Of all the overtly peaceful religious tenets ever proposed, the Path is among the simplest and most directly applicable in everyday life. It requires tremendous dedication but, like the Socratic Methods of peace, is democratic in that anyone can follow it – which in Buddha’s time meant regardless of caste, a radical religious move. Yet, the Path has not once been used to justify war or conflict. Although individual and groups of Buddhists have participated in wars, its internal logic and external remedies preclude it from being so abused. The Path is also the cornerstone of Buddhism’s Three Jewels: the Dharma or “teachings,” the Buddha who originally taught them, and the Sangha or sodalities of enlightened who have ever since provided guidance to Buddhist individuals and the societies in which they lived.
Buddhism’s pacific power is nowhere more evident in the Ancient East than in the life of Emperor Ashoka (c. 304–232 BCE), who came to rule lands that stretched from modern Iran to Bengal. However, had he not lived past middle age, he certainly would not have been granted the honorary title Beloved of the Gods. His father, ruler of the largest empire in Indian history, was nicknamed Slayer of Enemies, and emulating him Ashoka’s abilities as a warrior-statesman made him popular throughout the empire. When, seeking his embarrassment, his elder brother and heir to the throne sent him to govern a region ripe for war, fighting ceased upon his arrival. But as it resumed, Ashoka ordered an all-too successful suppressive massacre, for which he was ostracized, a form of counter-dominant behavior also practiced by Ancient Greeks. Called back from exile to quell a rebellion against his father, who died soon after, Ashoka was injured and taken into hiding so as not to be killed by his brothers. The care he received from a Sangha was his first exposure to Buddha’s peaceful principles. They did not leave an immediate impression, for when he was well enough he led another massacre, this time of the city in which his brothers lived (modern Patna), killing them off one by one. Ashoka, now Emperor by default, subjected peoples and lands beyond even his father’s dreams, enriching the Empire but also earning him the moniker Chandashoka, the Cruel. These campaigns culminated in the Kalinga War (c. 265 BCE), a kingdom which refused to submit to Chandashoka. His army butchered 100,000 Kalingians and displaced as many. Amidst the ruins, he realized all the suffering he had caused, screaming the adage “What have I done?” in horror. Tormented, he went sleepless for days – until he recalled the benevolence the Sangha once bestowed.
From that day on, he committed himself not only to the Eightfold Path as his personal way of life, but also adopted it as his public policy. Chandashoka soon came to be known as Dharmashoka, the Good Teacher. The basis of his policy was ahimsa or non-violence towards humans and animals, a Hindu concept adapted by Janaism, Buddhism and Gandhi in the twentieth century. Dharmashoka prohibited outright as well as structural violence, abolishing slavery, outlawing discrimination based on caste and promoting vegetarianism. Reinvigorating the unity in diversity of Ancient Indian polytheism, he set up networks of free hostels for pilgrims of all faiths. He founded institutions of higher learning for agriculture, handicraft and spiritual studies, and secured the basic needs by sanitation, hospitals and roads, as did the partnership-modeled Vedic societies of old. He also built thousands of Stupas, temple-mounds of earth around which Buddhist devotees are meant to walk in meditation (as at Sanchi) as well as Viharas, housing for the Sangha who had put him on the Path of non-violence for the rest of his reign. These peaceful objectives and achievements, to which archaeological remains attest, are also described in Ashoka’s eminent Edicts, which harken back to Hammurabi. Inscribed in languages from Pali to Aramaic on columns scattered across and beyond his vast empire, his Edicts are one of the earliest and widest known multilingual disseminations of universal isonomic law. To spread the Dharma, he sent diplomatic missions as far as Greece and Egypt in the West and modern Sri Lanka and Thailand in the East, the first ruler in recorded history to do so on such a scale. When the modern Indian state gained independence from Britain in 1949, the symbol of Ashoka’s transformation from feared warmonger to beloved peacemaker, an octagonal crest representing the Eightfold Path placed atop an Edictal column, was adopted as the emblem on its flag.
Buddhism’s peaceful proliferation can also be attributed to Ashoka, but requires a brief retrogression to be understood. Shortly after Buddha passed, a First Council of the Sangha was held to establish his teachings. A Second Council of this still small, regional religion was held a century later to determine the Sangha Code’s applicability. The principal point of contention was whether it should be relaxed to attract more lay practitioners; the Council held that it should not, originating the subsequent schism between the Mahayana (“Greater Vehicle”) schools which successfully spread Buddhism by contravening the Second Council’s decree, and the Hinayana (“Lesser Vehicle”) schools which did so by following it, each non-violently to the other and converts. The Ashoka-sponsored Third Council (250 BCE) sought to reunite the growing number of schools, write the Dharma down for the first time, and organize missions to spread Buddhism around the known world. All Ashoka’s goals, except reunification, were achieved. A benefit of remaining rifts was that priests propagated their own schools instead of a centrally determined one, allowing for localizations that would have otherwise been limited or prohibited. Thanks to a commitment to non-violence, these Councils were peaceable despite their disputed resolutions, an example their delegates abroad followed. For centuries after Ashoka’s peaceful proselytizing, Buddhism flourished in almost as many forms as places reached. Hinayana sects like Theravada spread west to modern Iran and Turkey, and Southeast to Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. Mahayana sects were slower-moving but reached even farther east, including to Korea and Japan, then annexes of Imperial China.
Harmonies and Antinomies of Ancient China
Ancient China’s demographic diversity and geographical immensity made harmony and authority two necessary peace principles of its political systems from their earliest days, but also made them so difficult to implement. Family and community were always and everywhere the bedrock of Ancient Chinese societies; it is only with the development of imperial political and administrative infrastructures that various peace-oriented codes came to compete for individual adherents as for social and collective control. The Records of the Grand Historian, attributed to second century BCE historiographer Sima Qian, and the Bamboo Annals, an anonymous chronicle of a slightly later date, present peace as central to the origins of Ancient China. Their historicity, like that of the records of early Rome, is questionable at best, and of less import than the ideas about peace they conveyed to those influenced by them. According to these works, the world was at first ruled by the Three Sovereigns, demigods who in their infinite insight presided over a period of universal harmony between all the cosmos’ constituents: the Heavenly Sovereign, the Earthly Sovereign, and the Human Sovereign. They not only ruled benevolently in their own realms but together kept a perfect balance between them.
Among the gifts they gave to humanity were fire, fishing, agriculture and writing, the last two being of special relevance to the history of peace. Archaeologists date the first of these developments to c. 7000 BCE. The words for agriculture and rice cultivation are synonymous in old Chinese script, suggesting that rice was a long-time staple. More than other crops, cultivating rice in nutritional quantities for small or large societies required cooperation, coordination, social cohesion and hydrological expertise, which is why Confucius later wrote that “from agriculture social harmony and peace arise.”4 Thus, while warfare seems to permeate Ancient Chinese history, continuity in rice cultivation is a strong reminder that general populations not only needed peace to survive, but in large measure helped create, recreate and sustain it. That rice spread throughout Asia and India before the times of the Ancient Greeks is also a sign that vast trading, political and other cooperative networks must have existed, although little about them is known. Chinese ideograms developed from inscriptions on bones used in wizar
ds’ divinations for, among other purposes, war and peace. The modern Mandarin characters for social peace, the etymologies of which can be traced back to these times, are shown on the following page. The left character (hé) on its own means: together with, harmony or union. The right one on its own (píng) means: flat, level, equal, to make the same score or to tie. The character for peace in another sense is n, meaning content, calm, still, quiet or to pacify, ideas as challenging to trace historically as their characters can be for foreigners to write.
The time of the Three Sovereigns passed when the Five Emperors came to power halfway through the third millennium by Qian’s account. They were not demigods but sage kings who were patrons of medicine, music, calligraphy, astronomy and hydrology, all of which were practiced in and for peace. Armed conflicts occurred in this period, but the wisdom of the Five Emperors prevented as well as resolved them. Legends surrounding the Yellow Emperor, first of the Five and the mythical founder of the future Han Dynasty, relate that he used fog to fight aggressors, in which he found their leader with a special compass, sparing the soldiers. Early commentators claim that he limited warfare to achieve lasting victories and fostered peace to make his people prosperous and obedient. Emperor Shun, the last of the Five, is said to have met hostility from his family and subjects, yet continued to love and care for them until the day he died. Above all, later commentators considered the Five Emperors to be moral models for current heads of states. Later political treaties on the Yellow Emperor’s rule prescribe that “Only in case of necessity will [sage rulers like him] undertake military actions,” as warfare harms the economy, making people discontent and reproachful of their rulers.5 However, these treaties also emphasize that a state without a strong army will not be able to survive. Tradition has it that the Fifth Emperor abdicated in favor of his best civil servant, Yu. Succeeding where his father had failed, Yu had expertly diverted floods for years, saving many lives and livelihoods. As a Qing emperor three thousand years later paid homage:
Since ancient times, the model for long-lasting peace has been essentially to ensure people’s livelihood. To achieve this is to have land reclaimed for farming so that surpluses are produced and income become inexhaustible.6
Yu ruled, if he did at all, roughly as the archaeological Erlitou culture arose. His successors, the Xia (c. 2205–1766) who may be more fiction than fact, were at the threshold of small warrior chiefdoms, becoming powerful palaces that could coordinate, if not yet control, others.
The Shang Dynasty (c. 1766–1122 BCE), China’s earliest historical one, took power by coup. Their palaces included courts and their many ministers and workmen. Wizards and warriors were thus slowly being replaced with bookkeepers and bureaucrats, by training and disposition less violent, though no less cunning. But citizen-soldiers who once did battle for themselves now became paid or conscripted armies who campaigned on their commanders’ behalf and behest. Before long, Shang capitals like Yin on the Yellow River became religious, administrative and political centers that could levy and expend taxes for the people’s welfare, but also for conquests near and far. As in Ancient India, if the duration and quality of peace increased with the size of Shang rulers’ dominions, so did the scale and intensity of warfare. With the Shang, natural spirit and ancestor propitiation developed into full-fledged systems of belief, from whom guidance, assistance and consolation were sought in peace and war alike through meditation and ritual. Sacrifices led by Shang rulers were made to the weather-god Di, without whose goodwill no enterprise could thrive, peaceful or otherwise. The labor and logistics required to produce the large number of bronze religious vessels found attest to the Shang’s technical sophistication and organization. But few ties bound the traditional elite of distant regions together, and hardly any did the diverse conquered peoples to each other or to their rulers. This lack of social cohesion on a large scale led to the decline of Shang’s authority in making and maintaining peace, which the Zhou Dynasty (c. 1122–256) that overthrew the Shang sought to restore.
The Zhou redefined statecraft and morality while revitalizing family relations during the longest and arguably the most illustrious reign in pre-Imperial China. Historians divide the Zhou Dynasty into four overlapping periods with distinct cultural profiles. Three traits unite them: the Mandate of Heaven, the Fengjian system and the Zongfa, each having a complex relationship with contemporary and subsequent socio-political peace in China. The Mandate of Heaven was a belief that a ruler’s legitimacy derived directly from Tian, the god of heaven the Zhou restored from the Xia in place of the Shang’s Di. Tian showed support for rulers, called Sons of Heaven, by making their reigns peaceful and prosperous. Conversely, a lack of peace and prosperity was considered proof that Tian no longer supported his Son, so that another may rightfully take his place. Divinations thus began losing ground to rituals, a reliance on precedents and continued spirit and ancestral propitiations, all aimed at maintaining peace and prosperity through socio-political order, or at least its appearance. The Fengjian socio-political structure is often compared to European feudalism for its stratified conflations of property and people, at the top of which were Sons of Heaven. Below them were aristocrats of various ranks who received their fiefs by inheritance or as gifts for services rendered and were responsible for keeping them peaceful and productive. Below them were the masses who paid dues in labor, cash or kind; professionals like doctors, scribes and clerics were somewhere in between. Fengjian reciprocal obligations and mutual limitations of action, spheres which are today seen as precursors to the “ideology of peaceful coexistence” put forth by Confucius, are discussed below.7
The foundation of the Fengjian social structure was its lineage system, the Zongfa or clan law, governing all but the lowest classes: ranks, titles, professions and primary possessions were passed on to eldest sons, whose families and descendents were called main lineages, while those of younger sons, minor lineages. The Zongfa entailed a jealously guarded exclusivity of ancestor worship, by which branches of the royal lineage reproduced legitimizing rites in their realms, and branches of aristocratic lineages did so within their clans. In time, the verticality of the Zongfa was supplemented with horizontal segmentations, so that the “principle of collective liability for punishment on the basis of households was the legal expression of a new institutional order.”8 Sanctions were not limited to individuals but could be collectively extended to family and clan; in the case of crimes by officials to superiors, subordinates or to those who had recommended them to office. Strict as they were, inter-class loyalty and social cohesion set in place by Mandate of Heaven, Fengjian sociopolitical structure and Zongfa were considerable improvements on the Shang, bolstering Zhou authority and legitimacy and so their ability to make and maintain peace, when they so chose. Until the early eighth century BCE, descendants of the Zhou’s first family, the Ji, ruled from their western capital on the Wei River, Hao, near modern Xi’an. During this first period, called the Western Zhou, the three preceding traits were still taking shape and gaining ground, and the rapid and extensive territorial annexations they made possible mark the first pinnacle of Zhou power. Following a war over the Mandate of Heaven, in which Hao and the western fiefs were captured by nomads, the Zhou capital was moved east to Luoyang in 771 by the remaining Ji, a self-made Son of Heaven and inaugurator of the Eastern Zhou period.
Displaced from their stronghold, the Zhou now needed the support of local Fengjian lords and their fiefs more than ever before, which these were willing to give to keep intact the systems that also supported them. At this point the three traits became ubiquitous in, and synonymous with, Ancient Chinese civilization, and the Zhou reached their second apogee before their long decline. The Eastern Zhou period is subdivided into the Spring and Autumn Period and that of the Warring States. The former gets its name from a chronicle attributed to Confucius, about one of these Fengjian states. At first the mutual support between the Ji and the ruling clans served its purpose of maintaining the peace and pr
osperity of the Fengjian system in the face of internal unrest and external threats. Aside from interstice wars between the Fengjian, inter-state diplomacy and law was often successful. Hundreds of treaties (meng) creating trading and defensive alliances between fiefs were ratified by Fengjian ambassadors representing their lords. A precise diplomatic vocabulary came into being, with specific words for ambassadorial meetings, friendly envoys sent by one fief to another and even trust-building hunting events for visiting officials. But major Fengjian lords became overlords themselves by interventions and annexations, and power-sharing with the Ji turned into a power struggle as fiefs grew into states. The Seven Warring States that fought ceaselessly for the next three centuries were the Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, Wei and Qin, the last of which eventually reunited all of Ancient China by employing new philosophies and practices of peace to create its lasting Imperial form.
The hostile environment of the Eastern Zhou period was the unnatural habitat of Chinese philosophy’s golden age, what Sinologists rhetorically call the Hundred Schools of Thought. The Hundred Schools of Peace these schools of thought spawned were direct or indirect responses to wars happening all around them, at least four of which ineradicably influenced the rest of Ancient Chinese history and the East as a whole. Not first but foremost among them was that of Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE), founder of the school that bears his name. Tradition tells he was the son of a destitute nobleman who was forced to flee to the Fengjian fief of Lu before it was subsumed by one of the Seven Warring States. Fascinated by ritual from an early age, he committed himself to studying his being in the world at fifteen, holding odd jobs till his twenties, when he married, had a son and became a Lu administrator, rising to Justice Minister by age fifty-three. But he soon resigned this position in protest at the Lu’s unjust policies, and travelled to neighboring states in search of a ruler who would take his advice. After several failed attempts, he returned to Lu, where he edited the Five Classics of Ancient Chinese literature. His teachings are collected in the Analects and Great Learning, posthumously assembled snippets of conversation and aphorisms. Far from proposing a systematic philosophy, he challenged his students to think for themselves, study the world around them, and respectfully reinterpret rather than reject tradition. If there is “single thread binding my way,” as he claimed, it is the enterprise of pacific harmony within and between individuals in society.9
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