Compared to the century of civil war that preceded it, falling short of this description of peace was infinitely better than having no peace at all. In the same spirit, the contemporary writer Velleius Paterculus (19 BCE– 32 CE) pandered that the “Pax Augusta, which has spread to the regions of the east and of the west and to the bounds of the north and south, preserves every corner of the world safe from the fear of brigandage.”55
The post-Augustan parameters of the Pax Romana were twofold. On one hand, internal peace was maintained by economic prosperity and an effective socio-political infrastructure, when it was at all. On the other, incessant external wars kept invaders out, the legions busy and brought in plunder by the conquest of new territories, when they were successful. This internal/external infrastructure barely survived the Emperors in Augustus’ line: of the four, three were insane or became so with power, feared as cruel tyrants who disregarded law and lived lavishly. That Nero (r. 54–68), the last, was even accused of starting a fire that razed Rome is indicative. The founder of the brief Flavian Dynasty that followed rose in military ranks and was a general in Judea when he was proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers, the first but far from the last to be so honored. Vespasian’s reign (r. 69–79) brought a return to legal and fiscal order, and he built another Temple of Peace (Templum Pacis). His two sons and successors, the first benign, the second prone to paranoia and persecutions, staunchly defended the Empire’s borders. But they also bolstered autocratic rule by expanding the military. The so-called Five Good Emperors of the subsequent Antonine Dynasty presided over the post-Augustan apex of the Pax Romana. Coins of the era celebrate pax, which by now did not mean “a restoration of external peace,” a dream long since forsaken, “but the imposition of internal peace,” well within the Emperors’ power.56 Nerva, the Dynasty’s founder, reigned for only 15 months (96–98) but a reputation for tolerance, benevolence and respect for law preceded and outlived him. The Empire reached its territorial zenith during the reigns of Trajan (98–117), first ruler to officially spare women and children in battle, and Hadrian (117–138), who pulled back borders in Mesopotamia and Britain to better defend them. Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161) and the Stoic Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180) made Varros’ dual citizenship their unofficial ideology, save that the two were with good reason believed to be united in Rome. They instituted the idea of “one empire, one peace” by which a small sect was steadily ascending, and their reigns became “bywords for peace and prosperity,” commonly referred to as the Empire’s golden age.57
The anarchic third century exposed the fatal weaknesses of the Pax Romana’s internal/external infrastructure, leading to its decline and fall as well as that of the Roman Empire itself. Internal peace was periodically broken by revolts against despotic Emperors, derailing the economic prosperity and destabilizing the socio-political structures by which it was maintained. Dozens of “Soldier-Emperors” came to and stayed in power such as Vespasian, while not even universal citizenship for imperial residents was enough to quell their growing dissatisfaction. Externally, the languishing legions stationed on the borders could no longer hold back Germanic and Asiatic tribes, which continuously raided and invaded, eventually sacking Rome. Its last single leader, Diocletian (245–312), divided the Empire in two along a linguistic line, the Greeks of the East and the Latins of West, then the Emperor’s power into four (the Tetrarchy), two seniors called Augustus and two junior Caesars. Ironically, it is by these titles that Roman Empire finally shed its Republican forms. The seat of imperial power would totter from the Western to the Eastern Empire, now known as Byzantium, until this as well as other struggles for supremacy toppled the former (456) and the latter a millennium later. But as the namesake of the Eastern capital, Constantinople, became a convert to Christianity and began its incremental integration with the state, this major thread in the story of peace and peacemaking will be taken up again in Chapter 4.
3
Peace in the Ancient East: India, China and Japan
The Many, the Few, the One: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient India
The vast array of circumstances and lifestyles that have defined the Indian subcontinent’s identities also bring together a core strand throughout its ancient history: harmony. As in Ancient China, harmonic policies and practices effectively promoted peace by laying grounds for unity in diversity. Building on differences whenever possible, overcoming them when not, at one time thousands of indigenous villages sprawled across the Indus River Valley (c. 3300 BCE). Finding defensive walls unnecessary, they devoted their considerable resources to securing social peace by meeting the basic needs of the many rather than of the few, putting in place the world’s first sanitation systems and gridded town structures, in which sectors were based on occupation and equally provided for irrespective of wealth and status. The partnership model thus seems to have prevailed in Ancient India until the Indus Valley’s extended drought-related decline, after which the dominator model took root c. 1500 BCE. This change resulted from the arrival of nomadic Aryans (“noble ones”) of the eastern Eurasian steppes. By literary conjectures, scholars debate whether they came in a sudden invasion or in migratory waves. In any case, that Ancient Indian life was forever transformed by them, less towards than away from peace, is indubitable. The potentials of Ancient Indian peace and peacemaking came to be circumscribed by structurally violent socio-political structures, namely the caste system, and ongoing warfare on two levels: between local chiefdoms for direct rule and regional kingdoms for hegemony.
A mosaic of chiefdoms (rashtras) arose between the Indus Valley and the Ganges River Valley to the east, in which natives were generally subordinated to the more or less unwelcome newcomers. However, biogenetic, cultural and ideological imperatives required that their ways of life be fused together or doomed to die apart. The nearly impenetrable forests and mountains of the two Valleys were the rashtras’ natural borders, and account for the astonishing number of languages and traditions in India then as today. A multicultural proto-civilization thus emerged, called Vedic from the Vedas, its unifying foundational text and a forerunner of Hinduism. Socio-politically, a hereditary hierarchy topped by feuding Aryan chieftains (Rajas) and their staffs of mixed descent ascended in its early years. Rashtras then became loose confederations of capital cities, seats of religious and secular power, and satellite villages (janas). Later, groups of rashtrasbecame mahajanapadas or “great kingdoms” under Chakravatins, “conquerors of the world,” who were entrusted with exterminating external threats more than with direct rule, which was relegated to Rajas. The direct rule of a Raja meant the ability to raise tributary revenue from his janas, bolstered by the plunder gained by ritualized raids into neighboring rashtras, usually with no intent to impose direct rule. The rise of mahajanapadas thus on the whole decreased the frequency but increased the scale of warfare in Ancient India: periodic breaks in collective peace made individual and social peace more likely.
Chakravatins and Rajas were not the only driving forces behind these individually short-lived but as a whole long-lasting Vedic states (c. 1500– 300 BCE). They ruled by the consent and legislated with the approval of four councils of unequal weight. The vidhata and gana were elite bodies with religious and economic clout; the sabha and samiti were popular assemblies of lesser bearing. Vedic cities were also divided along occupational lines, though the strife of stratification replaced egalitarian harmony as the sustaining basis and goal of society. Hence, India’s caste system originates with the Vedic civilization’s socio-political structures. The Veda-prescribed castes (varnas) were, in declension: Brahmins, scholar-priests, bureaucrats; Kshatriya, warrior-rulers; Vaisya, farmers, traders; and Sudra, manual workers, artisans. Only centuries after the Vedas was the term jati used to indicate the rigid, endogamous and hereditary social group the varnas had by then become. The social order and continuity the caste system conferred must in regards to peace be evaluated in the shadows of the structural violence it propagated. Positive and negative exa
mples can be found in the Ramayana and Mahabharatra epics (c. 400– 200 BCE), part mythologies, part histories, which narrate battles as well as socio-cultural syntheses by marriage, political alliances couched in spiritual-philosophical discourse. Because of ongoing warfare between chiefdoms and kingdoms, prescribed forms of peacemaking were perhaps more fully developed in Ancient India than anywhere else at the time.
The Brahmins’ lingua franca, Sanskrit, had a developed lexicon of peace in these overall non-peaceful conditions. Pragmatic peace terms are expounded in Kautalya’s Arthashastra (fourth century BCE), an encyclopedic treatise on autocratic statecraft which deals with economics, education, jurisprudence, clandestine operations and peacemaking, among many other topics. A Six-Fold Policy between states is elaborated: peace (sandhi), war, neutrality, preparing for war, alliance, and making peace with one state while waging war with another, called double policy. To name a few of the peace processes described: peace made with a promise is called paripanita and with no promise, aparipanita; on the condition that troops along with the ruler would be turned over, atmamisha; on the condition that the commander would march with the army to a specified place, adrishtapurusha; when concluded by offering goods carriable away on men’s backs, upagraha; when obtained by ceding all of a war-torn realm, uchchhinnasandhi (“peace cut off from profit”); and, when bought with an large amount of money, kapala. The thrust of these peace policies is economic so that, for example, if “any two kings hostile to each other and deteriorating expect to acquire equal amount of wealth in equal time, they shall make peace with each other;” and if “by making peace with one, I can augment my own resources, and by waging war with another, I can destroy the works of my enemy,” then he may adopt the double policy and increase his resources.1A ruler situated between two more powerful states is instructed to seek protection from the stronger or to make peace with both on equal terms. Above all, relative strengths and resources must be considered in making peace and alliances or breaking them. In the end, “when the advantages derivable from peace and war are of equal character, one should prefer peace; for disadvantages, such as the loss of power and wealth. . . are ever-attending upon war.”2 The surest way for a ruler and his people to prosper was for them to unite in amity with their neighbors, creating suvarnasandhi, “golden peace.”
Reinforcing implementations of these political peace-related terms were parallel religious ones based on polytheistic belief systems, Vedism and Hinduism, likewise formative of Indian culture, specifically in relation individual minds, bodies and spirits. Similarities between Vedism and Hinduism outweigh their differences for our purposes and lie primarily in their respective emphases within the same textual tradition, Hinduism being an outgrowth of Vedism. Of primary importance to inner peace in Vedism is the recitation of hymns and the performance of rituals; in Hinduism, bodily drills like yoga and exercises of the spirit and mind take precedence. A salient peaceful feature of Ancient Indian polytheism, aside from ongoing syncretism and henotheism, is that unnumbered gods and goddesses represented everything from elements of local landscapes and natural phenomena to everyday objects and timeless ideals were all part of one pantheon and system of belief. Ways of worshiping them included individual or group meditations, festivities, rituals and drills. War did require religious legitimatization, but this astonishing plurality meant that religion was seldom a valid pretext for war on its own. Presupposing tolerance, polytheism fostered a peaceful coexistence of spiritualities coordinated by shared pantheist concept: atmans, the individual souls of humans as well as divinities; brahman, the universal soul governing them by an eternal law, karma, by which atmans’ actions are held accountable. In Hinduism there is a separate deity called Brahma, the creator, part of a trinity with Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer, whose imports to peace are obvious. Atmans and brahman were at one time united and innately peaceful, shanti in spiritual senses and manahprasada in cognitive. Their separation stems from atmans’ ties to the temporal-material world and the brahman’s universal and everlasting immateriality, whose energy is the basis of this world.
In a sense, the sole purpose of Vedic and Hindu practices is to restore individual atmans’ lost peace by identifying or unifying them with brahman, which is why purification rituals to “decontaminate” atmans from impurities play key roles in Hindu spiritual and bodily inner peace practices. By following the Vedas, atmans can generate qualitatively positive karma while also reducing it quantitatively; not doing so generates negative karma and increases it. Reincarnation (samsara) occurs through a hierarchical order of beings so that, and until, atmans become empty of karma. At that point, liberation from the cycle of reincarnation (moksha), identification with the brahman and immaculate peace are attained. This process was adapted, with variations, by Mahavira in the Janaist religion he founded in the fifth century BCE. Although stress is placed on the individual, karma also had strong collective connotations. The proportion and degree of the karma-free in society serve as a gauge of its general peaceful state, which in turn influences the feasibility of individual karmic pursuits. Shanti is sometimes used interchangeably with sandi (association, combination), the opposite of vigraha (separation, isolation); corollary terms are the absence of isolation (vigrahabhava) and absence of strife (yuddhabhava). Believing that our actions in this lifetime determine our state in the next is a tremendous impetus for peace, the logic being not only that the peace we bring about now will follow us, but also that violence will too. This concept may be called reincarnative peace, found in both polytheistic and monotheistic traditions, East and West. So while polytheistic beliefs supported social stratification, they also offered practical opportunities to transcend them.
As a rule, the preceding socio-political and religious traditions combined sustained the caste-based dynastic system through the Magadha Empire (684 BCE–550 CE) despite the Persian occupation under Darius I, and those of the Indian Middle Ages (230 BCE–1279 CE) despite the Greek invasion of Alexander the Great. Tumultuous as they were, these mixed native dynasties and periods of foreign rule left largely unchanged the Vedic socio-political and Hindu religious forms until the Islamic Sultanates of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. Two peaceful exceptions that proved this structurally violent rule were the first explicitly nonviolent religion, Buddhism, and the part of Ashoka’s reign based on its principles. Like those of future peace leaders, their stories mingle history, legend and allegory but with distinctively peace-oriented messages. Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha’s given name, was the son of a Kshatriya prince in modern Nepal. Soon after birth (c. 563 BCE), a seer foretold that he would be a great teacher if he left the palace grounds and a great king if he did not. So his family immersed him in luxurious distractions to shield him from sufferings that might motivate his departure. But on escaping his comfortable confines, and after having married and continued the family line, he witnessed three commonplace sights from which he had previously been safeguarded: an old, a sick and a dead man. These sights made him aware of human suffering’s universality, of which the unnecessary persistence, he decided, precluded individual and social peace, to which he then devoted his life.
To his family’s dismay, he deserted the palace and began practicing in the most ascetic veins of Hinduism, through which he discovered that denying the spirit, mind and body can be as detrimental to inner peace as indulging them. The “middle path” between these two extremes he followed from then on was the basis of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path and the Three Jewels that govern much of Buddhist life. These he began to preach after becoming Buddha, or “enlightened one,” which is said to have occurred in one night as he meditated under a tree. His first disciples quote him saying that the Truths together lead “to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment.”3 Dukkha, the central tenet of these Truths, is usually reduced in English to suffering, but is more insightfully understood as the deeper meaning of Siddhartha’s three sights: a needless inhibition of inner and social peace. In
sum, the Truths are: Dukkha is universal and is entangled in humanity’s materiality, sensory perception, cognition, habits and experience, the five aggregates; Dukkha’s origins lie in expectations and attachments, to the five aggregates or anything else of this world; the cessation of Dukkha, or the state of enlightened peace Buddha reached (Nirvana), is possible for all; and the way to the cessation of Dukkha is the Eightfold Path. The Truths are principles more than prescriptions, like the Eightfold Path, which represents the Buddhist perspective on pacific wisdom, conduct and discipline.
Each of Path’s eight elements are qualified as samyanc, usually translated as “right,” but which more accurately combines the meanings of completeness and perfection, in the sense of both a state of being and a process:
1. Understanding of the Four Noble Truths and of the impermanence of Dukkha;
2. Intention, a commitment to non-violence and the pursuit of enlightenment;
3. Speech, to abstain from lying and divisive discourse, as well as idle chatter;
4. Action, specifically to refrain from killing, stealing and intoxicants;
5. Livelihood, not engaging in a profession that is violent or dishonest;
6. Effort, to always show goodwill and positivity while rejecting their opposites;
7. Mindfulness, being alert, clear- and open-minded to one’s being in the world around; and
8. Concentration, the practice of meditation both as an activity and as a way of life.
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