Volume 52, Number 4 · March 10, 2005
The Buddha's Cure
By Pico Iyer
An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
by Pankaj Mishra
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,422 pp., $25.00
In his new book, Free World, Timothy Garton Ash remembers the friends he had behind the Iron Curtain who used to tell him, 'We are the West trapped in the East.' There are many kinds of East, as Garton Ash quickly acknowledges, and yet sometimes they seem to be linked by this theme of imprisonment and what arises out of it, a longing for enlightenment and liberation (in a secular form). We in the West have watched for years would-be refugees going off to find—or lose—themselves in India, or in a Buddhist monastery, eager to absorb the 'wisdom of the East.' Yet what's awaiting them at the other end, increasingly, is people hungering for the wisdom of the West.
Review, 3504 words
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