Story of the Buddha

THIS is part of Weidenfeld and Nicolson's Lives series, which already boasts monographs by well-known scholars on individuals as varied as James Joyce, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mao Zedong and Joan of Arc; it promises to profile an equally if not more varied and exciting list of people in its forthcoming publications. This sort of biographical project obviously satisfies an important need and audience.

Karen Armstrong, author of Buddha, is a prolific writer. She has written a number of books on powerful religious themes. These include titles such as Islam: A Short History, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis. Buddha is her most recent book, and reflects her interest in identifying cross-cultural parallels and processes in the world of religion. Writing a life-story of the Buddha, Jesus or Muhammad is a tricky business. Taking on all three is a definitely not a job for the faint-hearted writer.

Armstrong is frank about her methodology. She disavows any ambitions of aiming at a definitive historical biography. Nor is she bothered about struggling to sift fact from legend to prise out the elusive threads of the Buddha's "real" personality from the thick web of tradition, to uncover the man behind the hagiographical mask - tasks which would be daunting, if not impossible. Her book is a study of the image of the Buddha's journey through life as it unfolds in Buddhist texts of different ages.

Naturally, the life of the Buddha has too much in it to be told as a simple tale. One of Armstrong's objectives is to make the Buddha and his teaching intelligible and meaningful to the modern western audience, its concerns and its predicaments. The frequent parallels that are drawn with the Judaeo-Christian tradition stem from this objective as also from the author's own previous research and writing. For Armstrong, the story of the Buddha's life has a particular relevance for the existential crisis of the modern world.

While this sort of approach makes for a certain sympathetic treatment of the subject, sometimes the cross-cultural parallels become too frequent, too laboured, and even inappropriate. There is also a problem with the translations or explanations of certain key words in the Buddhist philosophical vocabulary. For instance Armstrong tells us that the sense of the important word dukkha, does not correspond to its standard translation of "suffering"; she insists that its meaning is better conveyed by terms such as "unsatisfactory", "flawed", and "awry". In fact, the author repeatedly uses the idea of the world having gone awry in a number of places where she offers her interpretation of what must have been going on in the Buddha's head at crucial junctures in his life. This simply does not work. Neither does the use of certain terms, explanations, and analogies drawn from the Judaeo- Christian tradition - the concept of "brahman" being explained as "the underlying principle that made the world holy"; or the suggestion that Siddhartha yearned to "live in holiness"; or the suggestion that nature had become menacing to Indians of the Axial Age, in the same way as it had become inimical to Adam and Eve after their lapse. Further, in her eagerness to cut from ancient India to Iran to China to Jerusalem, to show the oneness of the message preached by the great prophets of the world, Armstrong often over-emphasises similarity, and ignores difference.

The book is clearly carefully researched. Although the author does trip up on historical details in certain places, a great deal of effort has gone into elaborating what was happening in the Ganga valley in the time of the Buddha, and in patiently explaining the different philosophical currents of Sixth Century B.C. North India. Several important episodes of the Buddha's life from the traditional hagiographies are recounted well and sensitively. Armstrong's Buddha is for the uninitiated reader who would like a readable introduction to the Buddha, his time, and his doctrine. What this reader will also encounter are Karen Armstrong's own ruminations and reflections on existence framed within the story of the Buddha's life.

UPINDER SINGH

Buddha, Karen Armstrong, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London, 2000, Lives series, editor James Atlas.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Indian art in New York
Next     : Humour in politics