February 08, 2005

An end to worldly sufferingLiterature

Sorry, I can’t help you in this department. You may gain some insight however in extricating yourself from worldly attachments (and that includes American Idol you freaks), by taking a look through Pankaj Mishra’s new book, “An End to Suffering,” as profiled in the New York Times:

You occasionally hear of writers, especially when their books are of long incubation, coming to resemble their subjects, and my fleeting glimpse of Pankaj Mishra seems to offer uncanny proof of the phenomenon. For here, surely, was the young Siddhartha Gautama himself: a scholar-sophisticate, a personality both cosmopolitan and ascetic, at large and at home in the world.

I wonder if this is similar to the phenomena where dog owners come to resemble their dogs?

“An End to Suffering” is part biography, part history, part travel book, part philosophic treatise. But perhaps it could best be described as a work of intellectual autobiography. I say “intellectual” rather than spiritual, let alone religious. Mishra is not a Buddhist — he “couldn’t sit still” long enough to meditate successfully — and his story is not a narrative of conversion or a road map to inner peace, at least not in the expected sense. It is, rather, the tale of his attempts to delve into the legacy of one of the world’s greatest philosophers.

The Buddha, as Mishra describes him, was not a prophet — not a religious figure but a secular one. Indeed, “he had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity; he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgment.” He likewise ignored the question of why sin and evil exist in the world, which has obsessed nearly every major religion. The Buddha’s concern was purely practical: to relieve suffering, both material and existential. His precepts weren’t couched as revelations from on high, delivered with the crash of thunder; instead they came as small quotidian insights: “I well remember how once, when I was sitting in the shade of a jambu tree on a path between the fields… .”

“…I took out my laptop and typed a blog entry in hopes of relieving the people’s suffering with a brief distraction.” That’s how I would have ended that quotidian insight.

abhi on February 8, 2005 01:47 PM in Literature · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post