An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
by Pankaj Mishra
Picador $195
In 1992, Pankaj Mishra moved to a small Himalayan village where he lived a simple bachelor's life in cheap rental accommodation, reading, thinking and observing. From here, he made long journeys 'across high mountains and deep valleys', to Buddhist-dominated regions in the inner Himalayas, 'often ... attracted by nothing more than a vague promise of some great happiness awaiting me at the other end'. Gradually, Mishra developed a career as a freelance writer. He travelled elsewhere in India and flew to Europe and America. But he recurrently nursed the idea of writing a book about the Buddha, the book he finally published this year.
Ten years of accumulated knowledge and experience had finally led him to discover 'a true contemporary' in the sixth-century BC spiritual teacher Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. Having earlier seen him as 'part of a half-mythical antiquity ... I now saw him in my own world, amid its great violence and confusion, holding out the possibility of knowledge as well as redemption'.
Biographer as well as autobiographer, Mishra presents different images of Siddhartha Gautama. A pampered and carefully sheltered boy and young man. An ascetic whose slight diet led to extreme emaciation. 'When I tried to touch the skin of my belly, I took hold of my backbone.' A man whose later careful habits - afternoon siestas, no evening meals - extended his life to about 80, but whose politeness to a host led to the dysentery that killed him.