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. The Buddha was in a sense a proto-existentialist, who questioned for the first time what it meant to be an individual and spoke of a basic human nature separate from social or religious roles. The critical point about the Buddha’s enlightenment is that it was not divine revelation, but rather a systematic process of inner examination, accessible to all. He was ‘an empiricist’ who claimed that experience rather than speculative metaphysics holds the key to wisdom. Through meditation, he realised a direct experience of the provisional and conditioned nature of the mind and body. What we call the ‘self’, he taught, is a process rather than a self-contained and unchangeable entity, consciousness is ‘a perpetual flow of interdependent thoughts’ — an insight which Mishra parallels with the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s observation that the mind is ‘a kind of theatre’, where perceptions ‘successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’.
It is this constant play of thoughts and feelings, desires and regrets which gives rise to the essential human condition of dhukka, or ‘suffering’ — not simply the suffering of old age, sickness and death, but also the suffering that lies in wait while we know happiness, the suffering that arises from change, and which replaces happiness.
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