helped associate Buddhism with such vaguely ominous words as ‘nothingness’, ‘void’ and ‘extinction’.

  These words appear to have influenced the young Argentinian reader of Schopenhauer, Jorge Luis Borges. In 1922 in one of his earliest essays, called ‘The Nothingness of Personality’, Borges wrote about Buddhism. Borges, who was then twenty-three years old, attacked the nineteenth century in Europe for its ‘romantic ego-worship and loudmouthed individualism’ and quoted approvingly a German book on Buddhism to support the assertion, much repeated in the essay, that ‘there was no whole self’.8

  Borges disowned his precocious essay when he later wrote more knowledgeably about Buddhism. Both Borges and Mandelstam probably relied upon their youthful notions of Buddhism as an irrational and nihilistic religion to counteract the then prevailing European prejudices in favour of what was rational and life affirming.

  It is also true that Mandelstam and Borges were unlikely to have met many Buddhists in the St Petersburg and Buenos Aires of the 1920s, when there were hardly any actual Buddhists in Western Europe or America, apart from some Zen Buddhists from Japan. It was only after THE SECOND WORLD WAR that Tibetan refugees and American and Japanese practitioners of Zen stimulated a new, deeper interest in Bud
dhism as a possible way beyond the excesses of rationality and individualism.

  When I first came across them, these remarks of Mandelstam, Borges and others did not give me much sense of the Buddha or Buddhism. It was much later that I saw them as part of the intellectual introspection that had followed the great material success of the West in the nineteenth century, the self-questioning that intensified after the means to that success – nationalism, imperial expansion, technological advances – were seen as having led to the catastrophe of the First World War.

  Nevertheless, I was fascinated then by the fact that some of the greatest writers and intellectuals of the West had not only engaged with but also appreciated the ideas expressed two and half a millennia ago supposedly by an obscure Indian sage under a tree.

  It was around this time, in an idle daydream, that I first thought of writing a book about the Buddha: a historical novel. Although a part of me balked at the likely difficulty of the task, I was stirred by the imaginative journey a book on the Buddha seemed to require: the readings in old philosophies, the remembrance of empires and conquerors, the more enduring things great men in unknown times had done or said. I thought, in my mood of optimism, that my research for the novel would help me fill a large gap in my own knowledge of India’s past, and give me the historical sense I felt I lacked.

  I saw myself leisurely reading and writing in Mashobra for a few years. I couldn’t have known then that it would be impossible to understand the Buddha or his teachings from books alone, and that I would have to leave Mashobra and enter the larger world, travel to places as different as America and Kashmir, England and Afghanistan, learn to see differently the western writers and intellectuals I idolized, before I could begin to understand the Buddha, his teachings, and their special relevance in these troubled, bewildering times from which his own age seemed, superficially at least, so remote.

  I had never been religious-minded, at least never as much as my parents, or Mr Sharma who spent much of his morning in elaborate obeisance before idols and calendars of various gods and goddesses. I didn’t feel I could enter religion and ritual in the same way an older Indian generation had done, while living a simple rural life. But although I didn’t think that mystical self-absorption was the best way to approach an objective historical reality, I began to meditate, thinking that it might somehow help me understand the Buddha.

  *

  My attempts at meditation didn’t last long. I managed to concentrate on my breathing and block all thoughts from entering my mind for up to two minutes before the dam broke. I was more absorbed by the books I found in Simla, the many reprints of nineteenth-century European accounts of India: letters, memoirs, travelogues and expository essays. Most of them reflected the nineteenth-century British discovery of India, when colonial officials, working largely on their own and in isolated parts of the country, first revealed to a worldwide audience the art, religion and philosophy of ancient India. From their old-fashioned fonts and starched prose I discerned the English or Scottish amateur in his sola topi supervising an excavation in the middle of an exposed plain, or poring over, in fading light, an unfamiliar script in the bougainvillea-festooned veranda of a bungalow.

  Among the greatest discoveries these amateur archaeologists and scholars had made was of the Buddha’s origins in India. It is understandable that Europe misinterpreted, or remained unaware of, the Buddha. The more startling fact was the almost total disappearance of Buddhism from India.9

  It wasn’t clear what had happened. In ninth-century China, the disgruntled followers of Confucius and Lao-Tzu had finally succeeded in driving Buddhism out from official favour. Scholars speculated similarly about India, where they claimed to see a fierce backlash from the Brahmins against the growing influence of Buddhism. There were reliable records of rulers in Kashmir and Bengal destroying Buddhist temples and monasteries. The nomadic people called the Huns had sacked monasteries in north-west India as early as the fifth century. And then Turkish invaders had brought their own iconoclastic zeal to India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  The Buddha’s ideas had been the dominant influence over the philosophy, literature, art and architecture of ancient India for over fifteen hundred years after his death. But the evidence of Buddhist civilization in India – thousands of inscriptions, stupas, rock-cut sanctuaries, monasteries, not to mention countless paintings, statues and emblems – still awaited discovery and identification in the early nineteenth century. Although Buddhist treatises on logic could be found in Mongolia and Siberia, not a single text of Buddhism had been preserved in any Indian language. As I discovered slowly, the only Indian places where Buddhism had survived the last millennium, and was still honoured, were in the mountains close to Tibet that I saw daily from my balcony in Mashobra.

  I wished then that I had known this earlier. But although I lived among them, I still could not associate the Himalayas with real men and events of the past. They belonged exclusively to the semi-mythical events of the Mahabharata. Even the Buddhist monasteries, which swarmed with old and young lamas and were clearly the work of men inspired by faith, seemed part of the natural scenery of the Indo-Tibetan Himalayas. I had never asked myself how they had sprung up in those inhospitable regions. I had the relevant dates and some broad facts: that, for instance, the monastery at Tabo was established in AD 996. But I was unable to connect such information to anything else.

  It was the travel books about the Buddhist Himalayas that made me realize that the places I considered remote, even half fantastical, had been visited, and their mysteries – the once puzzling mysteries of the Buddha and Buddhism – revealed almost two centuries ago by Europeans.

  Among the earliest of these visitors in the nineteenth century was Victor Jacquemont, a young botanist from Paris investigating the natural history of India. One day in Simla, I found two volumes of his letters, many of them written by him from the Indian Himalayas to his relatives in France. I had then just returned from one of my first trips to the Buddhist regions bordering Tibet, and I was fascinated by Jacquemont’s references to his travels in the same parts and to Simla, which he had visited soon after it was founded in 1820.

  Many of Jacquemont’s letters from India resemble the travel writing of a later age. They are reports of the exotic, designed to give pleasure to, and provoke envy among, people who feel themselves trapped in much less exciting places; Jacquemont probably exaggerated the gap he felt between the life he had left behind in Paris and his time in India among Maharajahs and dancing girls. He frequently lapses into snobbery; there was much in India that did not meet his need for beauty, refinement and rationality. He seems to have talked only to the grandest Indians, Maharajahs and Brahmins. But his intelligence and curiosity redeem even his occasionally petulant outbursts – and made him popular among the stolid British imperialists he met in distant places, and impressed Ranjit Singh, the powerful Sikh Maharajah of Punjab, enough for him to offer Jacquemont the viceroyalty of Kashmir.

  Travellers from Europe had previously been scarce in India.10 Early in the fourth century BC, the Greek colony of Bactria in what is now Afghanistan had sent out an ambassador called Megesthenes to the Indian city of Pataliputra, near which the Buddha had once lived. During his time in Pataliputra, Megesthenes had compiled the first western account of India, fragments of which survived and made their way into the writings of such Roman historians and geographers as Arrian and Strabo.

  Rome traded extensively with India, particularly in the first three centuries after Christ. Ideas travelled along the Silk Road and other routes to and from India: Christianity and Islam to the East, and Indian sciences and philosophies to the West. The Buddha himself reached the West in the form of a garbled story of two Christian saints, Barlaam and Josaphat, the original source for which was probably Asvaghosha’s popular biography of the Buddha, Buddhacarita.

  The Christian polemicist Clement of Alexandria is said to have met in the second century AD some Indian traders who identifi
ed their religious practice in ways that now make them seem like followers of the Buddha. Mani, the third-century Persian founder of Manicheism, which influenced the young St Augustine and lingered on among the Cathars of medieval Provence, spent time in India and is supposed to have absorbed Buddhist influences. But there was little contact between India and the West for several centuries as, first, the Roman Empire disintegrated, and then the Arabs came to rule both India and parts of Europe.

  During the Middle Ages, there was the odd traveller to Asia, such as Marco Polo, who served at the court of Kublai Khan, the most Buddhist of Mongol emperors. The traffic to India grew only after Europeans discovered in the sixteenth century the sea route to Asia and inaugurated their great age of exploration and conquest. Traders and diplomats set up trading centres, followed by missionaries of the Counter-Reformation who hoped to compensate for the Catholic losses to Protestant Europe by converting India and China to their faith. A few Jesuits managed to reach Tibet in the seventeenth century and reported coming across Buddhist notions about the self.

  There had been a few French travellers in India in the centuries before Jacquemont’s visit. In his Essay on the Manners and Spirits of Nations (1754), Voltaire relied upon the testimony of two intrepid French travellers, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and François Bernier, both of whom had attempted ambitious accounts of the last days of the Mughal Empire in India. Bernier had even gone up to Kashmir, a place few Europeans then knew of. He gave not just France but also Europe its first authoritative, if only partly accurate, image of Asia: as a place of ageless Oriental Despotism, where the ruler owned everything in his realm.