Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Others would draw upon these new ideas to challenge the social system. In the Punjab, the Aryans had tried to fight their way to “liberation” (moksha); now some, building on the internalized spirituality of the Brahmanas, were looking for a more spiritual freedom and would investigate their inner world as vigorously as the Aryan warriors had once explored the untamed forests. The new wealth gave the nobility the time and leisure that was essential for such introspective contemplation. The new spirituality was, therefore, strictly for the aristocracy; it was one of the civilized arts that relied on the state’s structural violence. No shudra or chandala would be permitted to spend hours in the meditations and metaphysical discussions that between the sixth and second centuries BCE produced the texts known as the Upanishads.

  These new teachings may have originally been formulated by Brahmins who lived in the towns and understood the problems arising from urban living.60 But significantly many new practices were attributed to Kshatriya warriors, and the discussions reported in the Upanishads often took place in the raja’s court. They drew on the more interior spirituality of the Brahmanas and took it a step further. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the earliest of these texts, was almost certainly composed in the kingdom of Videha, a frontier state on the easternmost point of Aryan expansion.61 Videha was scorned by the conservative Brahmins in the Doab, but there was a great admixture of peoples in these easterly territories, including Indo-Aryan settlers from earlier waves of migration and tribes from Iran, as well as peoples indigenous to India. Some of these foreigners assimilated to the varna classes but brought their own traditions with them—including, perhaps, a skepticism about Vedic orthodoxy. These new encounters were intellectually stimulating, and the early Upanishads reflect this excitement.

  The social and political developments in these new states inspired some of the warrior class to imagine a new world free of priestly ascendency. Thus the Upanishads denied the necessity of the Vedic sacrifices and completed the devas’ downgrading by simply assimilating the gods into the contemplative’s psyche: “ ‘Sacrifice to this god. Sacrifice to that god.’ People do say these things, but in reality each of these gods is his own creation, for he himself is all these gods.”62 The worshipper now turned within. The focus of the Upanishads was the atman, the “self,” which, like the devas, was also a manifestation of the Brahman. So if the sage could discover the inner core of his own being, he would automatically enter into the ultimate reality. Only by the ecstatic knowledge of the self, which would free him of the desire for ephemeral things here below, would a person be liberated from the ceaseless cycle of rebirth and redeath. This was a discovery of immense importance. The idea that the ultimate reality, which was “All” that is, was an immanent presence in every single human being would become a central insight in every major religious tradition. There was therefore no need to perform the elaborate rituals that had upheld the structural violence of the varna system, because once they encountered the deepest part of themselves, practitioners were one with “the All”: “If a man knows ‘I am brahman’ in this way, he becomes this whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (atman).”63 It was a defiant declaration of independence, a political as well as a spiritual revolution. The Kshatriya could now cast aside his dependence on the priest who dominated the ritual arena. At the same time as vaishyas and shudras were climbing the social ladder, the warrior aristocracy was making a bid for the first place in society.

  Yet the Upanishads also challenged the Kshatriya martial ethos. The atman had originally been Agni, the deepest, divine “self” of the warrior that he had attained by fighting and stealing. The heroic Aryan drive eastward had been motivated by desire for earthly things—cows, plunder, land, honor, and prestige. Now the Upanishad sages urged their disciples to renounce such desire. Anyone who remained fixated on mundane wealth could never be liberated from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, but “a man who does not desire—who is without desires, who is freed from desires, whose only desire is his self (atman)—his vital functions do not depart. Brahman he is and to brahman he goes.”64 New meditative techniques induced a state of mind that was “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected”: in short, the very opposite of the old agitated Aryan mentality.65 One of the Upanishads actually described Indra, no less, living peacefully as a humble student in the forest with his teacher and relinquishing violence in order to find perfect tranquillity.66

  Aryans had always considered themselves inherently superior to others; their rituals had bred within them a deep sense of entitlement that had fueled their raids and conquests. But the Upanishads taught that because the atman, the essence of every single creature, was identical with the Brahman, all beings shared the same sacred core. The Brahman was the subtle kernel of the banyan seed from which a great tree grows.67 It was the sap that gave life to every part of the tree; it was also the most fundamental reality of every single human being.68 Brahman was like a chunk of salt left overnight to dissolve in a beaker of water; even though it could not be seen the next morning, it was still present in every sip.69 Instead of repudiating this basic kinship with all beings, as the warrior did when he demonized his enemy, these sages were deliberately cultivating an awareness of it. Everyone liked to imagine that he was unique, but in reality his special distinguishing features were no more permanent than rivers that all flowed into the same sea. Once they left the riverbed, they became “just the ocean,” no longer proclaiming their individuality, crying “I am that river,” “I am this river.” Such strident assertion of the ego was a delusion that could only lead to pain and confusion. Release (moksha) from such suffering was dependent on the profound acknowledgment that at base everybody was Brahman and should therefore be treated with absolute reverence. The Upanishads bequeathed to India a sense of the fundamental unity of all beings, so that your so-called enemy was no longer the heinous other but inseparable from you.70

  Indian religion had always endorsed and informed the structural and martial violence of society. But as early as the eighth century BCE, the “renouncers” (samnyasin) mounted a disciplined and devastating critique of this inherent aggression, withdrawing from settled society to adopt an independent lifestyle. Renunciation was not, as is often thought in the West, simply life negating. Throughout Indian history, asceticism has nearly always had a political dimension and has often inspired a radical reappraisal of society. That certainly happened in the Gangetic plain.71 Aryans had always possessed the “restless heart” that had made Gilgamesh weary of settled life, but instead of leaving home to fight and steal, the renouncers eschewed aggression, owned no property, and begged for their food.72 By about 500 BCE, they had become the chief agents of spiritual change and a direct challenge to the values of the agrarian kingdoms.73 This movement was in part an offshoot of brahmacharya, the “holy life” led by the Brahmin student, who would spend years with his guru, studying the Vedas, begging humbly for his bread, and living alone in the tropical forests for a given period. In other parts of the world too, Aryan youths lived in the wild as part of their military training, hunting for food and learning the arts of self-sufficiency and survival. But because the Brahmin’s dharma did not include violence, the brahmacharin was forbidden to hunt, to harm animals, or ride in a war chariot.74

  Moreover, most of the renouncers were adult Brahmins when they embarked on their solitary existence, their apprenticeship long past.75 A renouncer made a deliberate choice. He repudiated the ritual sacrifices that symbolized the Aryan political community and rejected the family household, the institutional mainstay of settled life. He had in effect stepped right outside the systemic violence of the varna system and extracted himself from the economic nexus of society in order to become a “beggar” (bhiksu).76 Some renouncers returned home, only to become social and religious irritants within the community, while others remained in the forest and challenged the culture from without. They condemned the aristocratic preoccupation with status,
honor, and glory, yearned for insults “as if they were nectar,” and deliberately courted contempt by behaving like madmen or animals.77 Like so many Indian reformers, the renouncers drew upon the ancient mythology of warfare to model a different kind of nobility. They evoked the heroic days in the Punjab, when men had proved their valor and virility by braving the untamed forest. Many saw the bhiksu as a new kind of pioneer.78 When a famous renouncer came to town, people of all classes flocked to listen to him.

  Perhaps the most important martial ritual revised by the renouncers was yoga, which became the hallmark of renouncer spirituality. Originally, as we have seen, the term had referred to the tethering of the draft animals to the war chariots before a raid; now it became a contemplative discipline that “yoked” the yogin’s mental powers in a raid on the unconscious impulses (vrittis) of passion, egotism, hatred, and greed that had fueled the warrior ethos and were so deeply entrenched in the psyche that they could be extirpated only by sheer mental force. Yoga may have been rooted in the indigenous traditions of India, but by the sixth century BCE it had become central to the Aryan spiritual landscape. A systematic assault on the ego, it expunged the “I” from the yogin’s mind, nullifying the warrior’s proud self-assertion: “I am the mightiest! I am supreme!” The ancient warriors of the Punjab had been like the devas, perpetually on the move and constantly engaged in martial activity. Now the new man of yoga sat for hours in one place, holding himself in such unnatural stillness that he seemed more like a statue or a plant than a human being. If he persevered, a skilled yogin had intimations of a final liberation (moksha) from the confines of egotism that bore no relation to ordinary experience.

  Before he was allowed even to sit in the yogic position, an aspirant had to complete an arduous ethical program, observing five “prohibitions” (yamas).79 The first of these was ahimsa, nonviolence: not only was he forbidden to kill or injure another creature, but he could not even speak unkindly or make an irritable gesture. Second, he was forbidden to steal: instead of seizing other people’s property like the raiders, the yogin had to cultivate an indifference to material possessions. Lying was also prohibited. Truth-telling had always been central to the Aryan warrior ethos, but the exigencies of war had occasionally forced even Indra into deceit; the aspirant, however, was not permitted to be economical with the truth, even to save his own life. He also abstained from sex and intoxicating substances that could enervate the mental and physical energies that he would need in this spiritual expedition. Finally, he must study the teaching (dharma) of his guru and cultivate habitual serenity, behaving kindly and courteously to everybody without exception. This was an initiation into a new way of being human, one that eschewed the greed, self-preoccupation, and aggression of the warrior. By dint of practice, these ethical disciplines would become second nature to the yogin, and when that happened, the texts explained, he would experience “indescribable joy.”80

  Some renouncers broke even more completely with the Vedic system and were denounced as heretics by the Brahmins. Two in particular made a lasting impact, and significantly, both came from the gana-sanghas. Destined for a military career, Vardhamana Jnatraputra (c. 599–527) was the son of a Kshatriya chieftain of the Jnatra clan of Kundagrama, north of modern Patna. At the age of thirty, however, he changed course and became a renouncer. After a long, difficult apprenticeship, he achieved enlightenment and became a jina (“conqueror”); his followers became known as Jains. Even though he went further than anybody else in his renunciation of violence, it was natural for him, as a former warrior, to express his insights in military imagery. His followers called him Mahavira (“Great Champion”), the title of an intrepid warrior in the Rig Veda. Yet his regime was based wholly on nonviolence, one that vanquished every impulse to harm others. For Mahavira, the only way to achieve liberation (moksha) was to cultivate an attitude of friendliness toward everyone and everything.81 Here, as in the Upanishads, we encounter the requirement found in many great world traditions that it is not enough to confine our benevolence to our own people or to those we find congenial; this partiality must be replaced by a practically expressed empathy for everybody, without exception. If this was practiced consistently, violence of any kind—verbal, martial, or systemic—becomes impossible.

  Mahavira taught his male and female disciples to develop a sympathy that had no bounds, to realize their profound kinship with all beings. Every single creature—even plants, water, fire, air, and rocks—had a jiva, a living “soul,” and must be treated with the respect that we wish to receive ourselves.82 Most of his followers were Kshatriyas seeking an alternative to the warfare and structural segmentation of society. As warriors, they would have routinely distanced themselves from the enemy, carefully stifling their innate reluctance to kill their own kind. Jains, like the Upanishadic sages, taught their disciples to recognize their community with all others and relinquish the preoccupation with “us” and “them” that made fighting and structural oppression impossible, because a true “conqueror” did not inflict harm of any kind.

  Later, Jains would develop a complex mythology and cosmology, but in the early period nonviolence was their only precept: “All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure, unchangeable law, which the enlightened ones who know have proclaimed.”83 Unlike warriors who trained themselves to become impervious to the agony they inflicted, Jains deliberately attuned themselves to the pain of the world. They learned to move with consummate caution lest they squash an insect or trample on a blade of grass; they did not pluck fruit from a tree but waited till it fell to the ground. Like all renouncers, they had to eat what they were given, even meat, but must never ask for any creature to be killed on their behalf.84 Jain meditation consisted simply of a rigorous suppression of all antagonistic thoughts and a conscious effort to fill the mind with affection for all creatures. The result was samayika (“equanimity”), a profound, life-changing realization that all creatures were equal. Twice a day Jains stood before their guru and repented of any distress they might, even inadvertently, have caused: “I ask pardon of all living creatures. May all creatures pardon me. May I have friendship for all creatures and enmity toward none.”85

  Toward the end of the fifth century, a Kshatriya from the tribal republic of Sakka in the foothills of the Himalayas shaved his head and donned the renouncer’s yellow robe.86 After an arduous spiritual quest during which he studied with many of the leading gurus of the day, Siddhatta Gotama, later known as the Buddha (“awakened one”), achieved enlightenment by a form of yoga based on the suppression of antagonistic feelings and the careful cultivation of kindly, positive emotions.87 Like Mahavira, his near contemporary, the Buddha’s teaching was based on nonviolence. He achieved a state that he called nibbana,b because the greed and aggression that had limited his humanity had been extinguished like a flame.88 Later the Buddha devised a meditation that taught his monks to direct feelings of friendship and affection to the ends of the earth, desiring that all creatures be free of pain, and finally freeing themselves of any personal attachment or partiality by loving all sentient beings with the “even-mindedness” of upeksha. Not a single creature was to be excluded from this radius of concern.89

  It was summed up in the early prayer, attributed to the Buddha, recited daily by his monks and lay disciples.

  Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate

  Small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away,

  Alive or still to be born—may they all be perfectly happy!

  Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere.

  May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred!

  Let us cherish all creatures as a mother her only child!

  May our loving thoughts fill the whole world, above, below, across,—

  Without limit; a boundless goodwill toward the whole world,

>   Unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity!90

  The Buddha’s enlightenment had been based on the principle that to live morally was to live for others. Unlike the other renouncers, who retreated from human society, Buddhist monks were commanded to return to the world to help others find release from pain. “Go now,” he told his first disciples, “and travel for the welfare, and happiness of the people, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare, and happiness of gods and men.”91 Instead of simply eschewing violence, Buddhism demanded a positive campaign to assuage the suffering and increase the happiness of “the whole world.”

  The Buddha summed up his teaching in four “Noble Truths”: that existence was dukkha; that the cause of our pain was selfishness and greed; that nirvana released us from this suffering; and that the way to achieve this state was to follow the program of meditation, morality, and resolution that he called the “Noble Path,” which was designed to produce an alternative aristocracy. The Buddha was a realist and did not imagine that he could single-handedly abolish the oppression inherent in the varna system, but he insisted that even a vaishya or a shudra would be ennobled if he or she behaved in a selfless, compassionate manner and “abstained from the killing of creatures.”92 By the same token, a man or woman became a “commoner” (pathujjana) by behaving cruelly, greedily, and violently.93

  His sangha, or order of monks and nuns, modeled a different kind of society, an alternative to the aggression of the royal court. As in the tribal republics, there was no autocratic rule, but decisions were made in common. King Pasenedi of Koshala was greatly impressed by the “smiling and courteous” demeanor of the monks, “alert, calm and unflustered, living on alms, their minds remaining as gentle as wild deer.” At court, he said wryly, everybody competed acrimoniously for wealth and status, whereas in the sangha he saw monks “living together as uncontentiously as milk with water, looking at one another with kind eyes.”94 The sangha was not perfect—it could never entirely transcend class distinctions—but it became a powerful influence in India. Instead of melting away into the forests like other renouncers, the Buddhists were highly visible. The Buddha used to travel with an entourage of hundreds of monks, their yellow robes and shaven heads demonstrating their dissent from the mainstream, walking along the trade routes beside the merchants. And behind them, in wagons and chariots laden with provisions, rode their lay supporters, many of them Kshatriyas.