The daily routine was simple. In the morning they went looking for alms, and took their only meal of the day in the shade of a tree. They then wandered until midday when they rested from the heat. For the rest of the day, they wandered, had conversations about the dharma, and meditated. For the three months of the monsoons, when it rained incessantly and the rivers burst their banks, making the roads impassable, they had to confine themselves to the so-called ‘rains retreat’ during which they stayed under a roof, either of a temporary hut or a monastery. In the autumn, they were free to wander again.
The appearance and routine of the bhikshus changed little over centuries. In the fourteenth century, almost two millennia after the Buddha first formulated their rules, an emissary of the then Pope, Benedict XII, described what he had seen of bhikshus in Ceylon, Siam and China:
These monks only eat once a day and never more and drink nothing but milk and water. They never keep food with them overnight. They sleep on the bare ground. They walk barefoot, with a stick, and are satisfied with a robe rather like that of our Friars Minor (Franciscans), but without a hood and with a cloak over their shoulder in the manner of the apostles. Every morning, they go in a procession to ask, with the greatest possible reverence, that rice be given to them in an appropriate quantity for their number…These people lead a very saintly life – albeit without Faith.24
With the sangha, the Buddha was partly following a tradition of renouncers in India. It included the thinkers of the Upanishads, who had retreated to forests, and the wandering sramanas, of whom the Buddha himself was one, along with Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. Their rejection of the sensual life and voluntarily chosen hardship inspired respect among the ordinary people they approached for food, clothing and shelter. The renouncer continues to be revered in India today, sometimes for no more than his act of renunciation. They had become the rivals of Brahmin priests, who were dependent on the same ordinary people for their own livelihood.
As always, the Buddha looked for the middle way between extreme rejection of the world, which some of the more ascetic sramanas, such as Mahavira, espoused, and the deeper and corrupting involvement with it that the Brahmins largely embodied. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word ‘monk’, which is often used as a substitute for bhikshu, originally meant ‘religious hermit or solitary’, and then later, ‘member of a community or brotherhood living apart from the world’. But the Buddha didn’t wish his bhikshus to live apart from the world; he had already rejected the way of private salvation in Bodh Gaya, soon after his enlightenment.
In setting up the sangha, he hoped to achieve something more than the secluded community in which individuals could find the right conditions to achieve personal spiritual satisfaction. This is implicit in the word bhikshu, which means one who receives a share of something. This ‘something’ is nothing other than the common wealth of society that he is dependent upon. The bhikshu had renounced private property, but by this act he had earned an exalted place in society, and the promise that he would be fed and clothed by the general population. In exchange, he offered himself to society as a model of virtuous behaviour and self-awareness.
As the Buddha saw it, the bhikshus, who had reduced their personal desires and lived interdependently with like-minded human beings, had much to teach a society that was involved increasingly and fractiously in the pursuit of wealth and pleasure. This is why the bhikshus, unlike Christian or Jain monks, usually stayed close to urban centres of trade and business, and did so even during the Buddha’s time.
In any case, to be enlightened was to understand the sources of suffering not only within oneself but also within all beings. The wisdom this brought could not remain a personal achievement; it was inseparable from the feeling of universal compassion, or karuna.
A Little Dust in the Eyes
THE SANGHA MIGHT HAVE expanded quickly had the Buddha gone into Benares. The city was already a centre of commerce and manufacturing, famous for its cotton and brocades, and the place where people went to wash away their sins in the Ganges and hope for a better rebirth.
However, the Buddha rarely ventured into Benares, though he passed very near to it several times in his long life. He was probably deterred by the dominance of the Brahmins, who claimed many rich clients in the city. He knew that the Brahmins despised sramanas, whom they saw as likely competition. He in turn was scathing about the Brahmin insistence on ritual bathing, sacrifices and Vedic cults; he claimed that they brought no merit to anyone.
As elsewhere in India, the Brahmins seem to have won their argument with the Buddha. There is little trace of the Buddha in Benares today, where India’s pre-Buddhist Vedic religions still flourish. Temples to every conceivable deity (snake, monkey, river) crowd the old city’s alleys, along with countless sacred cows and old widows. Millions of Indians still crowd the riverside ghats (bathing steps), hoping to wash away their sins in the waters of the Ganges, first considered holy by the Aryan settlers of North India. Brahmin priests with little top-knots on their shaven heads form a mafia of sorts; they supervise the post-funeral ceremonies and other Hindu rites, routinely ripping off hapless pilgrims from villages and small towns across India.
Five miles away, on a flat land dotted with mango groves and rice fields, lies Sarnath, where the Buddha spent a few months after his enlightenment in Bodh Gaya. It is the most picturesque of Buddhist sites in India, its wide open spaces always bracing after the chaos – the heat, noise, dirt – of Benares. But its great peace is easily shattered, and there are days when the gaggle of shops and dhabas outside the lawn of Sarnath blare Hindi pop songs from morning till evening, middle-class Indian picnickers gather on the lawns, leaving small mounds of plastic bags and cups on the grass, and teenage boys in imitation Levi jeans and Nike sneakers go around asking white female tourists to have sex with them.
It was partly in connection with this new Indian middle class that I went to Benares in 1994, and then found myself one afternoon revisiting Sarnath. One afternoon in Mashobra, when I hadn’t gone out to Montu’s dhaba for lunch, the postman brought a letter from a publisher in Delhi. He had seen my reviews in Indian newspapers and wanted to know if I was interested in writing a travel book.
By then, I had been working on a book about the Buddha for more than two years. I had acquired many books, read quite a few of them, and made notes, but somehow the book refused to grow beyond a point. I was also bored by the Buddha’s dialogues, which were long-winded and repetitious. I found little of the artistry so evident in Plato. And so although I had no particular wish to write a travel book, when I heard from the publisher in Delhi it struck me as an opportunity to redeem, at least partially, the promise I had long ago made to myself: the promise that I would be a writer, and would do nothing else.
Besides, the idea of the travel writer was not unattractive: I imagined myself as Jacquemont, moving serenely through a picturesque landscape and recording everything in a cool, jaunty tone.
I wrote back to the publisher, proposing a book on Indian small towns – somewhat thoughtlessly, since I disliked even the trip I had to make to Simla once a month in order to stock up on provisions, magazines and books. The publisher offered a tiny advance, and it became clear that I would have to finance my travels out of my own resources. But it was too late to withdraw.
For the next five months, I travelled across small-town India. During this journey, I continually missed Mashobra, never stopped wishing that I was in my cottage instead of the grim hotel with the overused bed sheets and television echoes where I usually found myself at the end of a day’s journey.
The towns I saw were no better than extended slums: crammed with economic migrants from villages, congested and unsanitary. The wealthier towns were no better than the poorer ones. In fact, the more prosperous a town was, the greater seemed its moral and physical squalor. From Kanyakumari, the town at the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent, where Vivekananda had meditated before leaving on his historic tr
ip to Chicago, to Simla, there seemed to have come into being an urban landscape of glass-and-concrete mansions, stunted shacks, naked-brick box-shaped houses, broken roads and stagnant malarial ponds.
Much of this came as a shock to me. In Mashobra, the cruel, garish world of middle-class India felt remote, and I was happy to think that I had managed to escape it. In fact, I had grown used to living in the simpler India of my own small-town past. It never seemed closer to me than in the fair the village held each summer, where on sheets spread on the ground, or on ramshackle wooden stalls, lay all the things that I as a child, sitting on my father’s shoulders, had once thought amazing and longed to possess: pyramids of powdered orange and yellow spices; knives with lacquered and carved wooden handles, towers of bangles and bracelets, garishly coloured photos of Indian film stars, pink cotton candy, painted wooden toys and countless booklets about Hindu gods or litanies.
Mr Sharma stayed away, but almost everyone else in the village – shopkeepers, farmers, government employees, the servants in the big houses, the lone taxi driver heading fast towards prosperity – came to the fair with their families, dressed in unfamiliarly bright clothes, and mingled in what seemed an egalitarian spirit of bonhomie. Among the assorted crowd – of visitors, basket makers, knife sharpeners with their grinding wheels, aphrodisiac sellers with what looked like pieces of dry intestines in vials, and screaming children on the mini Ferris wheel – the local legislator, though still radiating power through his starched white kurta, always looked a bit lost.
*
A moderate climate and long years of communal living seemed to have given even the poorest people in Mashobra an air of calm and dignity. In contrast, most of the people I met on the plains during my travels seemed to be living on the edge.
One of the most volatile places was Bihar, once part of the kingdom of Magadha, the first great Indian empire. In this poor and densely populated Indian state, where rich landowners travelled in private planes while a caste of rat eaters starved to death due to a shortage of field mice, brutality seemed a casual everyday affair. The stories came in from every direction. Private armies of upper-caste landlords massacred low-caste landless peasants. Communist activists retaliated with massacres of upper-caste families. Doctors going on strike pulled out transfusion tubes from the veins of their patients.
This was especially unsettling given Bihar’s history. The Aryan settlers of North India had created their first urban civilization in this exceptionally fertile and mineral-rich part of the Indo-Gangetic plain. The first post-Vedic religious and spiritual movements of India had occurred in the same parts. The Buddha had spent much of his life visiting the cities of Magadha and preaching to their wealthy classes. Ashoka had made the region the centre of his Indian empire. Teachers and missionaries trained at the famous fifth-century AD university in Nalanda, whose ruins still spoke of splendour, had taken the Buddha’s ideas to remote parts of Asia.
There were days in Bihar when the disappearance of Buddhism from the land of its origins, and a politically driven and ethically empty Hinduism, appeared part of a catastrophe that was still working itself out. In the town of Gaya, where the Buddha gave a famous sermon, I met some middle-class Brahmin students who boasted to me of how their grandfathers had resolved a dispute with low-caste Hindus in their village by burning them alive. A few miles away at Bodh Gaya, the Mecca and Jerusalem of Buddhists, Hindu nationalists had started a violent agitation to claim for the Hindu community the temple standing on the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Heavily armed policemen stood everywhere in the dusty town, even inside the temple complex, frisking the South-east Asian monks who had walked for miles to reach the spot, and who prostrated themselves full length, hurling themselves on the muddy ground, after every two steps.
Such ancient gestures, performed by foreigners, expressed what remained alive of Bihar’s long past. From the summits of intellectual and spiritual achievement, Bihar had fallen to become the most derelict place in India. How had it happened? It was an obvious question, to which the disappearance of Buddhism and its replacement by Hinduism were only partial answers. But having taken Jacquemont as a model, and hoping to imitate his easy wit, I hadn’t prepared myself for such questions before setting off on my travels.
The history books quickly made it clear that Jacquemont had moved through a simple world, in which the British colonial elite together with their native feudal collaborators had presided over an invisibly wretched peasantry. The books told me about the ignorant and rapacious officials of the British East India Company, who had destroyed the system of collective ownership of land; they described the role of the all-powerful Indian zamindars, who on behalf of the British had taxed the peasantry into debt and destitution.
I learnt about the devastating industrialization that had destroyed small-scale manufacturing not only in England but also in distant Bihar, which was transformed from an exporter of raw cotton into an importer, and then reduced to farming opium, which British traders – those whom Jacquemont met in Calcutta’s elegant riverside mansions – then cynically smuggled into China.
The deprivations of medieval Europe, the exploitation of the early capitalist period, and the political chaos of modern times: the worst experiences of the West seemed to have been duplicated and speeded up in Bihar. History showed a cruel, unforgiving face in this place; and for many people who felt oppressed by it there was no release from it, except through more violence.
In a small, windowless room in a shanty town not far from Bodh Gaya, I met young low-caste activists from a Communist group who read Marx, Lenin and Mao in Hindi translations, organized landless peasants against exploitative landlords and the police, and spoke, quite seriously, of pulling off a revolution in New Delhi.
I had known activists from their group at the university in Allahabad. Mostly very poor, they weren’t among the students who went to Nepal to buy baseball caps. They organized demonstrations and Communist study groups. Gaunt and virtuous in their cheap synthetic shirts and rubber slippers, they were described, mockingly, by upper-caste students as followers of ‘Chou-Mao’.
A generation ago, they would have been in their villages and towns, not thinking or reflecting much, but simply living the life of deprivation they had been born into. Education and exposure to the wider world, and the accompanying bewilderment and pain – all the things that had led Vinod to Vivekananda – had led them to Marx, Lenin and Mao. They now possessed the words to describe the causes of their suffering and the means to end it. And they could also lay claim to the promises – democracy, socialism, secularism – made them by the western-educated idealistic men who had framed the Indian constitution.
The young men I met in Bihar had witnessed rape, killing, torture in their own families. They were outwardly gentle, but full, as I discovered, of a disquieting intensity. In the room we sat in one afternoon, as clouds of dust kicked up by passing trucks and buses on the broken road outside kept bursting in through the open door, faintly powdering the hair and stubble of the thin young men, they told me about what they called their ‘struggle’: the agitation to raise the minimum daily wage; their ongoing battles with a pro-landlord police; the recent attack on the home of a local Brahmin landowner who turned out to have several mistresses. They told me about the rise of self-respect they sensed among landless peasants who no longer let their sisters and daughters be kidnapped and raped by local landlords; the things that had to be achieved when the revolution comes.
‘When the revolution comes’: many of their sentences began with these unsettling words, which seemed to promise them freedom and happiness. They weren’t worried about the terror and the violence it involved, the demonizing of entire sections of the population as ‘class enemies’. Like other high-minded revolutionaries – Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Khmer Rouge – they too spoke casually of the necessary elimination of ‘decadent’ Brahmins, ‘kulak’ landlords, ‘reactionary’ government officials and the ‘comprador’ class of shopkeepers.
In Allahabad, I had also been stirred by the thought of revolution: nothing seemed more necessary in the degraded conditions of India than the brutal and swift cancelling of the past, and a fresh beginning in a new world of justice and equality. And even now, when I knew more about the fate of revolutions, I didn’t feel unsympathetic to these young men. But I knew that the revolution they hoped for was not going to come. Worse, there was going to be no place for these men in the new India that was beginning to emerge.
I was then at the end of my travels for the commissioned book. In the past, I had visited many places in India, but never with a view to writing about them. It was easier to make an itinerary than to know what to look for, and where to find material. These uncertainties disappeared fast as I began to travel and found my subject: the middle class was becoming visible in small towns and cities after the Indian economy was liberalized in the early 1990s and opened to foreign investment.
When Jacquemont visited India and for decades afterwards, the middle class in India had consisted mainly of clerks, educated at the European-style institutions that Macaulay and others had promoted in order to help the British administer India. From this small class had emerged modern India’s great men. Just as the first urban class in India had produced the Buddha, so the nineteenth-century middle class had brought forth men like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Vivekananda.
It was this class of politicians, doctors, lawyers, industrialists, engineers and teachers that Vivekananda had exhorted to embrace materialism and science and to weld India into a manly nation. This class had taken over the reins of government from the British in 1947, and had grown rich partly by plundering the immense resources available to the centralized Indian state. But it had had to wait for fifty years after independence, and an economic boom, to expand and begin fulfilling Vivekananda’s vision of a strong materialist India. Though still a minority – less than 20 per cent of the population – the Indian bourgeoisie appeared, by the mid-1990s, as big and important as the middle class that emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century and began to reshape the continent’s history, politics, religion, art and architecture.
An End to Suffering Page 19