Book Review: Buddhaland Brooklyn

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Buddhaland Brooklyn by Richard C. Morais
(Allen & Unwin $36.99)

Auckland, New Zealand -- The premise of Richard C. Morais' Buddhaland Brooklyn is that an apparent fish-out-of-water can eventually find, and adjust to, its new pond. Morais takes rather a long time to get there, but he makes it.

Oda, an 11-year-old boy from what is described as a quaint mountain village (with 15,000 people, no less), is sent to train as a Buddhist monk at the nearby head temple of the Headwater sect of Mahayana Buddhism. After nearly 30 years in this secluded environment, he is chosen to go to New York to set up a new temple in Brooklyn.

Almost greater than the shock of the huge city on Oda's sensibilities is the motley collection of American Buddhists he has to re-educate into the traditional ways of religious practice. Although reportedly proficient in English, Oda has difficulty understanding the Bronx dialect - and he would not be alone in that - but he also has cultural misunderstandings and misguided practices to negotiate.

His arrogance and isolation from his new flock do not endear him to most of his believers. Only when Oda realises his shortcomings and appreciates the care he has unwittingly been receiving does he understand what acceptance really means, and finds the true meaning of his faith.

Morais' style of writing is difficult to analyse. His descriptive passages are convincing, although adjective-heavy, but the frequent juxtapositions of the spiritual with the risible are disruptive.

In one instance, Oda finds solace on a wooded slope beside the river, at peace under the trees as he watches a troop of macaques "pick their noses and scratch their bums".

From the sublime to the gor-blimey, as my mother used to say.

Characterisation is another area where Morais has difficulty. The cast of characters in Buddhaland Brooklyn is wide and varied, but they do not convince or appeal.

They seem uniformly unable or unwilling to accept Oda's form of Buddhism, which was what they had, after all, requested, and all seem to confirm an outsider's rather unsympathetic view of Americans.

But all comes right in the end. The temple is built, Oda decides to stay in New York rather than return to his cloistered life in Japan, and the true meaning of enlightenment reveals itself to this turbulent priest.

Morais does not make life easy for himself either. Rather than writing about what he knows, he reaches for subjects outside his realm of experience and borrows heavily from works of mysticism and religion, which he freely admits.

This imparts a degree of confusion and lack of credibility. Conversation is stilted and unconvincing and the phrasing is often clumsy.

In Morais' first novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, he followed the path of a young Indian man from humble beginnings in his family restaurant to three Michelin-star success. This rags-to-riches pilgrimage seems to be his schtick. One wonders where he will take it next, but not with a great deal of interest.

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Phoebe Falconer is an Auckland reviewer.

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The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon – review

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Naomi Alderman enjoys the ride in a Buddhist-themed graphic novel

London, UK -- Graphic novels are peculiarly suited to the discussion of Buddhist themes. That frozen moment in each pane, paused for us to examine, more details revealing themselves the harder we look, has something in common with meditation and the desire to appreciate the "nowness" of each moment of life. The Book of Pages by David Whiteland is a wonderful meditation on Buddhism and technology, and Deepak Chopra has produced a comic book about the Buddha.

Illustration from The Nao of Brown

The Nao of Brown is an engrossing and beautiful addition to the list. Nao is a charming half-Japanese woman with a bob and cute shoes, who works in a shop selling Japanese ephemera. She's obsessed with a set of Japanese comics called Ichi (Dillon has built a dedicated Twitter account and website), and falls in love with a washing-machine repairman who looks like one of the characters, bearded father figure Nobodaddy. She's an artist. She rides a bicycle.

She'd be a tooth-achingly sweet "pixie dream girl" if she didn't also suffer from sudden, invasive, compulsive thoughts of harming other people. Graphic novels excel at moving smoothly from the internal to external world, combining the action and intensity of a movie with the access to inner life of a novel. When Nao's sitting in an aeroplane, we see her vision of herself opening the emergency door. When she's confronted by a pregnant woman, she's overwhelmed by thoughts of stabbing the swollen belly. We, like Nao, are sometimes initially confused about whether she's really done these things or not.

Her meditation, therefore, and her interest in Buddhist drawing, aren't just an adorable pastime – she feels constantly on the verge of breakdown. Dillon's illustrative style is clear and crisp, but incredibly expressive; the motion of Nao's shoulders, the tilt of her head as she's talking, let us know that she may be about to have another compulsive episode.

The book is very funny about the experience of learning meditation and Buddhism – however hard we try to rise above ourselves, we're always irritatingly anchored, and the beaming faces of the slightly over-keen teachers at Nao's local meditation centre tell the reader it's OK to laugh, even while Nao is taking it all extremely seriously.

Nao's story is interspersed with the elliptical tale of Ichi character Pictor, a half-man, half-tree creature who, despite having a conker for a head, goes off to join the army. The rich, illustrative techniques of the Pictor pages, with their nods towards the decorated margins of a medieval Book of Hours, form a neat contrast to Nao's story. We can see why Nao might be drawn to these strange, serene images with their intricate detail demanding close examination.

The style contrasts, very deliberately, with the sketchy, sometimes impressionistic, illustration of Nao's own story. The narrative is meandering and thoughtful, taking in Nao's flatmate, her family and her friend and boss at the toy store. There's a light plot: Nao fails to see that her friend is in love with her, and her relationship with the washing-machine repairman is inevitably threatened by her OCD.

The end reads as Hollywood romantic comedy in a way that's unworthy of what went before. But then, as Buddhism would tell us, to focus on the destination is to look in the wrong place. The matter of life, and of a book, lies in the journey, not its end, and this novel is a very fine journey indeed.

• The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman is published by Viking.

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Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor by Charles Allen – review

The top of the Ashoka pillar at Sarnath in India. Photograph: The Art Archive/Alamy

It is difficult to imagine a life as full of grandeur and drama as that of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, but it is more difficult still to imagine how such a life could ever have been lost or forgotten. From 270BC to 233BC, Ashoka ruled every part of the subcontinent except for India's southernmost tip, an empire larger than that of any Indian ruler before or since; his influence spilled even further abroad, into Sri Lanka and past the furthest border of present-day Afghanistan. He shepherded the rise of one of the world's major religions, and in a remarkable U-turn, he transformed himself from a callous conqueror into an intelligent and pacific ruler. Yet, as Charles Allen's Ashoka shows, the details of his life had to be prised out from the crevices of the past, in a process that revealed as much about the emperor as about the caprices of Indian history.

The rediscovery of Ashoka began with the rediscovery of India's Buddhist past. In the late 18th century, scholars were working at synchronising India's calendar of history with Europe's; the philologist William Jones called the resolution of this chronological gulf "the grand desideratum of oriental literature". Around the same time, Buddhist figurines and inscriptions began to be unearthed across India's northern plains. These archaeological finds presented something of a puzzle: they pointed to the vigorous heyday of a religion that was, in the India of the 18th and 19th centuries, in near-terminal decline. Buddhism had left behind no majestic temples, and "there were certainly no Buddhists in India and no Buddhist literature", Allen points out. Under whose patronage, then, did the faith once flourish as mightily as its artifacts seemed to indicate?

Allen is adept, if on occasion ploddingly so, at putting back together this vast academic jigsaw for our benefit. He recounts what Jones would have learned from Greek narratives of Alexander's attempted conquest of India and from subsequent ambassadorial communiqués from the Maurya dynasty's court. He traces the painstaking decryption of the Brahmi script, dating to the third century BC, by James Prinsep, an energetic assay master in the Calcutta Mint. He describes the assiduous legwork of members of the Asiatic Society, which yielded metal-plate inscriptions, sculptures of heartbreaking beauty, remnants of the humped Buddhist reliquaries known as stupas, and elaborate edicts inscribed, on Ashoka's orders, on slabs of rock across the subcontinent. And as Prinsep and his colleagues did, Allen reconciles these threads of evidence with strands from other texts – in particular from the Mahavamsa, Sri Lanka's great Buddhist chronicle – and thus arrives at the story of Ashoka as we know it.

None of this is new material, especially for Allen, who along with John Keay has worn something of a groove in scholarship about the Raj-era resuscitation of Indian history. Anton Führer, the deceitful archaeologist in Allen's The Buddha and Dr Führer (2008), flickers in and out of Ashoka's pages, trafficking in forged Buddhist relics and lying about his discovery of Kapilavastu, the city where the Buddha grew up. More significantly, Ashoka reprises the choicest parts of The Buddha and the Sahibs, Allen's 2002 book about men such as Jones and Prinsep – orientalists in the original, sweet vein of being intellectually curious about Asia, rather than in the pejorative Saidian sense. Allen emphasises that the study of ancient India would have suffered without scholars of the sort derided by Edward Said as "dead white men in periwigs" – a point that is both valuable and arguable, but also a point that he has made before.

An abundance of clues about Ashoka began to emerge from the work of these Indologists. The Mahavamsa spoke in glowing terms of an Indian king who had ordained his own son and daughter and sent them to Sri Lanka to spread the Buddha's message. Stone reliefs dug up from the sites of Buddhist stupas depicted an unusually unidealised king, "short, paunchy and with a grossly pumpkin-like face," as Allen writes. (The Ashokavadana, an ancient text in Sanskrit, called Ashoka's skin "rough and unpleasant to the touch".) Most intriguing were the rock edicts, scattered across an enormous area, all proclaiming a ruler's commitment to non-violence, to righteousness, and to a sophisticated notion of secularism.

By the final years of the 19th century, the contours of Ashoka's life had been established: his adroit power-grab that denied his elder brother the throne; his rampaging invasion of the eastern province of Kalinga, in which his army slew more than 100,000 men; his abrupt but long-lasting conversion to Buddhism; and his support of his new faith, so munificent that he is said to have built 84,000 stupas and donated millions of pieces of gold to the monastic order. But the physical legacy of this zenith of Buddhism was destroyed twice over: first by Hindu Brahmins, who were furious at Ashoka's sponsorship of Buddhism, and who would in subsequent centuries cannily co-opt the Buddha as one of the 10 avatars of Vishnu; and then by Islamist invaders, who razed stupas as well as the illustrious Buddhist university of Nalanda, in present-day Bihar.

Allen might usefully have devoted more space to this calculated domination of Buddhism by Hinduism, which so effectively wiped out traces of Ashoka's reign, and which contradicts descriptions of Hinduism as tolerant and ever-benign. (In 1905, during a lecture in Johannesburg, Mahatma Gandhi stoutly denied any decline of Buddhism in India, claiming: "No Hindu bore the Buddhist any ill will.") Allen is perhaps also too cursory in examining the effect of the rediscovery of Ashoka on the India of the late 19th century, although he briefly mentions the emperor's influence on a particular group of Indians: the new freedom-fighters.

To a burgeoning independence movement, Ashoka proved to be a touchstone on several levels. Gandhi praised Ashoka's non-violence and his latter-day lack of imperial ambition. Jawaharlal Nehru admired Ashoka's secularism and his efficient administration. For nationalists of all stripes, Ashoka was, along with the Mughal emperor Akbar, the soundest rebuttal to the colonial assertion that India's diverse territories had never been united as thoroughly as they were under the British. Ashoka inspired hope that, if India had once been whole and serene under the wisdom of a native ruler, it might well be similarly whole and serene again.

Samanth Subramanian's Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast, will be published by Atlantic later this year.

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Book review: 'Beyond Religion' by the Dalai Lama

For most of his 76 years, the 14th Dalai Lama has been the spiritual light for followers of Tibetan Buddhism, his every word parsed for guidance to living a better, more fulfilling life. Awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama has been an outspoken advocate for compassion, meditation and religious tolerance.

Now, as he steps down as leader of Tibet, the perpetually smiling monk in saffron and burgundy robes makes in "Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World" what some may regard as a heretical pronouncement: You don't need religion to lead a happy and ethical life.

Amid the clash of global, multicultural societies and religious values today, he argues in his new book that what is more important is "an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally accessible to those with faith and those without; a secular ethics."

A metaphor the Dalai Lama likes to use goes like this: The difference between ethics and religion is like the difference between water and tea. Ethics without religious content is water, a critical requirement for health and survival. Ethics grounded in religion is tea, a nutritious and aromatic blend of water, tea leaves, spices, sugar and, in Tibet, a pinch of salt.

"But however the tea is prepared, the primary ingredient is always water," he says. "While we can live without tea, we can't live without water. Likewise, we are born free of religion, but we are not born free of the need for compassion."

This is anything but a book denouncing faith. But some readers, particularly those with strong religious beliefs, are bound to find the Dalai Lama's argument troubling. Even the power of prayer has dissipated in his eyes. "In fact, I consider prayer to be of immense psychological benefit," he says. "But we must accept that its tangible results are often hard to see. When it comes to obtaining certain, direct results, it is clear that prayer cannot match the achievements of, for instance, modern science."

This volume could be viewed as the distillation of the Dalai Lama's lifelong interest in science and its evolving understanding of consciousness, subjective experience, rhythms of nature and the fabric of the universe. It draws heavily from personal recollections and regular meetings with researchers in the fields of physics, cosmology, biology, psychology and neuroscience.

In language that is relaxed and clear, the Dalai Lama suggests that a concern for the welfare of others, "when combined with reflection on our personal experiences and coupled with simple common sense, can, I believe, offer a strong case for the benefits of cultivating basic human values that does not rely on religious principles or faith at all. And I welcome this."

Buddhism, which has a history of adapting to changing times and cultures, was founded by Siddhartha Gautama in India about the 6th century BC and then spread to China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and Vietnam. It arrived in the United States in the 19th century and was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s by the likes of Buddhist missionary D.T. Suzuki, author Alan Watts and beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Today a new American hybrid of Buddhism is blossoming, fed by a large representation of Jewish practitioners.

Some may disagree with the Dalai Lama's perspective, but he does a credible job of arguing why we should "move beyond our limited sense of closeness to this or that group or identity, and instead cultivate a sense of closeness to the entire human family."

"The sequencing of the human genome, for example, has shown that racial differences constitute only a tiny fraction of our genetic makeup, the vast majority of which is shared by all of us," the Dalai Lama writes. "In fact, at the genome level, the differences between individuals appear more pronounced than those between different races. The time has come I believe for each of us to start thinking and acting on the basis of an identity rooted in the phrase 'we human beings.'"

Given that the Dalai Lama has given more time to getting in touch with his inner-Buddha than anyone else alive, his book offers a fascinating approach to moral guidance in an age of technological globalization and multicultural societies.

louis.sahagun@latimes.com

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Book Review: The Bodhisattva's Brain

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Buddhism Naturalized, by Owen Flanagan; Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen by James H Austin – review. Buddhism has never been more popular in the west. A sceptic's view makes fascinating reading, while a how-to guide makes the usual exaggerated claims

London, UK -- Despite the long-term decline in the west in churchgoing, people's yearning for some kind of transcendence appears as strong as ever, echoed in the common refrain: "I'm not religious but I am spiritual."

<< Buddha statue at Po Lin Monastery, Hong Kong. Photograph: Gareth Jones/Getty Images/Asia Images

Buddhism seems well placed to capitalise on this pent-up demand in the spiritual market. It appears to promise all the goodness of religion without the harmful supernatural additives. Even better, scientists in white coats are increasingly being wheeled out to show that it is clinically proven to increase happiness, improve attention and reduce stress. Add a charismatic CEO in the form of the Dalai Lama and you have a brand set not so much to conquer the world as win it over with loving kindness.

But is Buddhism really as amenable to the modern mind as it is claimed? More specifically, asks philosopher Owen Flanagan in his brilliant The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, can Buddhism be made compatible with a view that posits the existence of nothing other than the natural world, in which objects can be moved by gravitational forces but not karmic ones?

Refreshingly, Flanagan accepts that such "naturalised" Buddhism would not be "authentic", not only because, like all religions, it comes in numerous variants anyway, but because historically it has just been too infused with "mind-numbing and wishful hocus pocus". But if you subtract this "superstition and magical thinking", are you left with a valuable, truthful set of practices and beliefs?

What makes this book so important is not so much its cautiously affirmative answer but how it is justified. To make his case, Flanagan has to address issues concerning the nature of self, what recent neurological research tells us about human wellbeing, and what it means to be happy and live a good life. Much has been written about all of these in recent years and almost all of it is confused, misleading, simplistic or all three. Anyone looking for an antidote to this sloppiness will find it in Flanagan, who brings much needed clarity, insight and sophistication to the debate. Flanagan explains why excitable claims that Buddhist practice makes us happy, wealthier and wiser are premature and that research to date is extremely limited both in its sample size and in what conclusions it justifies.

Such sober scepticism cast a dark shadow over my reading of Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen . In essence it is a how-to guide for Zen meditation, and as such it does its job pretty efficiently. But James H Austin makes just the kind of exaggerated claims that Flanagan deflates. We are told time and again how Buddhist meditation brings incredible mental clarity and insight, but if that's true, why aren't more top scientists and intellectuals Buddhists? The obvious point that is not perceived with much clarity at all by Buddhism's proponents is that only certain types of seeing, if any at all, are improved by meditation, mostly concerning the impermanent nature of self.

The other vice Austin betrays is the liberal use of neurological research where it is inconclusive or irrelevant. Given that no one doubts meditation changes your mental state, pointing out that fMRI scans reveal changes in the brain too is hardly revelatory. This kind of stating the obvious reaches its apotheosis when Austin points to the startling discovery that in research into mindfulness meditation, which is largely about directing attention, data "tend to point" to brain areas that are – guess what – "related to the regulation of attention". To be fair, as I held the book at such moments, the wisdom of another of Austin's repeated recommendations hit me with remarkable clarity: I ought to learn to let go.

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