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. (more…)