The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  Now the khans pushed westward into Europe. Their armies ravaged Hungary and Poland and they raided Austria. One of the Great Khans wrote the Pope in Rome that he and all the European kings must come to China to do him homage. Unless they did, he’d consider them the enemies of Eternal Blue Heaven. And we know what that meant.

  Finally, however, the gigantic empire fell apart. That was bound to happen; like the Roman Empire, the Mongols’ khanates stretched too far. After the reign of Kublai, Genghis Khan’s grandson, the Great Khans focused mainly on their base in China, letting the other three khans go their ways. The Mongols also made the fatal error of the victor: they learned the customs of the conquered and abandoned theirs. They lost their taste for war and slaughter, let their little horses fatten, dressed in silken clothes they’d looted, and began to learn the use of soap and water.

  The worst thing that could happen happened: in every khanate the Mongols lost their skill in battle. In Palestine they lost to the Egyptians. The khanate of Iran and Mesopotamia fell apart. A Mongol invasion of Japan failed, and so did a venture into Southeast Asia. As we saw in chapter 5, in the late 1360s their Chinese subjects beat the Mongols, and they rode back humbly to their homeland in the north. And a decade later the grand prince of Moscow beat the Mongol “Golden Horde” in Russia; they didn’t go away but they started on a centuries-long decline. The Mongols’ brilliant day was done.

  CERTAIN THINGS STAND OUT about these conquerors: the Persians, Alexander and his Macedonians, the Romans, and the Mongols. One is “frontier energy,” a term we used before about the border tribes who crushed the Shang in China. The Persian horsemen, in their felt boots and leather breeches; Alexander’s Macedonian shepherds (who ever heard of them before or since?); the plain-living Roman farmers, just moved into town from the nearby hills; the filthy Mongols with their rugged horses and their curdled mare’s milk — all these frontier peoples had the same advantages. They traveled light and fast, regarded hardships as mere annoyances, and hadn’t anything to lose.

  Another point: the men who led these conquering peoples had iron wills. They astound us with their readiness to squash a million souls like bugs. Genghis Khan is said to have said, “I have committed many acts of cruelty and had an incalculable number of men killed, never knowing what I did was right. But I am indifferent to what people may think of me.”

  As well as vast amounts of evil, the conquerors did some good. The Persian Empire gave the Middle East two centuries of peace and tolerance. Alexander seems at least to have dreamed that he might bring unity and harmony to his conquered lands. Rome gave the Mediterranean world, and beyond, centuries of Pax Romana, “Roman Peace.” Even the Mongols, cruel as they were, brought order to the biggest continent on earth. During Genghis Khan’s lifetime a Persian wrote that one could safely walk from Persia to central Asia balancing a golden platter on his head.

  Chapter 7

  We found the worldwide faiths.

  HOW MOVING IS the thought of early humans deep in caves in southern France and Spain! Solemn men and women, holding high their flaring torches. Artists, splashed with black and red, painting stags and dancing shamans on the walls. Children, scared and awed. Even then, it seems, we humans felt the mystery in life, the need to fathom who we are and what will come of us.

  Nowhere on earth have people sought the answers to those mysteries so long and so deeply as they have in India. Our tale begins in towns that rose along the Indus River, which moseys southward through the hot, flat plains of what today isn’t India at all but modern Pakistan. Humans began to live in towns here later than they did in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and a little earlier than in China. From early on they lived in homes made out of kiln-baked bricks, and they had a sewer system many cities of today might envy. They left behind them many soapstone seals on which they carved both words and pictures. Scholars still can’t fully understand the words, so many mysteries about these folk persist.

  Two things we especially would like to know about these river people are: what were their religious beliefs, and did these beliefs live on in the Hinduism of later times in India? We have very little evidence about the religion of the Indus people, but consider this: carved on several of their seals is a god who is seated like the Indian holy men of later times, with his legs drawn close to his body and his heels touching. On the largest of the seals he appears to have other faces on either side of his head, and on all of them, this god is naked and his penis is erect.

  This is the intriguing thing: this figure on the Indus seals looks very much like Shiva, the god whom Indians of later times would worship as a destroyer and a re-creator of life. What is more, archaeologists found many cone-shaped objects in the Indus valley digs, and these are almost surely phalluses, abstract sculptures of the penis. In the Hinduism of later times a phallus is often a Shiva symbol.

  In about 1750 B.C., town life on the Indus River ended. River mud then buried the remnants of the towns so deeply that historians knew nothing of the Indus people till the 1900s, when archaeologists found the ruins. It looks as if the civilization, at least in places, ended violently. In one town diggers found the bones of many people who were slaughtered in their houses, in the streets, and at a public well.

  At about the time the Indus towns died out, light-skinned immigrants were filing southward through the mountain passes into northern India. They called themselves the Aryans, which means “the noble.” They tended sheep and cattle, and were also warriors who rode to battle on chariots, wielding swords and axes. The Aryans were yet another of those energetic peoples who were moving out of central Asia’s grasslands. They were pushing not only south into India but also westward to Iran (we have met the Medes and Persians), Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Greece. Their family of languages, called “Indo-European,” would father many modern tongues.

  Unlike the Indus River people, with their homes of brick, the Aryans lived in flimsy huts of wood and reeds. Long ago their homes decayed and disappeared. Whereas the Indus people left us bricks and seals but scarcely any words that we can read, the Aryans left us little else but words. What survives of them, apart from pots and tools, are many of their hymns. When they first arrived in India, the Aryans had no writing system. Their poets composed hymns in their heads and taught them to others, who taught them to others. But after several centuries the Aryans wrote them down.

  Although the meaning of the hymns is often puzzling, they do suggest what the early Aryans did. It appears that after they had entered India, they conquered a native people whom the hymns describe as dark and ugly, bull-lipped and snub-nosed, and worshippers of phalluses. These natives may have been the people of the Indus valley. If so, it appears that the Aryans played a part in wiping out that earliest Indian civilization. The Aryans had a rigid social system, which is still alive in India. Every Aryan was born a member of a caste of priests, or warriors, or merchants and farmers, or artisans, laborers, and servants. Most other Indians were “untouchables.”

  At the heart of the Aryans’ religion were their rites for sacrificing animals to gods. Only priests knew how to call upon the gods to come and join the worshippers and drink the sacred and intoxicating juice called soma. The gods were kindly and cheerful and usually granted what worshippers had asked for, such as children, victories in battle, or long life.

  As centuries went by the Aryans came to believe that sacrifices were more than just a way of winning favors from the gods. They were reenactments of what had happened to a primeval man named Prajapati, who had existed before the founding of the universe. The gods, who seem to have been his children, had sacrificed him. When Aryan priests reenacted that original sacrifice, if they did it perfectly, the world was born anew. But if they made mistakes chaos would result.

  As centuries went by, many thoughtful Indians turned against the priests and sacrificial magic. In poems and essays called Upanishads (“Sittings Near a Teacher”) their learned men discussed the fundamental questions about our existence. Their biggest contr
ibution was what they had to say about an afterlife, an existence after ours on earth. The older view, set forth in Aryan hymns, was that one who lived a full and upright life might hope to have an afterlife in heaven among the gods. If not, then he or she might finish up in hell.

  The writers of the Upanishads, on the other hand, believed that most of us will have no afterlife at all. They saw existence here on earth as never-ending rounds of life and death. For every living thing — animals, plants, humans, or gods — they said, the normal fate is to die and then to be reborn, perhaps as a member of a higher or a lower caste, or perhaps an animal or a plant. Then one dies again, only to be reborn again in another form. These cycles of death and rebirth go on forever, and this everlastingness is a terrifying prospect. What to do about it is a problem that concerned Upanishad philosophers, and also, as we soon shall see, the Buddha.

  The religion known today as Hinduism emerged from the beliefs of the Aryans and the Upanishad sages and others, and partly also from the religion of the earlier Indus people, which had never wholly disappeared.

  It is often said that nothing can be said about Hinduism that cannot also be denied. It’s the total of what a billion very different Indians believe and do. A Hindu may call for help on Shiva, Vishnu, or another of the many gods and goddesses, and perhaps on more than one of them. If possible a Hindu also reads the sacred poems and essays, and meditates on Brahman, the Self of every living thing. This spirit, Brahman, is so impersonal and all-embracing that it is “neither this nor that.” “Verily, this whole world is Brahman,” wrote one of the sages. “Let one worship it tranquilly as that from which he came forth, as that into which he will be dissolved, as that in which he breathes.”

  HINDUISM WAS ALREADY ancient when the man we call the Buddha taught in villages of northeast India. We have no writings about him that date from his own time, and so we know very little about him. Siddhartha Gautama was his name, and his father was a chieftain in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. While still a young man Siddhartha left his home, after which he lived for decades as an ascetic and then a wandering teacher. He died in the 480s or 470s B.C. at the age of eighty.

  Those are the bare facts, of no great interest. But the legends that his followers told about him in later times are vivid and moving. Whether true or false, they influenced many million lives. In the legends, Siddhartha’s father was not a mountain chieftain but a wealthy rajah, who reared his son in a charming palace from which every glimpse of misery was carefully screened out. Siddhartha had it all; he was handsome, rich, and brilliant, and when he was still very young he had been married to a lovely girl. But at the age of twenty-nine, he secretly left the palace several times with a servant and went to nearby villages to discover for himself what life was really like.

  On these expeditions he came upon Four Signs that would forever shape his view of life. The first three were a feeble old man, a man who was hopelessly sick, and a corpse surrounded by weeping mourners. When, in shock and wonder, Siddhartha turned to his servant Channa, the man could only tell him, “Yes, my prince, these things must come to all.” But how, Siddhartha asked himself then and later, did human beings endure their lot: the misery, the physical decay, the certainty of death? If this was life, then why be born?

  One day, however, on another secret foray, he came upon the Fourth Sign, a holy man. This man had chosen, Channa told him, to wander homeless and to beg for food. When Siddhartha saw the calm and peace in this man’s face he hoped that he had glimpsed a way to look for answers to his questions. But his inner angst persisted, and when it reached its worst he decided to leave home and find the cause and cure for evil, pain, and death. In the middle of the night, he stole away from his beloved wife and son and slipped outside the palace. He cut his flowing locks of hair, the badge of gentlemen, and flung them in the air, and swapped his rich man’s raiment for a poor man’s rags.

  For several years, the legends say, he studied with some Hindu teachers, but these gurus could not meet his needs. Their lofty thoughts and endless rites were not what he was looking for. And so, for seven years he lived alone, a hermit in a forest. He meditated; he used yoga to tame his wants and guide his mind; and he nearly starved himself to death. When he had almost lost all hope of finding answers, he had a flash of wisdom. Why, Siddhartha asked himself, did he mortify his flesh? His body, after all, was all he had with which to seek the answers to his questions. It was time, he thought, to return to something nearer to the life of ordinary humans. So he left the forest.

  A village girl offered him a bowl of milk curds. In an act that symbolized his transformation, he accepted and he ate them. For a man whose self-denial was a local legend, this simple act was stunning. It so upset five hermits who lived nearby that they rose and went away. Siddhartha bathed and changed his clothes, and he sat beneath a fig tree in the thinker’s pose. He began again to meditate, determined not to leave until he had the answers.

  Siddhartha knew, he knew for certain, that he himself had triumphed over what had so consumed the writers of the Upanishads: the endless rounds of birth and death and birth again. The chains that once had bound him to an earthly life were broken. Triumphantly he said,

  Many a house of life

  Has held me — seeking ever him who built

  These prisons of the senses….

  Sore was my ceaseless strife!

  But now You builder of this dwelling — You!

  I know You! Never will You build again

  These walls of pain….

  Your house is broken, and the ridge pole split.1

  1Nancy Wilson Ross, Three Ways of Ancient Wisdom (1966), p. 89. (I have simplified the language.)

  Now that he had risen over every earthly care, he might simply have ignored the world around him. Why should he concern himself about the rest of us? But Siddhartha knew how much he had to teach the world. He had found the answers to his questions about the meaning of our suffering and death. Could he not help his fellow humans by teaching them what he had learned? He decided to turn back from the bliss of inner freedom and return to troubled daily life. Leaving his place under the tree, he said, “I will beat the drum of the Immortal in the darkness of the world.”

  His first converts, tradition says, were those hermits who had left in horror when he ate the bowl of curds. He followed them to the holy city of Benares, and when they saw him there, in a deer park, they realized that he had been somehow glorified. He was now a buddha, a word that at that time meant simply an enlightened person. But in the hermits’ eyes, and the eyes of the many millions who would later be his followers, Siddhartha was the Buddha.

  The hermits bowed to him and sat down to be taught, and from the start Siddhartha proved to be a vivid and engaging teacher. By placing grains of rice on the ground he drew a picture of a wheel. This, he told them, was a symbol of the round of births and deaths that keeps on cycling because of our desires. The causes of our suffering and despair are our greed and self-absorption. But we can root out these deadly faults, which spring from our confusion.

  To reach an understanding of the meaning of our lives we can do certain things. We must see clearly what is wrong with us, resolve to heal ourselves, and mind the basic moral laws. Then — but this is very hard — we must think constantly about our goal, which is knowledge of life’s meaning. We must contemplate it “with the deep mind.” Doing these things will lead us to a tranquil freedom from our drives and wants. If we escape from them, we also will escape the “wheel” — the endless rounds of birth and death — and reach a state of perfect peace.

  That is what the Buddha taught the hermits, and later many others, as he wandered from one village to the next for the rest of his long life. No one knows just when he died — probably between 500 and 350 B.C. He had attracted many followers. No fewer than five hundred Buddhist monks convened soon after he had died to dumb his teachings down to formulas — precisely what the Buddha, who never was dogmatic, would have urged them not to do.


  Buddhism spread much faster later, in the 200s B.C., when Emperor Ashoka governed most of India. Early in his reign, Ashoka (“without sorrow”) was noteworthy mainly for the pointless slaughter of many thousand Indians. But later he became a Buddhist, and he spent his final decades spreading the teachings of the Buddha in India and in other lands. When the ruler of the island of Sri Lanka sent a gift of splendid pearls, Ashoka thanked him by sending him his only son, a monk, to bring “the Jewel of Truth.”

  Later though, Buddhism faded out in India, the land where it was born. Hinduism gave it birth, and Hinduism reabsorbed it. But even as it vanished in its motherland Buddhism spread through Asia like a rising tide. In Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan it would shape the lives of countless millions.

  WE KNOW MUCH more concerning Jesus, who inspired the Christian faith, than we know about the Buddha.

  Jesus came from Galilee, a little princedom in what long before had been a kingdom: Israel. In the time of Jesus, Galilee was just a puppet state within the Roman Empire. Jesus’s father — that is, the man who raised him — was a carpenter and of course a Jew. The Gospels, or early stories of the life of Jesus, suggest that Jesus’s mother was pregnant with Jesus when she married, and that his father was God. Jesus was not born in A.D. 1, as one might suppose (since A.D. means anno Domini, the year of the Lord, that is, Jesus), but at least four years earlier.