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Journeys To The East
Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All
By Perry Garfinkel
Harmony Books (Hardcover, $24.95),
Three River Books (Paperback, $13.95), 336 pp.
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond
By Pankaj Mishra
Picador (Hardcover, US$25; Paperback, US$15), 332 pp.
Reviewed by Rasoul Sorkhabi
Our fascination with the East has some legitimate historical reasons. For example, writing as well as all major religions, including Christianity, emerged in that part of the world. Since Marco Polo’s travelogue in the thirteenth century, however, journeys to the East have captured the imagination of the Western people. Of course, the nature of traveling, the East, and the Western mind have all changed through time; nonetheless, their significance has increased not diminished because of the world’s interlinked economy, resources, and geopolitics and because of advances in telecommunications and transportation. Recently I read two wonderful travel books, all about the East, by two different authors. I read them during my travels to Japan and India, and I reflect on these books because they report on not only our sweet ideals but also bitter realities of the East, and thus provide a balanced perspective.
I confess I do not like the title of Peter Garfinkel’s Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All. But the book cover claimed it to be “A National Bestseller.” There was an interesting question on the back cover: “Why does a 2500-year-old tradition seem more relevant today than ever before?” And there was a quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama in praise of the book: “Presents Buddhism as a practical approach to human problems.” All these hooked me to the book and I bought it.
Garfinkel, formerly a journalist for the New York Times, as he mentions in this book, was attracted to Buddhist meditation years ago. However, this book grew out of a National Geographic assignment for him (“Buddha Rising,” NG, December 2005) to document the spread of Buddhism in Asia and around the world. Following a 20-week trip to various Buddhist countries and centers, he expanded his notes and observations into this book.
Coming from a Jewish family, Garfinkel’s first stop on this spiritual travelogue was Auschwitz (now a museum) in Poland, where he recounts the Holocaust as a modern-time, wide-scale example of the “Buddha’s truth of suffering.” He then proceeds to India and about 2500 years back in time, to where and when the Buddha proclaimed his Dharma. Now that Buddhism is a fashionable religion in the West, Indian officials are commercializing the Buddhist sites to attract more foreign revenues. Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Japan are the other stops in this travelogue. Garfinkel chats with several renowned Buddhist leaders and monks including Goenka (the reviver of Vipassana meditation) living in India, Ariyaratne (the founder of a social service movement called Sarvodaya Sharmadana) in Sri Lanka), the “Ecology monks” in Thailand, the Shao-Lin monk Shi De Cheng in China, and Hoitsu Suzuki Roshi (the son of Shunryu Suzuki – author of the classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind) in Japan.
I learned two important points from this travelogue. First, Buddhist leaders in Asia are increasingly engaged in social services, and this sharply contrasts with the Buddhist “enlightenment” buffs in the Western countries. This book is a chronicle of “Engaged Buddhism” – a term coined by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh during the Vietnam War of the 1960s. Second, there is a mismatch between the idealized, theoretical brand of Buddhism promoted in the West and the realities of folk Buddhism prevailing in Asian cultures (consider, for example, the money-minded monks Garfinkel met in Thailand).
The book concludes with the author’s visits to Naropa University in Colorado (the first Buddhist university in the West, founded in 1974 by the Tibetan monk Chogyam Trungpa), to Thich Nhat Hanh’s residence (Plum Village) in southern France (where the author – a divorced father – unsuccessfully falls in love with a young Vietnamese girl), and finally to Dharamsala, India, where he has an interview with the Dalai Lama (who has been living in that Himalayan town since 1959). In this interview, the Dalai Lama points out that Buddhism has many aspects: religious culture and customs, a science of the mind and psyche, a philosophy for human life and happiness, teaching meditation and enlightenment of the individual, and promotion of universal peace, compassion, and socially-beneficial actions. Although there is a common thread running through all these Buddhist aspects, various groups emphasize on some particular aspects. While no single book can sufficiently delve into all these aspects of Buddhism, overall, Garfinkel’s book is informative and entertaining.
Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond articulates some of the burning issues of south-central Asia, and shatters the “Shangri-la” views of the Himalayan countries. Mishra is a rising star in India’s literary world with such reputed works as An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004). His new book, reviewed here, is a collection of nine travel essays about India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet (China), and Nepal. In each chapter, Mishra narrates a local story of ethnic, religious, economic, political or military conflict and injustice. Mishra’s writing is charming, honest, and attentive to both details and big picture. His interviews with locals bring these stories to life.
Mishra begins with India’s holy city of Benaras (Varanasi) and reports on poverty and dirty politics through the life and death of a student friend. India is regarded as the most populous democracy in the world, but through Mishra’s lens, the reader gains a sense of how it actually functions or mis-functions. Mishra analyses the postcolonial “dynastic” rule of the Nehru-Indira Gandhi family, and his bitter observations of the 2000 elections in Allahabad, a politically significant city in northern India. In “Ayodhya: The Modernity of Hinduism,” Mishra recounts the demolition of a fifteenth-century Muslim mosque in the town of Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu fanatics (who believe that the mosque was built on the site of an ancient Hindu temple belonging to Lord Rama) and takes this case to point out how the Hindu fanaticism blended with nationalism poses a challenge to democracy and minority rights in modern India. Bollywood (India’s Hollywood in Bombay) is the world’s largest film industry; it is where “India shines.” But as Mishra portrays through the successful career and complex psychology of the filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, Bollywood itself contains both pleasures and pains of modern India, and is struggling to keep up with the nation’s societal and economic changes. Mishra also takes us to the province of Kashmir (“a paradise on Earth,” according to a well-know poem) in northern India. In the past two decades, “this paradise on Earth” (according to a well-known local poem) has become a tragic scene of bloodshed and confusion, Pakistan’s interference and Muslim Jihadism, the Indian Army’s human rights abuses, and blind nationalism, militarism and violence. It is a sad situation for the local Kashmiris, and it seems that common sense by all parties coupled with regional economic and political developments is the best solution.
The other South Asian peoples face worse situations. For the past three decades, Afghanistan has been a battle-ground for Soviet army, the Afghan Mujahedeen, the Taliban and local warlords, and more recently the American war on terrorism. Pakistan has been devastated by military dictatorships and Muslim fanatics. Nepal has been wounded by (the former) dictatorial monarchy and the Maoist militia. Since 1950, the Chinese Communist Party and Army have invaded and ruled Tibet. Mishra argues that Tibetan culture and people have suffered both from the 1960s “Cultural Revolution” and the recent Chinese “modernization,” which in practice translates into demographic and economic empowerment of non-Tibetan Chinese immigrants in Tibet. In all of these cases, as Mishra concludes, the result is the same: People, the real inhabitants, have suffered; their land and resources have been raped or ruined.
The title of the book reminds me of André Malraux’s 1926 book The Temptation of the West, which documented an exchange of letters about the Eastern mind and the Western modernity between a young Chinese visiting Europe and a young Frenchman traveling to China in the 1920s. Mishra does not mention this, nor does he explain why the political, religious, ethnic conflicts and injustices in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet should be summed up as “temptations of the West.” Of course, one may argue that modernization creates conflicts with traditions, but the roots of violent conflicts, whether in the East or in the West, can be traced (as the Himalayan religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism teach us) to human’s greed and ignorance (from the individual to political levels).
Reading these travelogues, I was left with the feeling that we have come a long way from Rudyard Kipling’s famous line that “Oh, East is East, and West is West; and never the twain shall meet.” Now, in terms of both potentialities and problems, East is in West, and West is in East. And at a deeper level, journeys to the East or to the West are really a “homecoming” for us realizing what the Indian sage Krishnamurti said years ago: “You are the world: In oneself lies the whole world if you know how to look.”
Rasoul Sorkhabi, Ph.D., has studied, lived and traveled in the East for many years, and currently lives in Salt Lake City. He has contributed several articles and book reviews to previous issues of New Perspectives.
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