by Will Durant
V. THE LAST DAYS OF BUDDHA
His miracles—He visits his father’s house—The Buddhist monks—Death
From this exalted philosophy we pass to the simple legends which are all that we have concerning Buddha’s later life and death. Despite his scorn of miracles, his disciples brewed a thousand tales of the marvels that he wrought. He wafted himself magically across the Ganges in a moment; the tooth-pick he had let fall sprouted into a tree; at the end of one of his sermons the “thousand-fold world-system shook.”80 When his enemy Devadatta sent a fierce elephant against him, Buddha “pervaded it with love,” and it was quite subdued.81 Arguing from such pleasantries Senart and others have concluded that the legend of Buddha has been formed on the basis of ancient sun myths.82 It is unimportant; Buddha means for us the ideas attributed to Buddha in the Buddhist literature; and this Buddha exists.
The Buddhist Scriptures paint a pleasing picture of him. Many disciples gathered around him, and his fame as a sage spread through the cities of northern India. When his father heard that Buddha was near Kapilavastu he sent a messenger to him with an invitation to come and spend a day in his boyhood home. He went, and his father, who had mourned the loss of a prince, rejoiced, for a while, over the return of a saint. Buddha’s wife, who had been faithful to him during all their separation, fell down before him, clasped his ankles, placed his feet about her head, and reverenced him as a god. Then King Shuddhodhana told Buddha of her great love: “Lord, my daughter (in-law), when she heard that you were wearing yellow robes (as a monk), put on yellow robes; when she heard of your having one meal a day, herself took one meal; when she knew that you had given up a large bed, she lay on a narrow couch; and when she knew that you had given up garlands and scents, she gave them up.” Buddha blessed her, and went his way.83
But now his son, Rahula, came to him, and also loved him. “Pleasant is your shadow, ascetic,” he said. Though Rahula’s mother had hoped to see the youth made king, the Master accepted him into the Buddhist order. Then another prince, Nanda, was called to be consecrated as heirapparent to the throne; but Nanda, as if in a trance, left the ceremony unfinished, abandoned a kingdom, and going to Buddha, asked that he, too, might be permitted to join the Order. When King Shuddhodhana heard of this he was sad, and asked a boon of Buddha. “When the Lord abandoned the world,” he said, “it was no small pain to me; so when Nanda went; and even more so with Rahula. The love of a son cuts through the skin, through the hide, the flesh, the sinew, the marrow. Grant, Lord, that thy noble ones may not confer the ordination on a son without the permission of his father and mother.” Buddha consented, and made such permission a prerequisite to ordination.84
Already, it seems, this religion without priestcraft had developed an order of monks dangerously like the Hindu priests. Buddha would not be long dead before they would surround themselves with all the paraphernalia of the Brahmans. Indeed it was from the ranks of the Brahmans that the first converts came; and then from the richest youth of Benares and the neighboring towns. These Bhikkhus, or monks, practised in Buddha’s days a simple rule. They saluted one another, and all those to whom they spoke, with an admirable phrase: “Peace to all beings.”* They were not to kill any living thing; they were never to take anything save what was given them; they were to avoid falsehood and slander; they were to heal divisions and encourage concord; they were always to show compassion for all men and all animals; they were to shun all amusements of sense or flesh, all music, nautch dances, shows, games, luxuries, idle conversation, argument, or fortune-telling; they were to have nothing to do with business, or with any form of buying or selling; above all, they were to abandon incontinence, and live apart from women, in perfect chastity.85 Yielding to many soft entreaties, Buddha allowed women to enter the Order as nuns, but he never completely reconciled himself to this move. “If, Ananda,” he said, “women had not received permission to enter the Order, the pure religion would have lasted long, the good law would have stood fast a thousand years. But since they have received that permission, it will now stand fast for only five hundred years.”86 He was right. The great Order, or Sangha, has survived to our own time; but it has long since corrupted the Master’s doctrine with magic, polytheism, and countless superstitions.
Towards the end of his long life his followers already began to deify him, despite his challenge to them to doubt him and to think for themselves. Now, says one of the last Dialogues,
the venerable Sariputta came to the place where the Exalted One was, and having saluted him, took his seat respectfully at his side, and said:
“Lord, such faith have I in the Exalted One that methinks there never has been, nor will there be, nor is there now, any other, whether Wanderer or Brahman, who is greater and wiser than the Exalted One . . . as regards the higher wisdom.”
“Grand and bold are the words of thy mouth, Sariputta” (answered the Master); “verily, thou hast burst forth into a song of ecstasy! Of course, then, thou hast known all the Exalted Ones of the past, . . . comprehending their minds with yours, and aware what their conduct was, what their wisdom, . . . and what the emancipation they attained to?”
“Not so, O Lord!”
“Of course, then, thou hast perceived all the Exalted Ones of the future, . . . comprehending their whole minds with yours?”
“Not so, O Lord!”
“But at least, then, O Sariputta, thou knowest me, . . . and hast penetrated my mind?” . . .
“Not even that, O Lord.”
“You see, then, Sariputta, that you know not the hearts of the Able, Awakened Ones of the past and of the future. Why, therefore, are your words so grand and bold? Why do you burst forth into such a song of ecstasy?”87
And to Ananda he taught his greatest and noblest lesson:
“And whosoever, Ananda, either now or after I am dead, shall be a lamp unto themselves, and a refuge unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but, holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, . . . shall not look for refuge to any one besides themselves—it is they . . . who shall reach the very topmost height! But they must be anxious to learn!”88
He died in 483 B.C., at the age of eighty. “Now then, O monks,” he said to them as his last words, “I address you. Subject to decay are compound things. Strive with earnestness.”89
CHAPTER XVI
From Alexander to Aurangzeb
I. CHANDRAGUPTA
Alexander in India—Chandragupta the liberator—The people—The university of Taxila—The royal palace—A day in the life of a king—An older Machiavelli—Administration—Law—Public health—Transport and roads—Municipal government
IN THE year 327 B.C. Alexander the Great, pushing on from Persia, marched over the Hindu Kush and descended upon India. For a year he campaigned among the northwestern states that had formed one of the Persian Empire’s richest provinces, exacting supplies for his troops and gold for his treasury. Early in 326 B.C. he crossed the Indus, fought his way slowly through Taxila and Rawalpindi to the south and east, encountered the army of King Porus, defeated 30,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry, 300 chariots and 200 elephants, and slew 12,000 men. When Porus, having fought to the last, surrendered, Alexander, admiring his courage, stature and fine features, bade him say what treatment he wished to receive. “Treat me, Alexander,” he answered, “in a kingly way.” “For my own sake,” said Alexander, “thou shalt be so treated; for thine own sake do thou demand what is pleasing to thee.” But Porus said that everything was included in what he had asked. Alexander was much pleased with this reply; he made Porus king of all conquered India as a Macedonion tributary, and found him thereafter a faithful and energetic ally.1 Alexander wished then to advance even to the eastern sea, but his soldiers protested. After much oratory and pouting he yielded to them, and led them—through patriotically hostile tribes that made his wearied troops fight almost every foot of the way—down the Hydaspes and up the coast through Gedrosia to Baluchistan. When he arrived at Susa, twenty months aft
er turning back from his conquests, his army was but a miserable fragment of that which had crossed into India with him three years before.
Seven years later all trace of Macedonian authority had already disappeared from India.2 The chief agent of its removal was one of the most romantic figures in Indian history, a lesser warrior but a greater ruler than Alexander. Chandragupta was a young Kshatriya noble exiled from Magadha by the ruling Nanda family, to which he was related. Helped by his subtle Machiavellian adviser, Kautilya Chanakya, the youth organized a small army, overcame the Macedonian garrisons, and declared India free. Then he advanced upon Pataliputra,* capital of the Magadha kingdom, fomented a revolution, seized the throne, and established that Mauryan Dynasty which was to rule Hindustan and Afghanistan for one hundred and thirty-seven years. Subordinating his courage to Kautilya’s unscrupulous wisdom, Chandragupta soon made his government the most powerful then existing in the world. When Megasthenes came to Pataliputra as ambassador from Seleucus Nicator, King of Syria, he was amazed to find a civilization which he described to the incredulous Greeks—still near their zenith—as entirely equal to their own.3
The Greek gave a pleasant, perhaps a lenient, account, of Hindu life in his time. It struck him as a favorable contrast with his own nation that there was no slavery in India;† and that though the population was divided into castes according to occupations, it accepted these divisions as natural and tolerable. “They live happily enough,” the ambassador reported,
being simple in their manners, and frugal. They never drink wine except at sacrifice. . . . The simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they seldom go to law. They have no suits about pledges and deposits, nor do they require either seals or witnesses, but make their deposits and confide in each other. . . . Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem. . . . The greater part of the soil is under irrigation, and consequently bears two crops in the course of the year. . . . It is accordingly affirmed that famine has never visited India, and that there has never been a general scarcity in the supply of nourishing food.5
The oldest of the two thousand cities6 of northern India in Chandragupta’s time was Taxila, twenty miles northwest of the modern Rawalpindi. Arrian describes it as “a large and prosperous city”; Strabo says it “is large, and has most excellent laws.”7 It was both a military and a university town, strategically situated on the main road to Western Asia, and containing the most famous of the several universities possessed by India at that time. Students flocked to Taxila as in the Middle Ages they flocked to Paris; there all the arts and sciences could be studied under eminent professors, and the medical school especially was held in high repute throughout the Oriental world.*
Megasthenes describes Chandragupta’s capital, Pataliputra, as nine miles in length and almost two miles in width.10 The palace of the King was of timber, but the Greek ambassador ranked it as excelling the royal residences of Susa and Ecbatana, being surpassed only by those at Persepolis. Its pillars were plated with gold, and ornamented with designs of bird-life and foliage; its interior was sumptuously furnished and adorned with precious metals and stones.11 There was a certain Oriental ostentation in this culture, as in the use of gold vessels six feet in diameter;12 but an English historian concludes, from the testimony of the literary, pictorial and material remains, that “in the fourth and third centuries before Christ the command of the Maurya monarch over luxuries of all kinds and skilled craftsmanship in all the manual arts was not inferior to that enjoyed by the Mogul emperors eighteen centuries later.”13
In this palace Chandragupta, having won the throne by violence, lived for twenty-four years as in a gilded jail. Occasionally he appeared in public, clad in fine muslin embroidered with purple and gold, and carried in a golden palanquin or on a gorgeously accoutred elephant. Except when he rode out to the hunt, or otherwise amused himself, he found his time crowded with the business of his growing realm. His days were divided into sixteen periods of ninety minutes each. In the first he arose, and prepared himself by meditation; in the second he studied the reports of his agents, and issued secret instructions; the third he spent with his councillors in the Hall of Private Audience; in the fourth he attended to state finances and national defense; in the fifth he heard the petitions and suits of his subjects; in the sixth he bathed and dined, and read religious literature; in the seventh he received taxes and tribute, and made official appointments; in the eighth he again met his Council, and heard the reports of his spies, including the courtesans whom he used for this purpose;14 the ninth he devoted to relaxation and prayer, the tenth and eleventh to military matters, the twelfth again to secret reports, the thirteenth to the evening bath and repast, the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth to sleep.15 Perhaps the historian tells us what Chandragupta might have been, or how Kautilya wished the people to picture him, rather than what he really was. Truth does not often escape from palaces.
The actual direction of government was in the hands of the crafty vizier. Kautilya was a Brahman who knew the political value of religion, but took no moral guidance from it; like our modern dictators he believed that every means was justifiable if used in the service of the state. He was unscrupulous and treacherous, but never to his King; he served Chandragupta through exile, defeat, adventure, intrigue, murder and victory, and by his wily wisdom made the empire of his master the greatest that India had ever known. Like the author of The Prince, Kautilya saw fit to preserve in writing his formulas for warfare and diplomacy; tradition ascribes to him the Arthashastra, the oldest book in extant Sanskrit literature.16 As an example of its delicate realism we may take its list of means for capturing a fort: “Intrigue, spies, winning over the enemy’s people, siege, and assault”17—a wise economy of physical effort.
The government made no pretense to democracy, and was probably the most efficient that India has ever had.18 Akbar, greatest of the Moguls, “had nothing like it, and it may be doubted if any of the ancient Greek cities were better organized.”19 It was based frankly upon military power. Chandragupta, if we may trust Megasthenes (who should be as suspect as any foreign correspondent) kept an army of 600,000 foot, 30,000 horse, 9,000 elephants, and an unnamed number of chariots.20 The peasantry and the Brahmans were exempt from military service; and Strabo describes the farmers tilling the soil in peace and security in the midst of war.21 The power of the King was theoretically unlimited, but in practice it was restricted by a Council which—sometimes with the King, sometimes in his absence—initiated legislation, regulated national finances and foreign affairs, and appointed all the more important officers of state. Megasthenes testifies to the “high character and wisdom” of Chandragupta’s councillors, and to their effective power.22
The government was organized into departments with well-defined duties and a carefully graded hierarchy of officials, managing respectively revenue, customs, frontiers, passports, communications, excise, mines, agriculture, cattle, commerce, warehouses, navigation, forests, public games, prostitution, and the mint. The Superintendent of Excise controlled the sale of drugs and intoxicating drinks, restricted the number and location of taverns, and the quantity of liquors which they might sell. The Superintendent of Mines leased mining areas to private persons, who paid a fixed rent and a share of the profits to the government; a similar system applied to agriculture, for all the land was owned by the state. The Superintendent of Public Games supervised the gambling halls, supplied dice, charged a fee for their use, and gathered in for the treasury five per cent of all money taken in by the “bank.” The Superintendent of Prostitution looked after public women, controlled their charges and expenditures, appropriated their earnings for two days of each month, and kept two of them in the royal palace for entertainment and intelligence service. Taxes fell upon every profession, occupation and industry; and in addition rich men were from time to time persuaded to make “benevolences” to the King. The government regulated prices and periodically assayed weights and measures; it carried on some m
anufactures in state factories, sold vegetables, and kept a monopoly of mines, salt, timber, fine fabrics, horses and elephants.”23
Law was administered in the village by local headmen, or by panchayats—village councils of five men; in towns, districts and provinces by inferior and superior courts; at the capital by the royal council as a supreme court, and by the King as a court of last appeal. Penalties were severe, and included mutilation, torture and death, usually on the principle of lex talionis, or equivalent retaliation. But the government was no mere engine of repression; it attended to sanitation and public health, maintained hospitals and poor-relief stations, distributed in famine years the food kept in state warehouses for such emergencies, forced the rich to contribute to the assistance of the destitute, and organized great public works to care for the unemployed in depression years.24
The Department of Navigation regulated water transport, and protected travelers on rivers and seas; it maintained bridges and harbors, and provided government ferries in addition to those that were privately managed and owned”25—an admirable arrangement whereby public competition could check private plunder, and private competition could discourage official extravagance. The Department of Communications built and repaired roads throughout the empire, from the narrow wagon-tracks of the villages to trade routes thirty-two feet, and royal roads sixty-four feet, wide. One of these imperial highways extended twelve hundred miles from Pataliputra to the northwestern frontier26—a distance equal to half the transcontinental spread of the United States. At approximately every mile, says Megasthenes, these roads were marked with pillars indicating directions and distances to various destinations.27 Shade-trees, wells, police-stations and hotels were provided at regular intervals along the route.28 Transport was by chariots, palanquins, bullock-carts, horses, camels, elephants, asses and men. Elephants were a luxury usually confined to royalty and officialdom, and so highly valued that a woman’s virtue was thought a moderate price to pay for one of them.*