Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

Buddhism

  The world that becomes visible in the early Buddhist scriptures is a very different world from that of the Upanisads. It is a world of powerful kingdoms, large cities, extensive commerce, and great wealth. It is also a world in which “renouncers” of a variety of sorts have become common and argument between them highly developed. As we found in our effort to understand the cultural conditions in which the early Upanisads emerged, there is no easy answer to the question of why renouncers flourished in this later period. Clearly in the second half of the first millennium BCE, north Indian society, especially in the Ganges valley, was in rapid transition involving significant population increase, growing trade, urbanization, and stronger states. One further factor whose significance is hard to judge: India in that period experienced significant pressure in the northwest, not from the kind of “barbarians” the Chinese intermittently had to deal with, but from strong archaic and axial states, notably Achaemenid Persia and Hellenistic Greek empires. At the very least these pressures probably stimulated Indian state building.

  “Renouncer” has a variety of possible meanings, but its simplest definition in the Indian context was the renunciation of the life of the “householder” for a life of asceticism, usually involving itinerant mendicancy. In the Buddhist case the choice of the life of the renouncer was called “leaving home,” but that seems a good way of defining the role more generally. Certainly Yajnavalkya, the archetypal Brahmin renouncer as depicted in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, is shown rather dramatically as leaving home, giving instruction to one of his two wives. There is, however, a significant terminological difference between Brahmanical renouncers and non-Brahmanical renouncers. The former are called samnyasins, whereas the latter are called sramanas. Although Brahmin renouncers were occasionally called sramanas, Buddhists and Jams were never called samnyasins.164 In any case, gradually there developed a sharp distinction between brahmanas (referred to as Brahmins in this chapter) and sramanas-non-Brahmanical renouncers. The compound word sramana-brahmana is used in the A§okan inscriptions to represent two religious groups worthy of respect, but a century or so later the grammarian Patanjali used the same term as an example of a compound word composed of complete opposites. These terminological issues probably reflect controversy within the Brahmin community as well as conflict between Brahmins and non-Brahmanical groups.

  The issue for Brahmins had to do with the status of householder versus renouncer, resolved ultimately in the dsrama system of four stages of the life course: studentship (brahmacarya), householder (grhastha), the hermit or forest-dweller (vanaprastha), and the renouncer (samnydsa). It is this understanding of dsrama as four successive stages of the life cycle that is referred to in the fundamental term for expressing Hindu civilization, varndsramadharma, that is, the order of the four varnas and the four stages of life. Olivelle, however, has shown that this understanding of the dsrama system is relatively late, perhaps only crystallizing in the first centuries CE. The earliest description of the dsrama system in the Dharmasutras, dating from the third and second centuries BCE, envision “a free choice among the dsramas, which were viewed as permanent and lifelong vocations”: following one’s studentship one could opt to become a householder, to remain with one’s teacher until death, to become a hermit, or to become a renouncer.165

  However, before the idea of the dsrama system had even developed, the tradition assumed the necessity of the householder status. As Olivelle puts it: “The ideal and typical religious life within vedic ideology is that of married householder. The normative character of that life is related to the two theologically central religious activities: offering sacrifices and procreating children. Only a married householder, according to that theology, was entitled and qualified to perform either of them.“166 The tension between the householder and renouncer ideals was never completely resolved. The later development of the “classical” dsrama system attempted to resolve it by making the renouncer role appropriate only late in life after the obligations of the householder had been fulfilled. The argument was that the householder is essential for all the dsramas. Without sacrifices the ancestors would not be nourished, nor would the cosmos be upheld. Without children there would be no future members of any dsrama. And without householders there would be no one to feed the renouncers.167

  Medieval theologians continued to wrestle with this tension. The greatest Hindu philosopher, Sankara, defended the legitimacy of the renouncer role, arguing that the texts prescribing lifelong ritual activity were “directed not at people who are detached from the world but at those who are full of desires and wish to attain a heavenly world.” 161 Sankara did however, unlike most later thinkers in his tradition, believe that only Brahmins could be

  The importance of the renouncer role, as envisioned by such scholars as Dumont and Thapar, is that it allowed the possibility of viewing the entire tradition and the society that embodied it from the outside, so to speak. Renouncers viewed traditional society as imperfect, as not the only way life can be lived, as the quotation from Sankara above suggests. Dumont sees the renouncer as a genuine individual, capable of choice, in a society dominated by ascribed roles and particularistic relationships. In these ways the renouncer role is a signal of an axial transformation, as we already noted with respect to the early Upanisads. In the Brahmanic tradition, however, though there is tension between the central “worldly” role of the householder and the renouncer, the fundamental worldly order itself is not called in question-that is, the renouncer may transcend dharma, but he does not reject it. In one sense, neither do the sramanic renouncers, including the Buddhists, but they do not accept it either. They don’t attack the existing order, but in important respects they ignore it and attempt to build a society on other foundations. Romila Thapar argues that “the organized groups of renouncers of the postVedic period were neither negating the society to which they belonged nor trying to radically alter it: but rather they were trying to establish a parallel society.“170 She suggests that even though there was no explicit renouncer social program, there was between the renouncers and the worldly society “osmosis as a process of social change.“171

  It is worth pausing for a moment to consider that the Buddhist texts also suggest a geographical change relative to the Upanisads. Early Vedic texts focused on Kuruksetra in the eastern Panjab and upper Ganges valley; the Upanisads place some discussions in Videha and Kosala in the middle Ganges valley. Magadha, in the lower Ganges valley, was in the early texts considered beyond the boundary of orthodox Brahmanic culture; but by the time of the Buddhist texts, Sanskritization, in its continuous expansion toward the east and south, had reached Magadha. Nonetheless, though Brahmins are much in evidence there, Sanskritization was relatively recent, and so it is perhaps not surprising that nonorthodox sramanic sects were present to contest Brahmanic supremacy in this important and expanding kingdom. Both Buddhist and Jain texts report a large number of such sects, each with a founder or leader and each with a doctrine to which followers were attracted. Except for the Buddhists and Jains, and even the Jain texts are quite late though they probably have early material embedded in them, none of these groups survived, so we know of them only from texts that treated them unsympathetically and probably unfairly. It is perhaps surprising that among these groups there were materialists, believing that there are no gods and no other worlds, and nihilists, believing that death is final and there is no afterlife. It is a little hard to understand how ascetic teachers, sramanas, could attract people to these beliefs, but perhaps for some people denial of all existing religious beliefs was a relief. Because there was continuous discussion and argument between these groups, with extensive accounts of them in Buddhist texts, the situation has been compared with the Sophistic age in ancient Greece, where there was controversy between thinkers holding extremely heterogeneous doctrines.

  Here we must confine ourselves to the best documented and historically most important of the sramana groups, the Buddhists. The history of early Buddhism is
no more secure than that of any other aspect of early Indian religion, so I will be constructing an ideal type based on texts that may be of various ages and represent what later tradition thought were the Buddha’s teachings more than what we can know for sure that he actually taught.

  Certain things are reasonably clear: (1) the Buddha took for granted central views that had developed within the Brahmanic tradition, and (2) the Buddha transformed the tradition he received in a way that completed the axial transition in India. In Richard Gombrich’s words, the Buddha “turned the Brahmin ideology upside down and ethicized the universe. I do not see how one could exaggerate the importance of the Buddha’s ethicization of the world, which I regard as a turning point in the history of It will be our task to try to understand both the continuities and the radical change.

  One radical change that in a sense precedes all the others, but that we cannot pursue adequately within the confines of this chapter, is a double reversal of the fundamental Upanishadic soteriological equation: atman (self) equals brahman (ultimate reality). The Buddha denied that either atman or brahman have an essential reality, thus reducing the Upanishadic equation 1=1 to the Buddhist equation The doctrine of anattd, not-self, is expressed in the injunction not to regard anything as self: “this is not mine, this is not I, this is not myself.“174 It is the premise on which even the Four Noble Truths depend.

  On the other hand the Buddha avoided getting into arguments about the ultimate reality of the self and the world, and when he was approached by monks asking such questions as “Is there (or is there not) a self” or “Is the world eternal or not,” he responded with a parable, in Steven Collins’s summary, “of a man pierced by an arrow, who does not want to find out the name, family, skin colour, and so on, of the man who shot it, before taking it out. In the same way, a man pierced by the arrow of suffering should aim to get rid of it before asking questions about the nature of the universe which caused such a state.“175 Both Gombrich and Collins stress that the Buddha is in this sense a physician more than a metaphysician, that his teaching is ultimately practical and therapeutic rather than didactic, though didacticism is far from absent in the Buddhist Suttas.

  In spelling out what Buddhism shares with Brahmanism and almost all other Indian religious traditions, there is still a question of how much early Buddhism received and how much it contributed to the crystallization of these ideas. Nonetheless, three central Buddhist ideas existed in some form from the earlier tradition: (1) samsara-“the round of rebirth,” what is often called reincarnation, the idea that humans and other beings live through a series of lives that can take various forms in this and other worlds; (2) karma”action,” “moral retribution,” the belief that actions have consequences for happiness or suffering in this and future lives and that happiness or suffering in this life may have been caused by actions in previous lives; and (3) moksa-“release, “liberation” (in Buddhism usually called nirvana, Pali nibbana), the state of release from the round of samsdra, the highest religious goal, though usually seen as possible only for renouncers.176

  In each case Buddhists developed their own interpretations of these terms, often critically different from those of Brahmanism or Jainism, as will be discussed below. But in describing the Buddhist position it is surely not wrong to begin with the Four Noble Truths, believed to have been expounded in the Buddha’s first sermon and serving as the basis of Buddhist teaching subsequently. These Four Noble Truths are familiar, but perhaps they deserve a bit of commentary. The First Noble Truth is that all life is suffering (dukkha). The Second Noble Truth is that the cause of suffering or unsatisfactoriness is craving (tanha), desire, or attachment. The Third Noble Truth is that the way to end unsatisfactoriness is to end desire, craving, or attachment, and the Fourth Noble Truth is the way this ending can be accomplished: the “noble Eightfold Path.” The path can be very demanding, but anyone can take the first steps, which are the precepts for lay followers. These basic teachings of Buddhism underlie the discussion that follows.

  Although “suffering” can serve, as it has traditionally, as a translation of dukkha in the First Noble Truth, scholars of Buddhism have pointed out that that translation can be misunderstood: if we conclude from the First Noble Truth that Buddhism is a pessimistic, gloomy, or cold teaching, we will be making a mistake. An alternative translation that is often suggested is “unsatisfactory.” The idea that life is dukkha does not mean that people are unhappy all the time. Ordinary suffering is everyday physical or mental pain contrasted with ordinary happiness or indifference. A deeper meaning does not claim to explain how people feel all the time, but rather how, upon reflection, serious people may come to feel: “suffering through change.” This is the sense that all things are subject to impermanence and change; every happy moment will come to an end. More fundamentally it is the recognition of the vulnerability and fragility of life itself, as illustrated to the young Siddhartha when he saw what he was not supposed to see: illness, old age, and death. That knowledge, combined with the knowledge that one will be endlessly reborn and go through all this dukkha again and again and again, can lead the sensitive to a wish for an alternative. What the Buddha offers as the ultimate alternative, nirvana (Pali, nibbana), is elusive, indescribable, but definitely deeply preferable to the round of samsara, endlessly repeated unsatisfactory lives.‘77

  Yet the Buddha was preaching to lay men and women, not only to potential religious virtuosi. He offered a way of release from samsdra, but he was also concerned with those who were not ready for the demanding task of obtaining that release. For them he described a way of life that would lead to positive future lives, and, after many rebirths, ultimately nirvana. There has been a tendency to think of this possibility as a compromise with “true” Buddhism, or a decline from its early pure form, but there are many reasons to believe it is nothing of the kind. There may be One Path, but along the way there are various routes and various lives, and following the Buddha’s teaching can help in all of them. Perhaps I can borrow from a recent work of Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, to suggest the variety of possibilities here.

  Taylor suggests the term “fullness” for those who have reached a religious realization that goes beyond the world of daily life, that gives them “something more” than the ordinary satisfactions of life. It is paired with the notion of “emptiness” or “exile,” the sense that life is dark, cold, and meaningless. Often it is religious adepts who feel such emptiness most acutely, in the Christian West sometimes called “the dark night of the soul,” which may be a precursor to a religious quest that ends in something like fullness, or at least a glimpse of it. But Taylor is most useful for us at this point in reminding us that there is a “middle position” in between fullness and emptiness, which some people seem happy to see as “all there is.” Of the middle position (we must be careful not to confuse this with the common characterization of Buddhism as the middle way between the pursuit of sensual pleasure and self-mortification) he writes:

  This is where we have found a way to escape the forms of negation, exile, emptiness, without having reached fullness. We come to terms with the middle position, often through some stable, even routine order in life, in which we are doing things which have some meaning for us; for instance, which contribute to our ordinary happiness, or which are fulfilling in various ways, or which contribute to what we conceive of as the good. Or often, in the best scenario, all three: for instance, we strive to live happily with spouse and children, while practising a vocation which we find fulfilling, and also which constitutes an obvious contribution to human welfare.178

  I would suggest that it is those people who at least at times experience the sense of emptiness, of life as dark, cold, and meaningless, who would be most likely to embark on the difficult religious path toward nirvana, the ultimate fullness that the Buddha offered. But to those in the middle position, what Louis Dumont called the “man-in-the-world,” the Buddha also had much to offer, a way of life based not on the Brahman
ic dharma, with its radical particularism, but on a new sense of Dharma, the teaching of the Buddha, in which an ethical way of life in the world is a significant part. All of this is simply to explain that “all life is dukkha” means, not that Buddhists think that daily life is completely miserable, but that those who reflect seriously on life may find that it is, in spite of many rewards, ultimately unsatisfactory and that for those not looking beyond daily life at the moment, there is still much the Buddha has to teach.

  Let us go back to the words of Gombrich, a leading scholar of early Buddhism, where he says that the Buddha “turned the Brahmin ideology upside down,” and try to understand in more detail what he means. Perhaps most fundamental is that Buddha rejected the hereditary status of the Brahmins and of the four varnas altogether. Brahmins appear rather frequently in the Buddhist scriptures, often in arguments with the Buddha that conclude with the conversion of the Brahmin. The depiction of Brahmins is often unflattering: at the beginning of conversations they appear rude, arrogant, and angry that the Buddha has converted other Brahmins, but they are not treated viciously.179 At most there is an element of satire and humor rather than bitterness and rejection. Yet the hegemonic Brahmin ideology, starting with the status of the Brahmin, is indeed overturned. As Steven Collins puts it:

  A simple example here is provided by the use to which the very word brahmana, “brahmin,” is put in Buddhist texts. Whereas for Brahmanical thought it is being born a Brahmin in social fact which gives the highest status in religion (and indeed in everything else), for Buddhism it is the man who practices Buddhist precepts to their utmost who has the highest status, and who is therefore the (“true” or “real”) “Brahmin.” That is to say, while the particular religious content has been changed, even reversed (from a Brahmanic social to a Buddhist ethical emphasis), still the overall formal structure-here “being a Brahmin” as the highest value-remains the same.180