Buddhism

There was an eleventh-century Tibetan lama known to his students as Gloomy Face. His given name was Langthangpa Dorje Senge; the nickname came from a vow he had taken never to smile. He was also one of the teachers responsible for transmitting the Lojong mind-training slogans — a collection of pithy instructions whose recurring theme is the danger of taking oneself too seriously. The irony, apparently, was intentional. He lived the joke so completely that he became it. …

In Enlightenment and Madness I argued that José Arcadio Buendía wasn’t mad in the way Macondo thought he was — that the patriarch tied to the chestnut tree was another face of the same transcendence that lifts Remedios la Bella into the sky. Two exits from ordinary consciousness, one serene, one savage. A reader — my mother, actually — pushed back on that with a sharp question. If he had lived today, she asked, would you still call it wisdom, or would you just put him on a medication and send him home? …

Rereading Cien años de soledad after many years, I found myself less drawn to the Buendía dynasty’s epic sweep than to two characters at opposite poles of the novel: Remedios la Bella, who ascends bodily into the sky while folding sheets, and José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch who dies tied to a chestnut tree, speaking Latin to the ghosts only he can see. Both escape Macondo. Both leave ordinary reality behind. But they do so from diametrically opposite directions — one upward into serenity, the other downward into madness. The more I thought about it, the more this looked like a question Buddhism has wrestled with for centuries: what separates enlightenment from craziness, and are they really opposites at all? …