09.30.06
No end of suffering
An End to Suffering seems to me to be misleading. All Indian forgetting their own cultural history (granting the point that Buddhism is very unpopular in large swaths of Indian society. Perhaps that’s the reason it evokes interest: India became alienated to one of its greatest ‘heros’, but then I wonder why!
My problem with this interesting book is only the faddish grafting of Nietzsche on an electic take on Buddhism.
Shall we forget that Schopenhauer was Nietzsche’s mentor, before Nietzsche eviscerated him with a lot of violent gibberish. Schopenhauer is almost perfect as a practical, if slightly out of focus, introduction to Buddhist thinking.
With Nietzsche we get the shadowy spirit gangsters of the generation seeding the Nazis, and the appearance of a new vicious type of guru visible in a figure such as Gurdjieff.
So I would beware of Buddhism sugar coated with the Nietzschean glitz, to which the literati are so vulnerable.
India previously denounced Buddha as wishing to bring the world to hell. Why did they say that, pray tell…
OVER the years since Pankaj Mishra’s An End to Suffering was first published, I have found that readers, both amateur and professional that I know, curiously don’t dwell on the book the way they do on Butter Chicken in Ludhiana or The Romantics.