>From a review of "An End to Suffering" by Pankaj Mishra
"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. . . .''
He was, in many senses, a modern man, maybe even the first modern man, because he put into words the anomie and angst that are the daily companions of billions of modern lives. (Perhaps it's appropriate that northern India, which was the birthplace of some of the world's first cities, should also have been a birthplace of individual identity.) Yet the Buddha also recognized that the only real peace could come from within. Despite the flickering, flamelike nature of the self, he found, at the center of its inconstant, all-consuming dance, something steady and true." . . .
"But Buddhism, Mishra recognizes, is ''not easily practiced in the modern world,'' where almost everything is ''predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire, exactly the thing that the Buddha had warned against.'' In the United States, particularly, ''as Alexis de Tocqueville had noticed in the early 1830's, individual self-interest was the very basis of the brand-new commercial and industrial society that Europeans had created in the seemingly unlimited spaces of the New World.'' And yet Buddhism has taken root and flowered here. Perhaps, Mishra suggests, it is beginning to play -- though still in a small way -- the role Tocqueville foresaw for religion in America, as a moderating influence on society's worst excesses and strains. Given the scope of its ambitions, ''An End to Suffering'' could easily have become a disorganized ramble. But Mishra's book is in the best tradition of Buddhism, both dispassionate and deeply engaged, complicated and simple, erudite and profoundly humane."
Full review at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/review/06GOODHEA.html
Brian Dauth
Queer Buddhist Resister