Book Review: Deepak Chopra's Buddha!

You think you want enlightenment? Think again!

First, read Deepak Chopra’s Buddha, then see if you won’t want to leave the Spiritual path posthaste!

In his novel, Buddha, Chopra brings to life the Prince who would be “the enlightened one.”

The novel starts off with the birth of Siddhartha, the only son of King Suddhodana of Sakya (563 BCE). As was the custom, astrologers were called to foretell the Prince’s destiny at a naming ceremony, but they hesitated sharing their findings with the king.

The astrologers could see that Siddhartha was destined to be great, having “dominion in the four corners of the earth.” But what they feared telling King Suddhodana was that Siddhartha was the Prince who would not be King! It took a courageous hermit monk to tell the king what the others dared not tell: The Prince had two destinies, one to rule the Kingdom and another "to rule his own soul.”

King Suddhodana then sought counsel from a high Brahmin priest. He told the king that the only way to thwart his son’s destiny and make him king was to make him a prisoner for 32 years. The prince should not be allowed to see any human suffering. If he did, then the prince would follow the destiny of his “soul.”

So, the king quickly devised an elaborate plan to keep his son locked within the palace walls, where the only people and things he saw were happy and good. All the old, crippled and sick people, including the lepers, were sent away or confined to their homes under house arrests. Funerals were only allowed at night, and then, with no public ceremony.

For years, Prince Siddhartha grew up in a seeming paradise. He got married and had a son, all by the age of 29. Then his fate intervened.

It caused the Prince Siddharta to eventually witness sorrow, human suffering and death. Even his own soul began to penetrate his “beingness” and moved within to lead him on. It was then Siddhartha, the prince, left the palace and began his search to become the Buddha: “the one who is awake.”

Assuming the name and identity of "Gautama," a penniless monk, the prince walked barefoot and begged for food and shelter. He sought counsel of more seasoned monks along the way, some who became his teacher. But with his soul as his guide, Gautama eventually became disillusioned with the practices of these older monks and struck out to find “enlightenment” and the “truth about who he really was” on his own.

Gautama embarked on an austerity program to overcome his “karma.” This, he described as keeping “good and evil in balance. Karma is a divine law. When the law is violated, however innocently, it can’t be undone. One snapped thread alters the whole design, one misdeed alters a person’s destiny.”

The austerity program Gautama undertook had no other parallel, as he set out to defy death itself. “Death has been stalking me since the day I was born,” he said. “Eventually, no matter how hard I struggle, death will win---the hunter will kill his prey. But until then I have one chance to turn the tables. If I move quickly, I may be able to kill death first. There’s no other way, not if I want to be free.”

During his search for freedom, Gautama ate only a handful of rice most days. His body wasted away and his skin barely clung to his bones. Eventually, he attracted five other monks, who were impressed with his saintly emaciation and his commitment. He and the monks settled in a cave, at a place Chopra described as “in the sentinel peaks of the Himalayas” as they waited for enlightenment. As Chopra wrote, “It was a breathtaking place to suffer in....The air was crisp and cold as the first ice crust on a pond in winter...The faint air currents sweeping up the valley sounded like the breathing of the world.”

For months, Gautama and the monks sat in their cave speaking little, only collecting roots for food and filling their gourds from a stream. Gautama seemed to love the life of austerity. He sat in the snow for hours to see “if he could make his body hurt so much that it would give up all its hopes for pleasures. Day after day, he repeated this.”

Then, while sitting one day, Gautama had a vision of being visited by the god Krishna. At first, he truly believed it was the Krishna, but eventually realized it was the god of death, Mara, who had been plaguing him all his life. This encounter lead Gautama to even greater austerity: he piled rocks on his chest and pierced his cheeks with sharpened sticks.

He explained this method to his disciple monks,”I learned the Dharma of the higher self, but I never met my higher self or heard a word from it. I learned the Dharma of the soul, which was supposed to be my speck of the divine, but no matter how blissful I might feel, the time always came when I was overwhelmed once more by anger and sorrow.

“In time I concluded that my struggles could last a lifetime, and to what end? I will still be a slave to karma and a prisoner to this world. What is this karma that visits us with so much suffering? Karma is the body’s endless desires. Karma is the memory of past pleasure we want to repeat and past pain we want to avoid. It’s the delusions of ego and the storm of fear and anger that besieges the mind. Therefore, I have resolved to cut karma out by the roots.”

It took him five long years, but Gautama overcame all the temptations Mara, the death god, sent his way, allowing the Buddha to finally emerge! Gautama... as the Buddha...returned to share with his disciples this message:

“I have come back to tell you that you can be whole, but only if you see yourself that way. There is no holy life. There is no war between good and evil. There is no sin and no redemption. None of these things matter to the real you. But they matter hugely to the false you, the one who believes in the separate self. You have tried to take your separate self, with all its loneliness and anxiety and pride to the door of enlightenment. But it will never go through, because it is a ghost.”

At the end of the book, Chopra explained that as a story teller he did not feel it was “my place to spread Buddhism.” However, he briefly laid out Buddhism’s eight-fold path to change: 1. Right view or perspective. 2. Right intention. 3. Right speech. 4. Right action. 5. Right livelihood. 6. Right effort. 7. Right mindfulness. 8. Right concentration.

Even without sharing much about Buddhist practices, Chopra shared a wealth of information about the path of enlightenment and taught us about "enlightenment" itself!

Namaste’,

Che’
NOTE: Our next book review, in June, will be Chopra’s book, “The Third Jesus.”