The Brahmin-imposed hierarchy of varna, which had defined the human world for so long, lost its authority in the towns. In the agrarian society of the past, it had proposed itself as a complete explanation not only for what human beings did but also what they were. So, for instance, a Brahmin was not just a priest because he performed rituals; he was innately blessed with virtue, learning and wisdom. A servant wasn’t just someone who performed menial tasks; his very essence was poverty and weakness.
But in the towns, where money was the new measure of value and merchants enjoyed an unprecedented power, a warrior could simply be someone who had been paid to fight. As one of the Buddhist discourses put it, the king of a state had to judge a criminal according to the nature of his crime regardless of his varna. A high-born Brahmin could be employed by a low-born merchant. The rise of an urban economy brought about dramatic changes in that it exposed the old social hierarchy as man-made, and forced human beings to define themselves afresh. It later allowed the Buddha to address a broad audience, not just one varna or other, and to speak of a basic human nature separate from social or religious roles, which could, with the right effort, achieve wisdom and goodness.
The broadening range of what human beings could do was matched by a growth in size and complexity of the communities in which they lived. Political and social conditions in what Buddhist texts called the Middle Country, or the Central Gangetic plain, had evolved fast just before the Buddha’s birth.4 There were four major kingdoms, and among them there were independent tribal republics and small city-states in the Middle Country, usually ruled by members of the kshatriya varna forming an oligarchy or a council of elders, and named after them.
There were more cities – centres of cosmopolitanism and, as it turned out, fertile ground for the growth of Buddhism – in the kingdoms. The capital of Kosala was Shravasti, where the Buddha would later spend many monsoons in a mango grove donated to him by a rich merchant. The other important cities in the kingdom were Saket and Benares. Its eastern neighbour and rival was the iron-ore-rich kingdom of Magadha, in whose capital, Rajagriha, the Buddha also spent many years, and which became in his lifetime the first big empire in India. One of the smaller kingdoms was Vamsa, which contained the cities of Kosambi and Prayag (Allahabad). Further east, there was Avanti, which the Buddha does not seem to have visited.
By the time the Buddha came of age, power had begun to shift from the tribal republics and independent city-states to the centralized monarchies. Unlike their counterparts in Greece, the Indian city-states did not have geography on their side. In the Buddha’s lifetime, the two major kingdoms around the Ganges swallowed most of the smaller city-states and tribal republics. Just before his death, the kingdom of Kosala, which lay north-east of the Ganges, conquered his own people, the Shakyas.
The end of smaller political units and the growing subjection of human beings to the remote authority of the bureaucratic state – these changes were as momentous in India as the end of the city-states in Greece. The Buddha accepted that large monarchies and centralized states were inevitable and formulated the ideal of a ‘universal moral ruler’. But he never ceased to uphold the small republic, such as the one he had lived in, as a model of direct democracy, and even modelled the sangha, his monastic order, on it.
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The Buddha was born as Gautama Siddhartha, which means ‘he who fulfils his purpose’, in one such republic. His clan, the Shakyas, who were kshatriyas, controlled what are now the borderlands of India and Nepal, a region of 2000 square kilometres. The Shakyas were at the northernmost edge of the fast-developing civilization around the Ganges, and by the time of the Buddha’s birth they were not as self-contained and independent as before. They paid tribute to the kingdom of Kosala, and were dependent on trade with the cities in the south.
Their capital city was Kapilavastu. It is still not clear where it was. The Chinese pilgrims Fa Hien and Hiuen Tsang claim to have visited it in the fifth and seventh centuries AD respectively. They reported seeing a desolate place with a few monks and some ruins, one of which they identified ambitiously as the palace of the Buddha’s father. The European explorers and archaeologists who traced the route taken by the Chinese pilgrims ended up digging at two different sites, one in India, the other in Nepal. The excavations at both sites produced compelling evidence in favour of each. Archaeologists from India and Nepal still wrangle over the exact location of Kapilavastu.
If Kapilavastu was like other Indian cities of the sixth century BC, then it was probably rectangular in shape and defended by a moat and mud ramparts. The king’s palace stood in the centre of a network of streets and was two or three storeys high. The council hall where the eminent citizens of the town assembled stood opposite the palace. The walls of the town also included a site for ritual sacrifices, and the residences of the Brahmins. The shops and the workshops of the trades stood separately. Each trade had its own street: rice sellers in one, ivory carvers in another. Buddhist texts mention the presence in each city of powerful courtesans, who were artistically gifted and responsible for the sentimental and cultural education of many rich young men. Far away from the centre of the town, in clay and bamboo huts, lived the workers and servants: masons, carpenters, washermen, butchers, etc. The poorest of men lived in the parks just outside the town walls, where homeless people, various mendicants and other travelling ascetics hung out.
The city was separated from the Himalayan foothills to the north by wild jungles teeming with tigers and elephants. The young Buddha might have seen a faint outline of the great Himalayan peaks on exceptionally clear days. In the west lay the city of Shravasti, the capital of the powerful kingdom of Kosala. It was approached by a path that Buddhist texts call the Uttarpatha (northern route) on which caravans of ox carts loaded with goods and escorted by soldiers of the king of Kosala travelled for most of the year.
The caravans did not always halt at a relatively small place like Kapilavastu, but went on to the cities and towns in the east and crossed the Ganges to Rajagriha. The Buddha had heard, when he was a young man in Kapilavastu, that boats sailed down the Ganges to the cities of Benares and Prayag (Allahabad); and he had dreamed of travel to what to him then seemed impossibly distant places.
The Buddha’s father was Suddhodhana. Later legends call him a great raja, or king, but he was probably a member of the kshatriya class who ruled the Shakyas by rotation or election: a head or chief of a tribe rather than a king, with a small territory under his control and with not much administrative structure.
His son’s daydreams of travel amused him. He told Siddhartha that kshatriyas like him, members of the ruling class, did not wander around the world like a parivrajaka (renouncer), or oxherds and merchants. He expected his son to tend the family’s farm and grow skilled in the use of arms, so that he too could be elected chief and come into his real inheritance; and saying this, Siddhartha’s father would point to the city of Kapilavastu with its cluster of clay houses and bamboo huts and to the rice fields stretching in both directions.
Suddhodhana, who had two sisters as wives, Maya and Mahaprajapati, was protective of his son. In later life, the Buddha told his disciples about his upbringing:
I was delicate, extremely delicate, too delicate. They laid out three lotus ponds for me in my father’s house: blue lotuses in one, red in another, white in the third. I wouldn’t use sandalwood that did not come from Benares, my clothes – my tunic, my robe, my cloak – were made of Benares cloths. Night and day I was protected by a white parasol to keep me from the cold and heat and dust and weeds and dew. I had three palaces, one for the cold season, one for the hot season, one for the rainy season. During the rainy months, I would shut myself high up in the top of the palace and never come downstairs. The only people around me were minstrel girls. I didn’t even think of leaving the palace. And while in other houses people offer a broth of rice husks to slaves and labourers, in my father’s house we gave the slaves and labourers bowls full of rice and meat.5
Some of Suddhodhana’s anxiety about his son may have had to do with the circumstances of his son’s birth. The story in several biographical traditions of the Buddha is that his mother, Maya, had a dream in which she saw an elephant enter her side as she lay sleeping. The Brahmin experts Suddhodhana consulted about this predicted that she would give birth to a son who would either live the life of a householder or retire from the world and remove its veil of illusions. Shortly afterwards, Maya became pregnant.
According to the Nidanakatha, the introduction to the Jatakas, she was forty years old, and ten months pregnant, when she left Kapilavastu to be with her parents at the nearby town of Devadaha. Suddhodhana is supposed to have paved the road to Devadaha for the occasion; it must have been a bumpy ride on horse or ox cart for Maya even so. She hadn’t travelled far when she saw the garden of Lumbini and told her attendants to stop. She bathed in a tank and then while she was standing under a sal tree her labour pains began. She remained standing and delivered a baby boy, from, according to legend, her right side. Maya returned considerably weakened to Kapilavastu, where she died seven days later, leaving her sister, Mahaprajapati, to look after the future Buddha.6
The stone relief inside the temple at Lumbini shows Maya clasping the branch of a sal tree with her right hand. At the bottom of the relief, there is a smaller figure of the young Buddha with his right arm raised and right leg thrust forward. It looks like a Hindu image, and on my second visit to Lumbini, I saw Hindus from India worshipping it. The stone figures were daubed with vermilion powder, of the kind you see on idols of Hindu gods; and there were marigold flowers at the feet of the Buddha.
This reflected an older tradition of worship. The syncretic nature of Indian religion had allowed Hindus to absorb even the Buddha into their pantheon. Just as the first British visitors to Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment and of an old temple, had found it overrun by Brahmins, so the first archaeologists arriving at Lumbini in the closing years of the nineteenth century found that the idols inside were revered by local Hindus, who referred to the relief of Maya as ‘Rummendei’, which turned out to be the name of a local deity. The temple had also been used for the un-Buddhist practice of sacrifice.
The earliest Indian religions created by nomads and pastoralists both preceded and outlasted Buddhism by several centuries. And, perhaps, what’s most remarkable about them is not so much their sophistication as the fact of their survival into even modern times. The first verses I was taught in childhood were the Gayatri mantra, which dates back to the second millennium BC, although I remembered ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ much better. I remember the feasts in strange homes, where after a yagna commemorating a funeral, I sat in a row with other young and available Brahmins and was served ghee-rich food in brass plates. The Brahmin priest, who was usually corpulent, sat at the farthest end, and ate greedily and loudly.
I remember, too, the yagnas on the Sunday mornings of my childhood, when my father, freshly bathed and bare chested, sat on the floor in the living room and while chanting Sanskrit hymns poured ghee into a small fire in a kund.
I am not sure what he asked the gods for. But sweet-smelling smoke filled the house for hours afterwards, along with an oddly disturbing sense that something sacred and primordial had been reaffirmed within its walls; and my father appeared familiar and accessible only the next morning when he changed back into his western-style work clothes and went out to inspect the railway tracks.
Living in a railway town, amid a landscape of iron and steel, we had moved far from the world of the Vedic seers, and their feeling of uncertainty, their anguish of living precariously in a big, unknown universe. But we too still needed to affirm the sense of a profoundly interdependent world, its cyclical rhythms of birth and death, rise and fall, integration and disintegration.
These ritual propitiations of the gods were practised during the Buddha’s time as well. But they had grown complicated, and the officiating Brahmins had become more demanding and arrogant. They and their ceremonies had begun to lose their appeal for many people, who now lived in towns and cities, in conditions much different from those in which the early Aryans had formed their compact with nature.
To many of them, language, which was previously the preserve of Brahmins, had become freshly available as a resource for intellectual activity. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Cratylus, Socrates discusses whether the name of a thing comes attached as its natural part or is arbitrarily imposed by human beings. The discussion makes no sense to us until we take into account the ways of thinking of pre-modern peoples: their inability to separate names from things.
When pressed by Socrates, Cratylus comes up with a supernatural explanation: ‘Some power greater than human laid down the first names for things, so that they must inevitably be the right ones.’
This was also how ancient Indians saw it. For them, in the beginning was the word, or the Vedas, but only a few great sages had been privileged enough to receive it. Since the Vedas were eternal and uncreated and had existed prior to the world they referred to, their language was the very essence of reality, part of the overall unity of life. It created no distance from the world; and none perhaps was needed.
In fact, the word had a different kind of power in an oral culture. Just as the Bible was not translated and made available to a wider public by the Catholic Church, so the Vedas remained the exclusive possession of the priests, the Brahmins, whose high status rested on the fact that they alone could correctly recite Vedic hymns and charms and spells and thereby establish a link with the gods.
Where previously human beings, dependent upon nature, were not separate enough from the world to be able to analyse it or enumerate its properties, they had become, in their new urban setting, partly the maker of the world. Sacrifices didn’t provide answers to the new troubling questions they now faced: how did the world come into being? Is there a soul? Who am I? What is a self?
There is a hymn even in the earliest Veda, the Rig Veda. Called the ‘Creation Hymn’, it speculates about the origins of creation, about the god that precedes all the deified forms of nature, and concludes with this eloquent statement of doubt:
But, after all, who knows and who can say
Whence it all came and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
So who knows truly whence it has arisen?
He from whom all this great creation came,
He, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
He, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
He knows – or maybe even he does not know.7
The Greeks living in the prosperous cities of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor had raised the same simple question – ‘What is the stuff of life?’ – and come up with a variety of answers. For Thales, it was water; for Anaximander, air. In India, it was the thinkers of the Upanishads, a series of expositions, who attempted to move beyond the visible world, and thus marked the beginning of Indian philosophy.
A dialogue between a father and his son in the Chandogya Upanishad, which was complete before the Buddha’s birth, hints at the new kind of abstract speculation that flourished at this time:
‘Fetch me a fruit of the banyan tree.’
‘Here is one, sir.’
‘Break it.’
‘I have broken it, sir.’
‘What do you see?’
‘Very tiny seeds, sir.’
‘Break one.’
‘I have broken it, sir.’
‘Now what do you see?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘My son,’ the father said, ‘what you do not perceive is the essence and in that essence the mighty banyan tree exists. Believe me, my son, in that essence is the self of all that is. That is the True, that is the self. And you are that self.’8
The Upanishads attempted to explain the multiplicity of the world by relating it to an underlying ultimate reality, to which they gave the name of brahman, and w
hich they thought pervaded everything. For them, the human subject has a soul, the atman, which survives even after the body where it temporarily resides perishes – the idea of rebirth first makes its appearance in India in the Upanishads. But atman is not an individual entity, although it may appear so; it is present in all things. The famous formula is tat tvam asi (thou art that). Liberation, or moksha, consists in recognizing that atman is identical with brahman, the ultimate reality. To know brahman, the essential unity of all appearance, is to be liberated.
This is remarkably similar to what Pythagoras in south Italy thought in the early sixth century BC. He believed in the immortality of the human soul, which he claimed travelled through a series of incarnations in human and non-human bodies. Man was mortal, but his soul was a part of the eternal and divine cosmos; and his proper aim in life was to purify himself and become part of the cosmic harmony from which he had been sundered.9
Religious Indians were inclined to achieve this union through a form of rigorous self-discipline broadly called yoga.10 Meditation was one of the methods used to gain control over one’s emotions and passions. Sitting still in a secluded place, the yogi attempted to disengage his perennially distracted mind and force it to dwell upon itself. The other method was mortification of the flesh: the body was exposed to extremes of heat and cold, and even subjected to severe pain – the Buddha was to practise, and then grow disillusioned with, this form of asceticism.
The most important idea that emerged in the Upanishads was of rebirth. The Rig Veda depicts men as living only once; the afterlife was seen, as in Islam and Christianity, in simple terms of punishment and reward. But the Upanishads speak clearly for the first time about the transmigration of souls, that most important of Indian religious assumptions, according to which death destroys only the body and not the soul, which reappears in another body.
An End to Suffering Page 9