Pankaj Mishra on Buddha

"He struck me as a very profound thinker, perhaps the greatest the subcontinent has produced, someone who stood well out of the mainstream of classical Indian thought, and was also astonishingly modern in his diagnosis of the human condition. He was particularly trenchant about the concept of the self-directed, self-seeking autonomous individual — something that in our own era has been the basis of social and political and economic models that we associate with Western modernity and which have now been exported across the world."