The Vanished Pat

In 2010, soon after converting to lay Buddhism, Bharath Murthy mapped a route from
Sarnath and Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh to Lumbini in Nepal and Bodhgaya in Bihar,
sites significant to the practice. The Pune-based cartoonist and filmmaker wanted to
familiarise himself with the remains of places where the Buddha had lived, taught and
died. Murthy's resulting book, The Vanished Path, is a visual memoir of this pilgrimage
he took with his partner, Alka. Its a simple story of a man discovering how to be a nonsectarian Buddhist and, by extension, a better artist, by recounting a journey through a
project that took him four years to complete. The conceit of travel is what distills these
twin arcs in an account of coming to grips with the intimacy of personal faith.
As the two travelers negotiate their journey to the Buddhist sites, they also encounter
misconceptions about their faith. In Chapter 2, Bharath and Alka eat a meal at Yama
Caf in Kushinagar, a town in Uttar Pradesh. Various conversations between the couple
and people they meet revolve around whether or not there will be riots after the
Ayodhya verdict regarding the division of land in the Babri MasjidRam Janmabhoomi
case. They anticipated nationwide turmoil of some sort no matter what the verdict. In
this chapter, the couple meet the cafs owner, Mr Roy, and his wife. As they speak,
Roys wife suddenly claims that the caste differences between them are never a bone of
contention. It must be noted that she is a high caste Nepali and Roy is a Bengali
Brahmin. For his part, Roy is an admirer of the Buddhas humanist teachings, but
believes all religions are the same, and in the end asserts that there is no such thing as
religion at all. Bharath and Alka are astonished by these statements, but rather than
argue with Roy, they say their good nights and leave.
The next day, after sightseeing, the couple return to Yama Cafe where they meet Suresh,
a Buddhist convert of Indian descent, who was visiting from Australia. Suresh credits
his conversion to Buddhism to the Tamil ideologue Periyar, who in the 1930s pioneered
the anti-caste Self Respect Movement. Periyars slogan, Forget about God, think about
man, which Suresh attributes to the Buddha, had inspired him to convert to Buddhism.
Bharath is certain that the attribution is erroneous but lets the comments slide.
Buddhism may be a shapeless mess of non-specific spirituality in most peoples minds,
especially to those who know it little or have sought it to escape Hinduisms caste
legacy, as Suresh claims to have done. To Bharath, it is a religion that cannot be
understood without immersion in Buddhist philosophy and engaging with the monastic
practices of the Sangha, or community.
Led by Murthys point of view, the narrative takes six self-sufficient chapters, each
set in a place significant in the life of the Buddha, and limned with extracted Buddhist
Suttas, scriptural texts evolving from the Buddhas presence at those sites. So if Sarnath,
Kushinagar, Lumbini, Sravasti, Nalanda, and Bodhgaya, plot the journey along
milestones in the Buddhas lifewhere he first sermoned, died, was born, propagated
monastic life, discoursed, and found self-awakeningthe appending texts become

prompts to revisit Buddhist learning. The storyboard of the first chapter exemplifies the
books strategy of multi-sensorial immersion. Passages of hand-drawn panels depicting
the journey, local colour such as cows pissing in the alleys of Varanasi, and encounters
with service staff and officials intersperse sequences of the couple at archaeological
sites. Peppered throughout these sections are archival photographic illustrations of the
sites before restoration, retellings of events associated with discoveries of Buddhist
monuments, as well as relevant textual insertions of Suttas. A running motif is an
endearing Bhikku or Buddhist monk who resembles the author but acts as a sutradhar
(narrator) guiding the reader through facts about the Buddhas life.
By far, however, the most effective narrative device is the repeating motif of the
aniconic Wheel of Dhamma that Murthy casts as the Buddha. This motif, which
represents the Three Universal Truths taught by the Buddha, is borrowed from the art
historical tradition of visual substitution that was common in early Buddhist art. Rather
than figurative images of the Buddha, early Buddhist monuments feature aniconic
motifs such as a wheel, a vacant throne, footprints, and the Bodhi Tree to embody the
Buddhas presence and his preachings of moderation and the Middle Way, which can be
achieved only through ones individual actions. In the book, the wheel performs the role
of an active character who speaks, moves, listens, and counsels as the Buddha might
have done.
A nascent reader of comics will be impressed by Murthys ability to ravel a narrative
filled with such picaresque details. To the comic book veteran, the profusion of
downright maladroit images will seem ad hoc and unfit for professional print. A lack of
basic sophistication in rendering figural poses, facial expressions, spatial relationships,
and scale leave page after page feeling both visually stilted and only procedurally
necessary, rather than structurally integrated or graphically pleasing. These infelicities
are most vivid in sections of chapters 1 and 2. Then again, it helps to know that the first
30 pages were produced on a deadline to fill a weekly supplement in the Tamil
newspaper Dinamalar. These factors inconveniently combined have produced dozens of
pages that would have been well worth redrawing. Why did the author choose not to?
One might put it down to laziness. But bear in mind that staying true to his identity as a
novice Buddhist with a lot to learn might have also meant embracing those parts of the
books that look like a work in slow-going progress. Both journeys were interlinked even
before the project began. Their affair is what impassions the narrative.
Then right on time, a sureness of hand and more purposeful juxtapositions creep in
around Chapter 4, Fruits of Action. Graphic and verbal descriptions become more
specific and immediately relevant to the episodes at hand. Momentary lapses of
draughtsmanship are fewer. That these qualitative improvements coincide with the
chapters content about the growth of monastic culture around the Buddha and greater
confidence in his teachings feels almost serendipitous. Most indicative of a hard-won
authorial grasp of both his own drawing skills and the Buddha story is that Murthy
chose to represent this history through fictional episodes, fabular stories, and

imaginative insertions such as a full page of panels showing a group of intrigued

monkeys drawn to the speaking Wheel of Dhamma. It is passages such as those set in
Sravasti which houses Angulimala Stupa and Anathapindika Stupa that very nearly
vindicate the poverty of visual imagination marring the books opening sections.
Some of the strongest sections in The Vanished Pathsweeping birds eye views of
sites; the poetic attention to a great tree; an ordinary twisting road reimagined by an
angle that lends its width the swell of a river; shifts in perspectives on a single page to
suggest the wavering thoughts of the narrators eye; the textural variety on a single
panel containing architecture, animals, humans, trees, dust, and grass; the scale of a
spongy mushroom relative to a bulbous shoe when seen up close and the thrill such
observation inspires in the eyeowe, in some part, to Murthys confessed inspirations.
On the graphic front, his central models comprise the manga of three Japanese giants
Tatsumi Yoshihiro, Taniguchi Jiro, and Tezuka Osamu. Tatsumis A Drifting Life (2008),
itself a bildungsroman, or coming of age story, charting his struggle to become an artist
from 1945 to 1960, means a great deal in Murthys understanding of the darkness and
humour that necessarily accompany his own journey as an artist. Taniguchis ability to
make graphic details add up to an enriched whole has focused Murthys attempts to
create more meaningful scenographies of place that will ultimately contribute to a
running thread of ideas. And finally Tezuka, author of the multi-volume tome Buddha
and the most mainstream of Murthys heroes, galvanised his attempts to find awe and
wonder in simple images such as the shoulders of bare stony hills by homing in on their
emotive and spectacular function. Yet the art of the travelogue, in which observations
have the status of personal talismans, and where history, autobiography, and opinion are
inconceivable without each other, is a persuasion Murthy developed by reading the
travelogues of WG Sebald and VS Naipaul.
Aside from its vaunted influences, the virtue of The Vanished Path consists in
mobilising the dregs of history, that is, archaeology and little-read texts, to tell a witty
and rounded story of the Buddhas teachings. In this, pilgrimage is not just physical
travel. Its a spiritual trope that encourages a self-sufficient connection to religion. The
importance of defining faith in terms of an individually driven investigation will not be
lost on anyone who fears that counterfeit politics has the power to kill the real logic
behind anti-caste radical BR Ambedkars embrace of Buddhism in 1956. All this said,
Murthy is not a Neo-Buddhist. He did not convert to escape from caste. Admittedly, he
did not have to, though he did yearn to be part of a belief system that is inherently
defiant of Hinduisms inequities. Even so, Buddhism for him is not what a small
community of genuinely committed Ambedkarites construe as a natural fit with their
anti-caste agenda. A faith unto itself, whose roots and future are anchored in the sites,
the Suttas, and the monastic tradition of the Sangha, is what the The Vanished Path
argues Buddhism is. To be part of it you need only to engage with it. If there is a slogan
in this book, its an enticingly simple one: find your own middle way!