The first is that, as usual, the crisis isn’t the one you thought it was—i.e., some external circumstance impeding the universe from unfolding as it should. No, the problem is you: the prison of your desires and illusion of your identity, with its false imperative to achieve some pressing destiny. And the only lasting solution? That is the second assertion, and it is still more astonishing, especially to Western ears. Get out of that metaphorical burning house, the Buddha advises. Out of what? Nothing less than your own presumed-to-be stable self. Get out of it, and quickly.

Buddhism, a friend likes to joke, is religion for accountants. There are the Three Fires and Four Noble Truths, the Five Bundles of Personality and Ten Fetters. The Noble Eightfold Path, which proceeds from the final truth, offers a bonus Threefold Plan of Action. Contained within the twelve links of the Chain of Dependent Causation are terms that are, Karen Armstrong acknowledges in her recent biography, Buddha, difficult to merely understand, let alone put into practice. If the Eightfold Path to enlightenment is less daunting, be grateful for its use of repetition: the Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, and so on.

The lists, which Armstrong dutifully unscrolls in her straightforward account of the prince who became the lotus sage and the legends from Indian antiquity that cohered into a great Asian philosophy, do serve a purpose. The Buddha was a teacher and preacher both, and his audience was almost certainly illiterate. (Among the many things not known about the real Gautama was whether he himself could read.) Lists aid memorization. They also encourage thinking in terms of process, as when following a manual. The Ten Commandments aside, Christianity can’t touch Buddhism when it comes to columns of edicts and advice. Nor can any other religion manage the same appeal to our own itemizing era, with its fondness for twelve-step programs and Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.

In Srinivas Krishna’s film Masala, two Hindu deities, slumming it as human beings, are about to crash an airplane. “Thank God, we are Gods,” one quips to the other. But while Hinduism, Greek mythology, Judaism and Christianity feature all-powerful gods, the Buddha was having none of this Higher Being business. His business was about being human, and he had no patience for doctrines concerning hierarchies or ultimate reality. He had, in fact, no real theology to impart or philosophy to share. Rather, his fussy lists sketched out, in Mishra’s words, a “medical diagnosis and cure” for suffering that was both psychologically acute and ethical.

The pseudo-philosopher who freebases spirituality with therapy in order to retail a remedy for pain and a path to wellness: sound familiar? Siddhartha Gautama as Deepak Chopra or Dr. Phil? Not quite. Still, the Buddha would definitely qualify for his own prime-time TV spot—at least until the details of his ego-eradicating program of recovery sank in. Then, regardless of any physical resemblances to Keanu Reeves, his ratings are likely to plummet.

I’m Not Me—You’re Not You might be the title of that unpopular show. Negative emotions such as anger, hatred, malice, and jealousy, are caused by a false attachment to such seemingly rock-solid entities as the self and the phenomenal world. A sense of identity isn’t so much problematic as delusional. We don’t exist as autonomous beings, despite what our insatiable hungers and thirsts suggest. Instead, we are part of a complex flow of phenomena in a universe at once impermanent and beyond our control. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a near contemporary of Gautama, had a similar idea: “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

Understanding that impermanence, and the interconnectedness it implies, brings far more than release from individual suffering and disappointment. It helps one become a more disciplined person. There is a reason why the Buddha is forever depicted in solitary repose, eyes cast downward. He doesn’t offer a weekly service, let alone a sermon bracketed by hymns. His treatment certainly doesn’t feature healing circles or group hugs. Giving over to one’s desires, or to the authority of a state or even a God, represents a retreat from personal responsibility. You, and you alone, must regulate your mind. You, and you alone, must liberate your actions. A “private remedy for private distress,” is Mishra’s elegant summary, multiplied by six billion.

Both An End to Suffering and Buddha are careful to locate this still singular idea—a challenge, Mishra grants, to the “very basis of conventional human self-perceptions”—in the Buddha’s lifetime. Sixth century BC India saw the breakdown of smaller societies and older moralities and their replacement with the tumult of emerging empires. Traditional consolations of faith and community were vanishing. People feared for their personal security and for the future. “Terror, awe and dread” is how one Buddhist scripture summarized the mood.

That was then. But that is now as well, amid what Mishra calls the “great violence and confusion” of the present day. The young Indian casts a cold eye on what the West has sought to impose upon the rest of the planet. Some of his pronouncements seem almost calculated to inflame. He dismisses the individual of the European model as a creature living “merely for the sake of increasing and satisfying his material needs.” He also declares nearly everything in the modern world to be “predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire.”

Mishra’s trenchant conclusion is this: the political and social arrangements that our autonomous selves have rendered tyrannical must be overcome. The Buddha offers a regimen that can liberate us from the burning house of our unappeasable selves. He outlines a kind of spiritual politics that demands that human beings accept responsibility for their actions and, having been made aware of the interdependency of individuals and societies, behave with compassion and kindness. The flight from individuality will be tough going—our flawed, self-regarding natures, while being a cause of suffering, may also, Mishra admits, be a source of vitality—but the effort alone can constitute the closest thing possible to an ethical life, as well as an antidote to the fanaticism that is spreading like a pox across the globe.