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

by Robert N. Bellah

  What one might call the “gentle rejection” of Brahmanism by the Buddhists was nonetheless seen by many Brahmin writers as a mortal threat: the Buddhists rejected the entire Vedic tradition, all the received texts, as having any authority, the very eternal texts on which Brahmanism and the dharma that it took as essential were based. Further, the Buddhists rejected sacrifice, indeed the killing of any living being, with their doctrine of ahimsa, nonviolence. The beginnings of the idea of ahimsa can be found in Vedic texts, but applied selectively, and not intended to abolish sacrifices that are prescribed in the texts.181 We have noted the Brahmin renouncers (samnyasins) also rejected sacrifice, internalized it so that it was expressed in thought and word, not act, but for householders, the very foundation of the Brahmanic order, sacrifice was still required. The total rejection of sacrifice could not but seem a major threat to hegemonic Brahmanism.

  Gombrich has made a similar point with respect to the ritual fires, three or five depending on the circumstances, that are central to Brahmanic ritual. Again, the samnyasin abandoned fire upon leaving the world. That is one reason why he must beg: he can’t even keep a kitchen fire to cook his own food. But fire, and the fire god Agni, though marginal in the later tradition, never lost their sanctity in normative Brahmanism. Again the Buddha radicalizes the Brahmin renouncer position by using fire as such as a symbol of “the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion,” which must burn out before salvation can be attained.112

  To give an idea of the satirical but not unsympathetic way the Buddhist Suttas treated Brahmins, I will briefly recount a story concerning a certain wealthy and influential Brahmin, Sonadanda.183 The Buddha and some of his followers had arrived at Campa, where Sonadanda lived in considerable comfort. Sonadanda, a man no longer young but of irreproachable birth for seven generations on both his father’s and his mother’s side, learned, handsome, and the teacher of many, decides to visit the Buddha because of his great reputation. His Brahmin friends reproach him, saying that the Buddha, being younger, should visit him rather than that he should visit the Buddha, and that his reputation would suffer if he initiates the visit. However, Sonadanda, arguing that the Buddha is fully enlightened, convinces his friends that it is right for him to make the visit. On the way, however, he begins to worry that if he asks the Buddha a question, the Buddha may say it is not a fitting question, or if the Buddha asks him a question he may not know the answer, or if he sits in silence he will look bad, and his friends will despise him. He thinks to himself, “If anyone were despised by this company, his reputation would suffer, and then his income would suffer, for our income depends on the gaining of a

  Sonadanda hopes the Buddha will ask him a question from his own field of the three Vedas, and the Buddha, sensing his discomfort, does so: “By how many qualities do Brahmins recognize a Brahmin?” Sonadanda is delighted and answers that there are five such qualities: a Brahmin is well-born for seven generations, is a scholar versed in the mantras, is handsome, virtuous, and wise.

  The Buddha responds: “But if one of these five qualities were omitted, could not one be recognized as a true Brahmin, being possessed of four of these qualities?” Sonadanda replies, “We could leave out appearance, for what does that matter?” The Buddha counters by asking if we could leave out one more quality so that only three would be enough. Sonadanda replies, “We could leave out the mantras.” Once again the Buddha asks if there were one more that could be left out, so only two qualities would be necessary, and Sonadanda replies, “We could leave out birth.” At this Sonadanda’s Brahmin friends are really upset and tell him he is giving away too much and taking the Buddha’s position, not that of a Brahmin. Sonadanda tells them to shut up and responds further to the Buddha saying that the essential qualities of a Brahmin are virtue and wisdom. The Buddha asks if one of these could be omitted, and Sonadanda replies: “No, Gotama. For wisdom is purified by morality, and morality is purified by wisdom: where one is, the other is, the moral man has wisdom and the wise man has morality.“185 It is clear to all that Sonadanda has given up basic elements of Brahmin belief and has in effect converted to the teachings of the Buddha, that is, Dharma in the new sense of ethics and wisdom and not dharma in the old sense of caste obligations.

  Yet Sonadanda asks the Buddha to forgive him if he fails to recognize him adequately in public, because if he did so, his “reputation would suffer, and if a man’s reputation suffers, his income suffers.“186 According to the commentary, Sonadanda is “represented as a convert only to a limited extent.“187 Like the rich young man in the New Testament, Sonadanda is unwilling to give up his life of privilege, even though he has agreed with the teachings of the Buddha. Many other Brahmins described in the Suttas do become real followers of the Buddha and obtain enlightenment. But the story of this little encoun ter between a Brahmin and the Buddha gives a sense of the tenor of argument in the Suttas and the skeptical but not unsympathetic way in which the Buddha was believed to have treated his interlocutors. More important for us is that, by reducing the qualities necessary to be recognized as a Brahmin from the traditional five to the Buddhist two, this story gives an example of the radical ethicization involved in the Buddha’s teaching.

  From the point of view of axial ethicization, perhaps the most fundamental innovation of Buddhism (though shared by other non-Brahmanical renouncer sects) was the ethical necessity of making the teaching of liberation, Dharma in the Buddhist sense, available to all people, regardless of status or ethnicity. Obeyesekere points to a climactic moment in one of the Suttas where the Buddha comes to realize his role as universal teacher.188

  After his long arduous search for enlightenment, the Buddha has finally attained Nibbana. He thinks, “This Dhamma that I have attained is profound, hard to see and hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise.” He considers that he lives in a generation that delights in worldliness and is unlikely to respond to what he has to teach. Some verses come to him that sum up his view:

  But suddenly at this point the Brahma Sahampati appears and addresses

  The Buddha listened to Brahma’s pleading, and “out of compassion for beings” decides to undertake the task of making his teaching available to all.”’

  Obeyesekere points out that years later, at the point of death, the Buddha reiterates his intention when Mara, “the personification of the world’s evils,” tells him it is time to die: “I shall not come to my final passing away, Malignant One, until my bhikkus and bhikkunis [monks and nuns], laymen and laywomen, have come to be true disciples-wise, well-disciplined, apt and learned, preservers of the Dhamma, living according to the Dhamma, abiding by the appropriate conduct, and having gleaned the Master’s word, are able to expound it … and preach this liberating Dhamma.“19i Having reached the point where he sees that he has accomplished all this and that the Dhamma is now available to all, monastics and laypeople of every status alike, he is ready to die.

  In the Suttas the Buddha is often depicted as surrounded by large numbers of monks, and individual monks are often his conversation partners. But just as often it is laypeople, not infrequently even kings, who come to the Buddha with questions or in search of advice, with whom the Buddha speaks. Solitary renouncers are referred to, often with admiration, but the Buddha is most often shown as engaged in an active social life both with his monks and with the larger society. He is shown teaching his monastic followers the right way to conduct themselves in their quest for nirvana, but he is just as often shown teaching laypeople the right way to live-a way that will avoid the pitfalls that bad actions can produce in this and future lives, and that will instead lead to a good life here and a better life later on, ultimately leading to the possibility of attaining nirvana, even though for the laity that is not their immediate concern.

  Thus, although Buddhism produced the earliest fully developed monastic system in religious history, comparable only to the later development of monasticism in Christianity,
it cannot be viewed simply as a monastic religion. It is also very much a religion of the laity, who are not viewed as deviant or “popular” Buddhists in contrast to the monks. Though further from the goal than the monks, they are equal partners in the community, and the monks are in their own way as dependent on the laity as the laity are on the monks .112 Ilana Silber has described the core of their profound interdependence:

  Barred by Vinaya discipline from providing for their own food and shelter, monks were thrown into a state of dependency on the laity and hence prevented from cutting themselves off from society. This dependency is mutual, since on the laity’s side the Sangha is said to form a “field of merit,” in the sense that providing monks with material support through gifts (dana) represents the most effective (if not the only) way for the laymen to reap merit.193

  Silber notes that this exchange should not be viewed as a magical buying of rewards, because the generous intention of the giver is essential to the efficacy of the gift. The laity are also dependent on the monks as the guardians of the canonical texts for their preaching of the Buddha’s Dharma, but the monks, pledged to nonviolence as they are, are dependent on the laity to maintain order among the monks and even to discern who is a legitimate monk and who is a self-serving parasite. In short, though the Buddha and Buddhist monks have “left home” and are no longer involved in the familial, economic, and political obligations of householders, they are still very much engaged with society in the ongoing life of the Sangha.

  Although a decision to “leave home” marked a sharp difference between Buddhist monk and layman, the obligations undertaken by the Buddhist laity overlap to some degree with those undertaken by novice monks. Gombrich puts the Five Precepts for the laity in a larger perspective:

  The positive values of kindness and unselfishness characterize Buddhism better than do the moral precepts for the laity which are expressed negatively. Though usually called “precepts,” they are really undertakings, expressed in the first person. They are five: not to take life, steal, be unchaste (which is defined according to one’s situation), lie, or take intoxicants, inasmuch as they lead to carelessness and hence to breaking the first four undertakings … Positively, the Buddhist’s first duty is to be generous, and the primary-though by no means the only-object of his generosity is to the Sangha. Generosity, keeping the moral undertakings, cultivating one’s mind: these three summarize the Buddhist path to a good rebirth and ultimately to release from all

  Gombrich goes on to describe certain additional rules that the laity were encouraged to follow on certain days, the quarter days of the lunar month: “For a night and a day they undertook complete chastity, not to eat solid food after midday, not to adorn themselves or witness entertainments, not to use luxurious beds.“195 These, together with the Five Precepts, are the same as the obligations of novice monks except that in addition the monks must abstain from the use of money. Although not common, a layperson could undertake to keep these injunctions permanently. In general, then, the line between monks and laity was not as impermeable as one might think: even though the monks were expected to be concerned more with the attainment of nirvana and the laity with a better rebirth, still the latter looked forward to an eventual attainment of nirvana.

  Buddhism in the West has long been viewed as a “rational” religion (often in implicit or explicit contrast to Christianity), and Buddhist religious and ethical teaching is often expressed in systematic propositional form, with premises leading to conclusions. For this reason it is easy to see Buddhism as an axial religion, if one takes the presence of “theory” as a marker of axiality. But as in the other axial cases, the “logical” aspect of Buddhist teaching is intertwined with a variety of other kinds of discourse-symbols and narratives-in ways sometimes overlooked by its Western admirers. Further, Buddhist truths are to be understood logically in terms of what the words mean (that is, semantically), but to be “really” understood they must change the hearers in their practical stance toward themselves and the world (in the linguistic sense,

  Thus even in the rather terse first sermon of the Buddha after his Awakening, the famous Deer Park Sermon, which is devoted to the exposition of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha repeatedly stresses, after stating the truths, that he has finally “fully understood” and “realized” them so that the knowledge and vision arose in him: “Unshakeable is the liberation of my mind. This is my last birth. Now there is no more renewed existence.” And it is also recounted that while he was giving the sermon, one of his followers, the Venerable Kondanna, became fully awakened to their truth: “Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.“197 Thus, understanding the words and their logical connection is only the first step; it is only when the teachings have penetrated deep into one’s consciousness that they can be transforming.

  Steven Collins has pointed out that, although systematic thought has always been important in Buddhist teachings, it has also always been accom panied by narrative and symbolic thought. In summarizing the linkages between these three kinds of thought (which can be found in all the axial religions), Collins argues that “imagery is the bridge, the mediation” between the systematic and the narrative:

  The two most common images of nirvana in the developed tradition are the quenching of fire and the city. Buddhist systematic thought presents a static arrangement of ideas, which are connected by logical not temporal relation; its narratives, whether the overall master-text or the stories told in actual texts, are by necessity temporally structured. The imagery of fire is built into the vocabulary of the systematic thought in which the concept of nirvana exists; but it also has a temporal dimension, embodied in the verbs or verbal notions within the image: it is of fire going out or quenched. This temporal dimension is, in microcosm, the same as that of the larger-scale stories and histories in which narrative thought textualizes both time and timeless nirvana. So not only is the image intrinsic to the vocabulary of Buddhism (attachmentfuel, nirvana-quenching); it also contains-in a nutshell, or, to use a south Asian metaphor, in seed form-the narrative movement from suffering to resolution and closure in which nirvana’s syntactic value is to be found. The city of nirvana can be a static object of textual vision; but in the notion of the city as the destination point of a journey, the terminus of the Path, which is again intrinsic to Buddhist systematic thought, there is also a microcosmic version of the entire Buddhist masternarrative. The Path to salvation is thus, in the image as in the masternarrative, a journey through time from the city of the transient body to the city of timeless and deathless nirvana: the city without fear, as one of the earliest texts to use the image calls it. The images set the logic of the concept in motion: once there is motion, there is temporal extension, and once there is temporal extension there is narrative.‘98

  Just to round out Collins’s eloquent effort to capture the central concern of Buddhist devotion, we can go to him again to explain how the word “syntactic” got into the above quotation:

  Both the concept and the imagery of nirvana eventuate, by design, in aporetic silence. Nirvana is the full stop (period) in the Buddhist story, the point at which narrative imagination must cease. But this cessation provides the sense of an ending rather than a mere breaking-off. Nirvana is a moment within a discursive or practical dynamic, a formal element of closure in the structure of Buddhist imagination, texts and rituals. This is the sense in which I want to say that nirvana has a syntactic as well as a semantic value: it is the moment of ending which gives structure to the whole.‘99

  Collins then goes on to apply his argument about the paradigmatic story of Buddhist liberation to the story of Gotama the Buddha. “For any individual, the denouement of the story of spiritual liberation-Bildungsroman on a cosmic scale-is both the discovery of Truth and a change in being … When the Saint realizes the truth, it is not that he or she has simply acquired some new knowledge, but rather that such knowledge instantiates a new existential state or condition.“200 At the central point
of silence, the idea of nirvana, when all the things one can say don’t seem to help, Buddhists have always turned to the Buddha in something we should hesitate to call worship because of the associations of that term in Abrahamic religions, but as an instantiation of what the whole teaching is about. As the Buddha himself said, “He who sees the Dhamma sees me, he who sees me sees the Dhamma.“201

  Thus the central Buddhist teaching, contained already in the Four Noble Truths, is the Path from suffering to nirvana, expressed in systematic and narrative thought and even in such symbols as the quenched fire. Insofar as this teaching disregards all distinctions of birth and proclaims the equality of all human beings in their capacity to follow the Path, the teaching is revolutionary relative to early Indian society with its heavy reliance on birth and lineage. But as Romila Thapar noted, the Buddha called for no revolutionary overthrow of existing institutions; rather he attempted to establish a parallel society, offering an alternative way of life, which would grow by attraction, not by conquest. Central to the establishment of this parallel society was the creation of the Sangha, the order of Buddhist monks.

  Patrick Olivelle has suggested that although the Buddha surrounded himself with followers who had renounced the world, the development of the Sangha as a “formal organization,” one based on the acceptance of universal rules and obligations rather than, as in most social organization of the time, on particularistic ties,202 took place only gradually.203 At first the call to leave home was simply to become a wandering mendicant. During the rainy season it became convenient to have the monks gather together in temporary communities for about four months, and then go their separate ways. Gradually these communities became permanent and Buddhist monasteries common, often in the vicinity of cities.