It's a full life, if a trifle banal

Gore Vidal's doorstop novel "Creation". Cracking read, about a man whose travels take him to India, Greece and China, at a time when rather a lot of great religious founders are alive or recently dead at once... He meets Confucius and gets to know him quite well, has some fascinating experiences with Hinduism and, if memory serves, Buddhism, ending up in Greece not long after the death of Socrates. The hero himself is a man of no fixed faith at all, trying to make sense of life and death. It could have been written for that course!