by Andrew Marr
The first biographies of the Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, appear around six hundred years after he lived. They give place names, dates and a plausible life story. But the pause is a long one, making him the least historically visible of the major ethical revolutionaries of the age of the great empires. Confucius did not get a biography until some four hundred years after he died, the work of the Chinese historian Sima Qian; but Mengzi, or Mencius, who lived a century after Confucius, did write about him; and his own reported conversations fill in gaps. (Compared with Buddha and Confucius, Christ is a much clearer historical figure. St Mark is reckoned to have written his account only forty years or so after the death of Jesus, in the year 70 when Jerusalem fell. There are good reasons to think he may have had the stories directly from St Peter, the historical Christ’s companion. In addition, there is supporting evidence from non-Christian sources, such as the Jewish historian Josephus and mainstream Roman writers, about large numbers of followers of ‘Chrestus’ less than a century after his death.)
Yet archaeology and ancient texts do explain a lot about the society the Buddha emerged from, as well as his teaching. By his time, the Brahmin system with its priestly hierarchy and sacrifices was very strongly entrenched, but it was also being challenged by dissident travelling teachers and sects. This probably reflected the severe social disruption being experienced by north India at the time, which was undergoing a major increase in population and fast changes to many people’s lives. The villages and local markets had been added to, with sizeable towns and even cities of around thirty-five thousand people springing up, accompanied by a money culture, shops, cart paths, moats and fortified walls.
Unlike stone-built Greece or Persia, we have almost no architectural remains of a people who built with pounded earth, mud bricks and wood. Their words, repeated in scriptures and poems long enough to make Homer look terse, have lasted better than their buildings – or anything they made that was much larger than pottery and ironwork. In the so-called republics or gana-sanghas,18 Brahmin authority seems to have been more questioned than in the kingdoms. Siddhartha Gautama came from one of the former, the small clan-republic of Sakya, inside today’s Nepal, which elected its own chief. Academic arguments persist about just when Siddhartha was born; recent scholarship is shifting his dates forward by about eighty years, from around 566 BC to nearer the middle of the following century. But the often quoted description of him as a prince, living a life of royal luxury, hardly squares with what is known of the Sakya clan and seems an embellishment.19 He was more likely to have been a reasonably well-off leading clan member.
Siddhartha married his cousin, had a son and lived a comfortable life until, aged twenty-nine, he rebelled and set off to seek enlightenment, leaving his family behind with the briefest of farewells and no apparent remorse. Some traditions say this happened after his refusal to take part in another bloody bout of inter-clan warfare. Walking off would not have seemed such a strange thing to do in the India of Siddhartha’s time. There was a tradition of men leaving their villages and families and going to seek spiritual truth in the forests, or begging by the roads. Shaven-headed ‘seekers’ in ragged robes seem to have been widely respected, even if their views differed wildly. The tradition can be likened to the wilderness treks of Israelite prophets, or those of the later Christian saints and mendicants moving from village to village.
At a time of social change and civil warfare, the appetite for new thinking is famously keen. In 1949 the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the period from 800 to 200 BC ‘the axial age’ because the revolution in spiritual thought was so powerful that the rest of human history rotates around it. It seems an essential product of the greater leisure and wealth created by the rise of town- and city-based civilizations, and the disturbing effect of the wars between them. As a phrase, the ‘axial age’ has fallen from fashion, but there was clearly a rethinking of old beliefs going on from Greece to China. The conflict between small Indian states in the Buddha’s time is a perfect example of it.
We are told that Siddhartha tried some of the techniques used by other seekers, beginning with ascetic renunciation and begging in a nearby city. He gave this up to wander, study under hermit monks, and meditate. He rejected extreme mortification, the practice of starving until one was almost a living skeleton, for a ‘middle way’ between that and worldly indulgence (attractively, rice pudding seems to have helped do the trick). After meditating under a sacred fig (or Bodhi) tree for forty-nine days and nights at a small village in northern India, he achieved enlightenment at the age of thirty-five, finally understanding the source of human suffering. What did he conclude? That the pains of birth, illness, ageing and death were caused by a lust for sensual pleasure and renewed life, which repeats itself in the cycle of death and rebirth until overcome by mental and moral willpower. At this moment, the seeker breaks the tragic cycle. He achieves a state beyond the physical world, of pure mind and serenity, or nirvana.
The Buddha or ‘enlightened one’, as Siddhartha was now known, started to gather disciples, who became monks. With them he travelled around the Ganges flood plain, preaching to anyone who would listen. The former courtesan Amrapali, who (as noted earlier) had provoked a war, became a devoted follower; her son became a Buddhist monk. The Buddha founded monasteries, including some for female monks. He rejected both animal sacrifices and the caste system, and survived assassination attempts by supporters of Brahminism, to live on to the age of eighty. Or so it is said – and, again, how can we know? Stories of the Buddha’s life and his sayings were transmitted by methodical mass chanting, rather like rote-learning in traditional schoolrooms. This allowed them to be passed on, generation by generation, with the minimum of error, though corruptions will always appear. But much early history starts as oral history, and it is confirmed surprisingly often by archaeology. We cannot brush it away.
In this story there are obvious similarities with the stories of Christ and Muhammad: the leaving-behind of ordinary family life to seek enlightenment in natural solitude (under a tree, in a cave, or in the desert); then there is the gathering of disciples; preaching through stories to everyone, not just an elite; and the rejection of earlier religious systems. Unlike the founders of the great monotheisms, however, the Buddha never claimed divinity for himself, or his system. Many would argue that strictly speaking Buddhism is not a religion but a system of self-control, which allows its followers to escape the limitations and pains of everyday life.
But it involved a pacifist and tolerant attitude, which made it a public matter, not simply a private practice; and it was open to everyone, of whatever past creed or social position or race. In the centuries after the Buddha’s death his followers tapped into attitudes already present in Indian thinking – the renunciation of wealth and power, vegetarianism, pacificism – and extended them into a ‘do unto others’ creed. By contrast, Christianity would become intertwined with the very worldly and aggressive power of the later Roman Empire, and Islam would arm itself even more dramatically.
Buddhism was indeed different. In essence, it was a radical rejection of everything that goes to make up what we call history – earthly empires, developing technological skill, changing political systems and ideas. The Buddha says, Walk away from all that, and instead look inside yourself. So it is hardly surprising that, with one exception we shall come to later, Buddhism rarely features as a history-shaping system of belief. This does not mean it was not hugely influential. It spread to the countries of South-East Asia, where superbly elaborate Buddhist temples and courts would emerge, under the patronage of Buddhist kings. The influence of Buddhist monks and art in China was huge, and it spread from there to Korea and to Japan, where the story of its early art seems at times almost completely a Buddhist one. Buddhism would be persecuted in most of these places. It did not, however, produce a political or imperial system of its own; the Buddha would have been aghast if it had.
In India itself, Buddhism would later be almost ext
erminated until modern times, and it was only under the Victorian British Raj that the Buddha’s existence as a real, historical figure came to be acknowledged. All the same, it remains a very important belief system. Bodhgaya, where the haggard former aristocrat meditated his way to enlightenment under the fig tree, is today perhaps the most attractive of the pilgrimage sites of the world’s great religions. Calm, smiling, saffron- and plum-shrouded monks and nuns from Thailand, Burma and Sri Lanka chant under the shadow of an ancient temple. There is a refreshing air of cheerfulness, and the religious tat is more meagre, cheaper and less obtrusive than in Rome, Jerusalem or (I suspect) Mecca.
What, meanwhile, of the even greater contemporary civilization to the east of India?
Kongzi’s Mid-life Crisis
Aged fifty-four, a middle-ranking bureaucrat in a failing, riven state had had enough. He resigned as minister for law and order, said goodbye to most of his friends and went off on a thirteen-year ramble. This was not a Buddhist search for solitude and enlightenment, but a political journey. After visiting many rival states and finding little employment, the civil servant came home again, amused and rueful at his relative failure. By the time he died, he had attracted a small group of friends and followers. The career of Kong Fuzi, or Kongzi, or ‘Confucius’ (in the Latinized version of his name made appealing to faltering Western lips by Jesuit missionaries two thousand years later), was hardly stellar.
Yet his influence was huge. For good or ill, Confucius was treated as a kind of god by scores of Chinese emperors, and had a huge effect on Chinese life. Reviled by Mao Zedong and the original Communists, in the year 2012 his influence is growing again as new generations of Chinese search for values beyond threadbare Communism or materialism. A state-sponsored and fairly dreadful film has been made about his life. In the central Confucian temple in Beijing – one of around three thousand such temples – where emperors once worshipped the thinker, small children, sent by parents anxious to impart something more than mere facts, are again being taught his ideas.
Depending on one’s view of the row about Buddha’s dates, the two men were alive at roughly the same time. The Chinese were more careful with records, and we believe Kongzi lived from 551 to 479 BC. Like Siddhartha, he was born in a marginal state and at a time of civil strife and war, in which the old order was being challenged. If India had her yellow-robed forest ‘seekers’, China had her wandering philosophers, by tradition hundreds of them. Like the Buddha, Kongzi communed with rulers without coming under anyone else’s sway; like the Buddha he preached the importance of doing unto others as you would like them to do to you; like the Buddha he never came close to asserting his own divinity. But he too would later become the focus of a semi-religion that elevated him into mythical status.
Kongzi’s China was divided, like the Buddha’s India and golden-age Greece, into rival states. After his death it too would plunge into vicious local wars. Instead of Athens, Corinth, Sparta, Panchala, Maghada, Sakla and the rest, China had the states of Wei, Zhou, Song, Han and Chu. But politically, China was if anything even more chaotic. The chronicles for the time list more than 140 states, whose rulers and priests behaved in ways that contemporary Greeks, Persians or Indians would have understood. They tried to divine the future by reading the cracks on the burned shoulder-bones of cows, or the undershells of turtles, which was no sillier than the Greek habit of listening to the ramblings of women who had inhaled poisonous vapours, or the Roman penchant for fingering chicken entrails.
What made China different was that it had been united. This was the source of Kongzi’s deep conservative romanticism about a lost past. The states of Kongzi’s time were themselves the shattered shell fragments of a much greater China, that of the Zhou dynasty which had lasted for more than seven centuries, following the fall of the Shang. Chinese imperial history can sound impenetrable to outsiders, but at this stage the story is pretty straightforward. The Shang were the first historically certain dynasty, following the cloudy story of the Xia and Da Yu.
Shang China was, like early India, a much wilder place than it later became, with extensive forests and impassable marshes, not yet drained for rice. Where Chinese civilization probably first took root, along the Yellow River, roaming animals included tigers, bears, elephants, rhinos and panthers; the climate was fierce, with cold winters and very hot summers, as well as the regular flooding. Shang society was, again, in some ways like early Aryan India, an aristocratic and warrior hierarchy setting much store by raiding and hunting, living off the backs of an impoverished peasantry.
Like the Assyrians and Persians, the Shang fought from chariots and used powerful bows. A cascade of subkings, dukes, local rulers and fighters derived their position from the emperor. Their cities and fortresses were built with walls which, when dug up today, are still sharp-edged and hard. They had wooden buildings in the same longeaved and rectangular pattern of later Chinese architecture. (The wood eventually gave way to brick and the thatched roofs were mimicked in yellow and green glazed tiles, but the essentials remained for a remarkably long time, China being untouched by the imported styles and hybrids that gave European architecture such diversity.) After lives spent in their square, pillared country homes, the Shang nobility were given lavish burials, with superb bronze vessels, silks and lacquered coffins. They were addicted to human sacrifice, and huge numbers of servants and prisoners seem to have been murdered and partly dismembered to keep Shang aristocrats company on the way to the afterlife.
It was not all dark. Under the Shang, extensive terraces were built for agriculture, land was cleared and more canals were dug. Remarkably, a script of at least four thousand characters, found written on diviners’ animal bones, bears enough resemblance to modern Chinese for archaeologists to be able to read some of it straight off. Shang culture looks in many respects like the world of the Aztecs, with their human sacrifices and complex, gnarled art. Just as in central America, an attractive human-scale ‘folk art’ had given way to ever more complex, severe, encrusted ritual designs, which seem to mirror the more forbidding society developing in cities and palaces.20 Shang bronzes are particularly famous, quite extraordinary achievements in casting. But they inspire only admiration; they are not appealing.
The Shang were ousted by the long-lasting Zhou, and it is to them that Kongzi looked back with dazzled admiration. One historian says that the Shang deserved to go: ‘Drunkenness, incest, cannibalism, pornographic songs and sadistic punishments enliven the catalogue of liturgical improprieties.’21 The man who more than any other put an end to such poor behaviour was the headmasterly Duke of Zhou. His older brother won a great victory over the Shang around 150 years after the siege of Troy, at a site called Muye, but had then retired home and died. Since the king’s son was too young to take over, the duke led a regency council, which eventually overwhelmed the earlier dynasty and established the Zhou as its replacement under ‘the Mandate of Heaven’.
This is an important concept in Chinese history. As a new ruling family from the edge of Shang China, the Zhou had to tread carefully. They needed continuity to keep the loyalty of the followers of the ousted dynasty. Later dynasties would have the same problem. So the Duke of Zhou declared that the Zhou were merely the tools used by a just Heaven to punish the Shang. Given this job by Heaven, the deal required that the new king must be reverent and kind. The duke said: ‘As he functions as king, let him not, because the common people stray and do what is wrong, then presume to govern them by harsh punishments . . . In being king, let him take his position in the primacy of virtue. The little people will then pattern themselves on him throughout the world.’22
This was a crucial doctrine for Kongzi. A virtuous king produces a virtuous people. Thus begins a chain of obligation and mutual service. If everyone acts according to their role, trying to be whatever they are – mother, baker, teacher, soldier – as well as they can, then the good life and the good society emerge. ‘Knowing your place’ is a positive social virtue, not merely
submissiveness. This is a family-based and profoundly anti-individualistic way of thinking; but if we, in our extremely (and excessively) individualistic culture do not try to understand it, we have no chance of understanding Kongzi, or Chinese history, or indeed today’s China either.
After explaining the Mandate of Heaven to the people, the Duke of Zhou stood down and handed back control to the rightful king, his nephew – a modest gesture rare in the Chinese story. Kongzi spoke a lot about the duke. The heyday of the Zhou dynasty was for him and his generation a little like the age of lost heroes was for the Greeks of the same time. But by his day the system devised by the Zhou, which had parcelled out the Chinese heartland into subsidiary principalities, had completely broken down. The principalities, with their own cities, became effectively hereditary, then started to harden into rival independent states. One historian puts it beautifully: the House of Zhou ‘now burned only as a wraithlike source of ultimate authority in a world where all the states and principalities had freely entered into a struggle for survival . . . bonds of lineage and loyalty were losing their hold’.23 The time in short, was out of joint. Kongzi would come to think that he was born to set it right.
He was born, apparently, in Chanping village in the Lu kingdom. Lu’s connections with the failing dynasty were particularly poignant; the Duke of Zhou himself had returned to run Lu after handing back control of China. So Lu was a rare, loyal vassal of the Zhou, or meant to be. It is said that Kongzi’s father was a famous warrior and strongman called Zou He, who married a ‘woman of the Yan clan’ and made love to her ‘in the wilds’, or by some accounts on a sacred mound in the forest. The boy was born with a deformed head, either a lump on the skull or a depression, and a strangely sunken face.24 He grew up to be notably tall. In the China of the time, he might well have been abandoned to die. That he was not may explain Kongzi’s lifelong devotion to his mother. His father died early, and though he could claim the status of gentleman, just about, Kongzi seems to have had a tough start.