Pico Iyer argues that Proust was an “accidental Buddhist,” quoting from Within a Budding Grove to illustrate his point:
“We do not receive wisdom,” [the painter] Elstir tells the narrator (who has just realized that “this man of genius, this sage” is a “foolish, corrupt little painter” in another context), “we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us.” Could the Buddha, enjoining his disciples to “Be a lamp unto yourselves,” have phrased it any better? Or: “If there were no such thing as habit, life might appear delightful to those of us who are constantly under the threat of death—that is to say, to all mankind.” I can’t think of a clearer formulation of the Western Buddhist’s teachings that habit is how we keep ourselves away from truth, imprisoned in our heads and not the world.
Iyer continues:
Proust’s genius, like that of his compatriot [Henri] Cartier-Bresson (who called himself “an accidental Buddhist”), is to register every detail of the surface and yet never get caught up in the superficial.
Here is the rare master who saw that surface was merely the way depth often expressed itself, the trifle in which truth was hidden thanks to mischievous circumstance (or, others would say, the logic of the universe). It takes stamina, bloody-mindedness, concentration, and a fanatic’s devotion to stare the mind down and see how rarely it sees the present, for all the alternative realities it can conjure out of memory or hope. Proust had the sense to belabor us with little theology, academic philosophy or overt epistemology; yet nearly every sentence in his epic work takes us into the complications, the false fronts, the self-betrayals of the heart and mind and so becomes what could almost be called an anatomy of the soul. I’m not sure sitting under a tree in Asia 2,500 years ago would have produced anything different.
The Dish 