In 1992 Pankaj Mishra, fresh out of Delhi University, moved to a small Himalayan village to continue his education. In this environment, he began to write this polyhedral book on Buddhism, which is at the same time biography, history, travel book and philosophical essay.

From the beginning of his research he understood that the social environment in which he had grown up - a convulsed and rootless world in which the old pillars of caste and community had disappeared - was very similar to that of the young Siddharta Gautama, later known as the Buddha. Born in the 6th century BC. C. In a small town at the foot of the Himalayas, he came of age at a time when city-states and villages ruled by the council of elders gave way to centralized kingdoms and empires: a transformation that spawned social chaos and a traumatic cultural change.

Faced with the suffering of those beings now subjected to the whim of remote rulers, plagued by war and hunger, and with no truths to cling to, Siddharta Gautama approached human suffering from a purely practical perspective, without precepts or commandments, but with intuitions everyday and understandable. He was, in many ways, the first modern man, for he managed to express the loss of values ​​and anguish that now accompanies contemporary man. When he died, at age 80, he had preached to thousands of people, traveled much of northern India, advised kings and founded a civilization that has survived the great empires and that today extends from Tibet to California. .

But Mishra does not propose a religious book, but tries to place the Buddha in the framework of western thought, from Plato to Borges, also telling us about his own journey through history and the places where the Buddha was born, lived and preached, a journey in time and space.

This book is, in essence, an elegy to the cosmopolitanism of a personality who wanted to free the human being from the burden of pain, who was more of a psychologist than a philosopher, and who today, for many, is essential in a Manichean, closed-minded world, due to religious fundamentalisms of one color or another, of which he offers us a lucid first-hand portrait.