I can recommend 'Ka' by Roberto Colasso, a masterwork on Indian mythology. Although I've been reading it for a few years I'm not finished yet.
I'm in that sort of mood where I have to post a short paragraph (as allowed under the fair use act).
Presence is just a special case in the category of absence. Presence is a hallucination protracted for a certain period. But this in no way diminishes our pain. Looking into the future, Siva could see certain presumptuous and ingenuous natives of the distant West, who would one day believe they were the only ones to suffer, sectarians of the irreversible. Seeing them, Siva felt sympathetic and, murmuring words they would never hear, addressed them as follows: "Whether the world be an hallucination or the mind be an hallucination, whether all return or all appear but once, the suffering is just the same. For he who suffers is part of the hallucination, of whatever kind that may be. What then is the difference? This: whether in the sufferer there is–or is not–he who watches him who suffers." More than that for the moment he would not say.
