Amita Kanekar
‘A novel about the Buddha’ is the way the book is described. Let’s start from that. It’s probably to dispel any ambiguity about the book’s historical authenticity – it is a work of historical fiction. But such is the force of the narrative that it really becomes easy to believe that this version is probably the correct one! It is also the most novel way of presenting the Buddha that I have read.
The book has two parallel narratives. One traverses the path of the Buddha’s life, and the other is set almost three hundred after his death, with a monk named Upali serving as the protagonist.
Upali’s relatively ordinary life (despite his own history in Kalinga) is made extraordinary when the emperor Ashoka, hailed as the Beloved of the Gods, learns about Upali’s work on the Buddha’s life and teachings and officially commissions him to write it as part of a larger plan to put down a single version for immediate propagation, and posterity as well. Upali is hardly Ashoka’s supporter as he believes that no amount of Dhamma preaching by the emperor could wipe out the evils of Kalinga, and also that the emperor’s motivation for espousing Dhamma is more a political move than an inner transformation.
Upali’s version of the Buddha is an ordinary man who became extraordinary because of his enlightenment. But Upali still felt that Buddha had died unhappy mostly because of the Sangha he created and its manifestation of his message, and he could not be really considered a God, a stance that made a lot of his fellow monks unhappy. In fact, Upali tears down the mythology around the Buddha piece by piece from his birth to his attaining enlightenment, portraying him as someone filled with self-doubt and quite an under-performer in all facets to boot!
Many things appealed to me in this book, but I will restrict myself to a couple of examples. The first is the crisp narrative and the characters. I wondered about the kind of characters and the author’s motive in including them, and it was towards the end that it hit me – many of the characters are manifestations of our search – all of them find their own ways of making their peace with the world, which is I believe is the Buddha’s message – the middle path that acknowledges the world as a sorrowful place but understands its transience. The second is the universal and timeless nature of the human condition the author brings out. At an individual level, the questions that were raised in Siddhartha’s mind remain pertinent now, even more so. At a societal level, the way we treat fellow human beings has actually hardly changed. At a nation level, Magadh’s assimilation of territories and people, with scant regard to their nuanced differences in culture, values and beliefs and then the stamping down of laws is not different from what happens in contemporary times.
I have always wondered when and how the Buddha’s way became a religion, and how the movement got political tones. This book offers a superbly articulated perspective on it. A must read if you’re into history and/or philosophy.
