The great enemy of dogma

Nobody could accuse Pankaj Mishra of lacking ambition. A mixture of memoir, history, political and philosophical treatise, An End to Suffering sets out to tell the historical story of the Buddha and to contextualise his teachings in the development of the Western philosophical tradition. Hindu by birth and rationalist by disposition, Mishra leads us on his own journey from India, to Europe, to America, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Descartes, Schopenhauer and Hume jostle for attention, along with pensées on the rise of the nation state, the end of history and Islamic fundamentalism. It sounds an almighty mess. The extraordinary thing is that it works, and triumphantly.

The Buddha of Mishra’s account is less the serenely enigmatic figure of religious myth than a philosophical and social revolutionary. The Buddha, he argues, emerged at a time — circa 600 BC — and in a culture (northern India) when the growth of towns and cities was eroding the old social certainties and the exclusive purchase on religious knowledge held by the Brahmin caste.