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Pankaj Mishra has nothing good to say about those who put themselves forward as public intellectuals. Yet his own articulate and wide-ranging engagement with politics, religion, culture, and economics (via journalism, criticism, travel writing, and fiction) makes a convincing case for what a public intellectual "in the real sense of the word" might actually look like. Mishra's writings all share an abundant curiosity, an ethical conscientiousness toward the world and its inhabitants, and an exacting way with words. His modest, contemplative authorial presence is constantly informed by the larger contexts of geopolitics and philosophy.
Mishra is the author of the novel The Romantics; a travelogue, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India; and, most recently, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, an exploration of Buddhism and the life of the Buddha. He also edited the volume India in Mind and is a regular contributor to such publications as the New York Review of Books and the Guardian. Recently, Mishra has been traveling in and writing about China. My interview with Mishra was conducted via emails between Los Angeles, London, Dharamsala, Delhi, and various cities in China.
-Wendy Cheng
Loggernaut Reading Series: In An End to Suffering, you write that, "Just as
European travelers had once alerted me to the India
the Buddha had belonged to, so American Buddhists made
me see the new role the Buddha had acquired in the
modern world." What does it mean to you that your
engagement with Buddhism was facilitated and mediated
by Western eyes?
Pankaj Mishra: I suppose that while I was in India,
where Buddhism had died a long time ago, I had thought
of the Buddha as too much of a historical figure. In
America, I was intrigued to see how his teachings had
a great impact upon extremely well-educated
people—people who may have had little time for the
organized religions they had been born into but were
ready to embrace the ideas of an Indian thinker. This
really started the process in my head of rethinking
about the Buddha, seeing his position in the modern
world, or more precisely what were the aspects of his
teachings that people still found relevant in a world
where science and technology had rendered so many of
the old belief systems irrelevant. It made me see how
Buddhism could serve as an alternative way of living
and conceptualizing life, how its critique of the
self, undertaken through the practice of meditation
and mindfulness, could become a personal antidote to
the ideologies that preached self-interest and
self-aggrandizing. In that sense American Buddhism
really is different from all the other revivals and
growths of Buddhism around the world. Nowhere do you
see it so sharply counterposed to a dominant way of
life, the reigning belief systems.
LRS: Why do you feel Buddhism has gained a foothold
with the extremely well-educated, as opposed to other
sectors of American society?
Mishra: I suppose that Buddhism doesn't offer
consolations of the kind found in other non-western
religions that have become popular in America. There
is no God to pray to, no prescribed rituals that could
give order to one's life, no promise of an afterlife.
Instead there is, for the uninitiated at least, a
rather cerebral worldview, and an austere spiritual
regimen. I also think that Buddhism has always
attracted the elite of whatever society it has
traveled to, partly because you need to have
traveled through a certain experience of materialism
in order to arrive at the sense that there is
something problematic about desire and longing, how
they don't lead to happiness, and more often than not
lead to unhappiness. If you are still struggling to
fulfill your fantasies of wealth, power, status,
Buddhism is less likely to appeal to you.
LRS: Yet one of Buddhism's founding premises, that all
life is suffering, seems like it would have a stronger
resonance with the poor and unfortunate. During the
course of researching your book, did you look into the
attraction of Buddhism for these groups, such as the
Dalits in India?
Mishra: Yes, I think it is possible to take a
pessimistic or fatalistic view of Buddhism and
conclude that life is suffering. The Hindu version of
this idea does induce a kind of fatalism and
complacency in India. But Buddhism diagnoses suffering
as a mental condition, one that can be removed. It is
saying that both the rich and poor can find happiness
if only they are able to control their minds, their
desires. Such an austere regimen is likely to appeal
more to the well-off people than to people who are
still living materially deprived lives. The Dalit movement in India has interpreted Buddhism rather
radically: as a program for political action. There
are aspects of the Buddha's message that can be seen
as a critique of social and economic hierarchies, but
he never thought of organized politics as a means to
redemption.
LRS: You've suggested that American Buddhism is
distinct from other Buddhist outgrowths and revivals,
but what, if anything, keeps it from being another
packaged form of Orientalism—of what Edward Said
referred to as "Eastern sects, philosophies, and
wisdoms domesticated for local European use"?
Mishra: Well, it has been domesticated to a certain
extent—I talk a little bit about that in my book. But
I don't see that as an unwelcome development, rather
as an inevitable and necessary one. Wherever Buddhism
has travelled—China, Tibet, Japan, Korea—it has been
adapted to local cultural, pre-existing ways of life.
Why shouldn't it do the same in America? I am not
worried about Buddhism in America being an example of
Orientalism. The knowledge of Buddhism doesn't allow
anyone to control people or nations in the way
Oriental knowledges may have done in the past. I think
we may be in some danger of ignoring the enormous
richness of Buddhism's encounter with America culture
if we confine ourselves to narrow political
prejudices.
LRS: Two solitary figures persist in An End to
Suffering and your novel, The Romantics: one of the
questing writer/traveler caught up in romantic
idealism; and the other that of the monk, in an
imperturbable stasis of wisdom and peace. Your work
seems to struggle with how to reconcile these two
figures, and how to engage them both productively and
ethically with the problems and complexities of the
contemporary world. What does each of these figures
mean to you, and why the struggle?
Mishra: It is hard for me to talk about this, and I
wonder if I should become too self-conscious about a
process of personal growth of discovery that is often
retarded by excessive self-consciousness. You make the
analogy between my novel and the Buddha book, it is
very interesting, and I can only say that these two
figures of the monk and the writer may persist in my
writing for a while, for they do seem to represent two
ways of living that I find and have always found very
attractive.
LRS: Is there an example of someone who embodies
either of these figures who has been an important
influence on you?
Mishra: There are people who have managed to combine
the two roles in their personalities. I think of
Thomas Merton and Gandhi, and among writers, Tagore,
Thomas Mann, and Simone Weil. Among present-day
writers, I admire J.M. Coetzee for refusing to accept
the public role of the wise writer and seer.
LRS: You've lived in New York, Delhi, England, and
Mashobra, and you've spent time in Dharamsala. In An
End to Suffering, your encounter with your friend
Helen, who has become a nun, in San Francisco, and
your participation in a meditation retreat there seem
to help you to understand and reconcile the
contradictions of "Westerners" taking on "Eastern"
spirituality (of which you were quite critical when
you lived in India). What are some other ways in which
living in England (colonizer of India) and America (current imperial power) has changed your views of
"East" and "West"?
Mishra: I think it is important to move away from
larger political concepts like colonialism and
imperialism in one's own personal view of the world.
They may be important as hermeneutic devices in
writing about politics and literature, but they are
not very helpful when you live
[continues...]
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