Buddha's many paths to happiness

One early western stereotype of Buddhism (still influential in certain quarters) depicts it as a "world-renouncing" tradition obsessed with pain, suffering, and despair. This monumental work focuses by contrast on the broad range of "felicities" (as used here the term simply means "good things" in a general sense) which Buddhism makes available to its followers.

Chief among these felicities, of course, is nirvana, but this is far from the only positive goal the tradition holds out. What this book does is to document and analyse an extensive range of positive objectives, of both a social and spiritual kind, which are found at various points within the long tradition of thought that the author labels the "Pali imaginaire".

This term needs some explanation. Pali is the language within which the canonical and other important texts of the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, influential in Southeast Asia, are redacted. Imaginaire denotes the ideology or conceptual world that these sources inhabit. In speaking of the Pali imaginaire, the author is designating a continuous intellectual history that extends well over two thousand years, although his interest in this book is primarily with the classical phase of this tradition (roughly a thousand years from the time of the Buddha in the 5th century BC). The Pali imaginaire was originally an elite ideology "which over the course of the second millennium AD moved, sociologically speaking, downwards and outwards, and at some point before or during the modern period became a "'popular' or peasant religion" influencing large parts of Southeast Asia.

Among the numerous interweaving strands in the book are history and historiography, sociology and anthropology, textual studies, philosophy, literary theory, and the study of narrative.

Structurally, the book falls into two main parts. Part one: "Nirvana in and out of time", focuses on the Buddhist summum bonum, namely nirvana, and devotes a chapter each to the concept of nirvana, the imagery of nirvana, and "nirvana time and narrative". The author's innovative claim is that nirvana needs to be understood not simply as a soteriological goal or philosophical enigma, but in terms of "the dynamics of Buddhist ideology, as that which circumscribes the felicitous imaginaire as good to think, good to imagine, and good to narrate".

"Inexpressible timeless nirvana," Collins writes, "is a moment in the Buddhist textualisation of time, the explicit or implicit closure marker in its discourse of felicity. It is the motionless and ungraspable horizon, the limit-condition which makes of the Pali imaginaire a coherent whole". In other words, nirvana needs to be understood not just from the inside of Pali texts, but from the outside as well in terms of its function within the overall Buddhist discourse of felicity.

Part two: "Paradise in heaven and on earth" is devoted to the felicities which fall short of the ultimate goal of nirvana. These include utopias of various kinds, which are classified using the five western-derived categories of The Land of Cockayne, Arcadia, The Perfect Moral Commonwealth, The Millennium, and Utopia. All of these provide an answer of one kind or another to the question: "what is it like to be happy, or to live in conditions of happiness?" An exploration of these topics involves a detailed exploration of the many heavens of Buddhist mythology, sublime states of mind experienced in meditation, mythological continents, various earthly dwelling places, millenarian expectations centring on the future Buddha Metteya, the well-known story of Vessantara, and a useful chapter on Buddhist ideas about kingship and social theory.

This is a major work, which opens up new perspectives for the study of Theravada Buddhism. It is stimulating, original and thorough, and certainly succeeds in the aim (declared on the jacket) of contributing "to a new vision of Buddhist history, which can hold both the inside and the outside of texts together".

Damien Keown is reader in Buddhism, Goldsmiths College, University of London.