India has long been famous for its "ancient wisdom". Yet, the few historical sources that survive shed a woefully inadequate light on ancient Indian society, especially that of the Buddha and Mahavira. Still, evidence at hand suggests that around 600-500 BCE, in parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of north India, people were asking some very bold and original questions: What is the nature of thought and perception? What is the source of consciousness? Are virtue and vice absolute or mere social conventions? Old traditions were under attack, new trades and lifestyles were emerging, and urban life was in a churn, reducing the power of uptight Brahmins. Philosophical schools flourished in a lively marketplace of ideas. There were radical materialists, self-mortifying ascetics, chronic fatalists, rational skeptics, sensible pragmatists, mystical saints, and the ubiquitous miracle mongers.

Who were these people? How did they live, what did they believe, what did they aspire to? Due to the paucity of archaeological evidence and non-religious textual sources, insightful narratives on ancient India must rely more on "creative scholarship". An End to Suffering is one such work by Pankaj Mishra for the life and times of the Buddha. In refined prose that rises to a lyrical pitch at times, it mixes memoir, history and philosophy while exploring the Buddha's relevance today.

Like Socrates and Jesus, the Buddha too did not commit his ideas to writing. Early accounts of his life, written by his disciples in the ensuing centuries, seamlessly mix facts with all sorts of unlikely stories and miracles. So every modern account of the Buddha's life, including this one, can do no more than rationalize the scriptural stories. Mishra offers a wealth of detail about the Buddha's life and times—petty rivalries, politics, the march of empire against republics. His Buddha is pluralist and pacifist, opposed to trading in arms and favoring compassion in the policies of state. Caste and social class didn't matter to him, nor did he mention any gods, worship, prayers, or rituals. Indeed, it seems safe to infer that he was agnostic about the idea of God. Believing economic sufficiency to be a factor in moral development, he advocated improving the plight of the poor.

Notably, the Buddha's view of reality has stood firm alongside science. Mishra deftly situates the Buddha in the context of modern and ancient creeds, quoting many artists, scientists, and philosophers, including "Albert Einstein [who] called Buddhism the religion of the future since it was compatible with modern science." Mishra doesn't really discuss why Buddhism disappeared from India but he furnishes an absorbing narrative on the rediscovery of the Buddha's Indian roots by British adventurers and amateur archaeologists.

In his early twenties, Mishra, burdened by a sense that he had wasted his university years studying literature in Delhi while his peers worked hard for "the secure and stable life of marriage, children, paid holidays and pensions", moved from Delhi to a Himalayan village near Shimla called Mashobra. Led by his "increasingly desperate ambition" to become a writer, he plunged into Western literature and philosophy. He then had "little interest in Indian philosophy or spirituality", and was enthralled instead by the likes of Nietzsche, Hume, and Emerson.

Mishra's early interest in the Buddha also began during this Himalayan sojourn. Here was a radical rebel from Mishra's own part of the world, who, amid the ritualized pieties of Brahminical culture, had pursued an ethical life based on reason. He sought out books on the Buddha, traveled to places associated with him, and thought about writing a book on him. But soon journalistic work took him to Europe and America, reducing his worries about money, demystifying for him what had long been places in his mind, and illuminating the social context of his intellectual idols.

It is no surprise then that his growing attraction to the Buddha headed for a showdown with the ideas of Nietzsche, his hero at the time. Nietzsche vs. the Buddha is apt—besides shared views on the nature of reality, they were both cultural rebels who denied a role to god in their metaphysics. Years later, when Mishra was living in London, his "romantic image of Nietzsche began to dissolve." An End to Suffering offers a nuanced comparison of the two men, even as Mishra relates his own personal struggle with big ideas. Nietzsche, despite recognizing that there is no "stable and enduring individual identity", sought to elevate the superman's ego, while the Buddha cautioned against this.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Mishra now idolizes the Buddha. Indeed, he approaches the Buddha like a smitten scholar. We search but do not find him investigating the limits, contradictions, and drawbacks of the Buddha's path, which surely exist in all chosen paths. Even in his own day, the Buddha faced reasoned skepticism from the Carvakas. But despite this imbalance—without which perhaps he may never have written this book—the most resonant part of Mishra's work remains his intellectual approach to the Buddha.

Also engaging is Mishra's account of his own personal journey, from his callow youth in small town India to his success as a literary writer with a considered moral vision. An endearing honesty pervades much of this work. Stylistically (though not in caliber), his earnest-intimate prose, particularly his narrative on the rhythms of life in Mashobra, is reminiscent of Naipaul's An Enigma of Arrival. Mishra seems to admire Naipaul a good deal; he has even introduced two volumes of his writings. This book, however, makes us suspect that "how to measure up to the Buddha?" is a question that engages Mishra deeply—indicative of his significant departures, too, from Naipaul.

Mishra treats his genre-defying book like a commodious duffel bag, tossing in ruminations on topics as diverse as the Taliban, Khymer Rouge, Meiji Japan, Nagarjuna, Adam Smith, and Tagore. His brisk rehashing of history, frenetic analysis, and the kind of theorizing that a humbler writer might eschew suggests a case of overstuffing, but it turns out to be not too onerous. Its readability alone is a rare achievement, one with a manifest Indian sensibility.

But Mishra's writing on contemporary mass culture—be it "the cruel, garish world of middle-class India", or "the complacent European faith in history, rationality and science [that] brought about a new scale of devastation", or "a world powered mostly by greed, hatred and delusion"—often feels like the idle carping of a philosophical pessimist. It makes us wonder at times: Is Mishra relating the rarest of truths to us, or merely revealing his own psychological dispositions? Would the Buddha have approved?

NB: An expanded version of this review is available here (4500 words).