Arundhathi Subramaniam - The Book of Buddha

The Book of Buddha

Books in this series

The Book of Buddha

The Book of Devi

The Book of Durga

The Book of Ganesha

The Book of Hanuman

The Book of Kali

The Book of Krishna

The Book of Muhammad

The Book of Muinuddin Chishti

The Book of Nanak

The Book of Ram

The Book of Shiva

The Book of Vishnu

The Book of

Buddha

ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2005

Published in Penguin Books 2009

Text copyright Arundhathi Subramaniam 2005

Illustrations copyright Penguin Books India 2005

Illustrations by Subroto Mallick

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-01-4306-765-8

This digital edition published in 2011.

e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-091-1

This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.

I think I was five, and in my uncles house, when it first registeredan impassive, somewhat weathered, limestone image, in the archetypal Gandhara style. It was a face of extraordinary tranquility. A face that presented a stark contrast to the densely populated pantheon of Hindu gods that dominated my childhood devotional landscape.

The gods I knew in my mothers puja room were a vibrant bunch, captured in states of perpetual animation: the dancing Nataraja, the playful Krishna, the devoted Hanuman, the benign Ganapati. Arrestingly idiosyncratic personalities in their own right, all of them. But somehow they seemed to be busy folk, preoccupied with activities of an external kind. None of them exuded the air of untroubled interiority that this limestone figure did.

I mulled over the image in the inarticulate manner of a five-year-old. What was he thinking about? Was he never angry? Never sad? Above all, never bored? Was it actually possible to be so immersed in some world inside the self?

And so, without knowing it, my fascination with the Buddha had begun.

The Amar Chitra Katha comic that I stumbled on sometime later, offered a life-story, but of a schematic sort. It only endorsed the impression I already hadof a compelling but puzzling inwardness. In my teens, I rediscovered the Buddha through other channels: through S. Radhakrishnan and Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts and Christmas Humphreys. He remained an inspirational figure, but for other reasons. He appealed now as the heroic solitary seeker who blazed his own trail; the man who asked the same questions that I did but dared to devote his entire life to addressing them.

But most importantly, here was a sage who didnt patronize me. He didnt tell me that he belonged to the hallowed echelons of the spiritual elect. He didnt smile down beatifically from some rarefied stratosphere. Here was someone who didnt demand weak-kneed veneration. He seemed to be comfortable with equality. We could be friends, I thought (with some impunity, forgivable perhaps in a seventeen-year-old). If you met him on the road, went the famous Zen epigram (that I, like many others, found so enticing), kill him. Here at last, I felt, was someone who spoke my language.

More than a decade-and-a-half later, I find that he still speaks it. I have approached him time and againnot as a student of philosophy or history, but as a seeker, with a seekers mix of curiosity and desperation. He seldom lets me down. Few seem to have articulated the human predicament with quite the same degree of lucidity, psychological acuity and unsentimental precision. And it is as a seekernot as a scholarthat I approach him once again in this book. What empowered me in what often seemed like a formidable enterprise was the man himself and his own staunch refusal to turn the existential journey into a matter for experts and cardholders.