An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

By the time the Buddha died, these republics had grown fragile and were confronted with big and hungry kingdoms like Kosala and Magadha on their borders. Towards the end of the Buddha’s life, Bimbisara’s aggressive son, Ajatashatru, threatened to overrun an important confederation of republics called the Vrijjis. On his last journey across North India, the Buddha was in Rajagriha when an emissary of Ajatashatru came to see him. This Brahmin minister told him of Ajatashatru’s plans for conquering and annexing the Vrijjis. It was then that the Buddha listed the seven principles he thought necessary for the well-being of the Vrijjis.

  The Buddha probably sensed the fate of the Vrijjis. But he still tried to prescribe the rules that he thought the Vrijjis needed to follow in order to maintain their independence:

  1) Hold regular and frequent assemblies.

  2) Meet in harmony, break up in harmony, and carry out business in harmony.

  3) Do not authorize what has not been authorized, but proceed according to what has been authorized by their ancient tradition.

  4) Honour, respect, revere and salute the elders among them, and consider them worth listening to.

  5) Do not forcibly abduct others’ wives and daughters and compel them to live with them.

  6) Honour, respect, revere and salute the Vrijjian shrines at home and abroad, not withdrawing the proper support made and given before.

  7) Make proper provision for the safety of the arhats, so that such arhats may come in future to live there, and those already there may dwell in comfort.2

  It seems from the list that the Vrijjis formed a small community with a low level of technology and a relatively simple government that allowed direct participation of ordinary citizens in the management of public affairs. It is clear that the Buddha was concerned to ensure the welfare of women, elderly men and sramanas. His emphasis on following custom and tradition marks him, in this instance at least, as a conservative. But the priority he gave to regular assemblies reveals his belief in politics as a necessary activity undertaken by human beings, not purely as means to an end but as a participatory process of deliberation and decision-making.

  He used more or less the same prescriptions as the basis for the Buddhist sangha. As a member of the ruling class in his home state, he had some experience of political and legal matters. He put it to good use in formulating rules for the sangha. His model for the internal structure of the sangha was the small republic in which communal deliberation and face-to-face negotiation were possible. A full assembly of monks took important decisions, reaching them by debate and consensus rather than vote. Any monk or novice was entitled to express his view of the matter under discussion. The debate went on until agreement was reached.

  The Buddha was confident that ‘as long as the monks hold frequent and full assemblies the sangha will prosper, and not decline’. He did not think of himself as leading the sangha. Nor did he encourage any of his disciples to assume the burden after his death. He saw consensus as of the utmost importance to the life of the sangha. The Buddha also stressed the need for each local sangha to remain united. He allowed for differences of opinion, but he did not wish them to undermine the structural unity of a sangha and vitiate the experience of everyday life. Controversy, whenever it arose, could be settled by the method of the dissenting individuals removing themselves and forming a new group.

  This distinguished the sangha from democracy, in which majority opinion is binding on everyone, and minority opinions are subordinated to the efficient functioning of the polity. The Buddha’s early effort to accommodate dissent, and acknowledge the plurality of human discourse and practice, later saved Buddhism from the sectarian wars that characterize the history of Christianity and Islam; and the Buddha’s emphasis on practice rather than theory kept his teachings relatively free of the taint of dogma and fundamentalism. The Mahayana and Theravada movements are separated by a difference in emphasis: the former stresses compassion for others over personal liberation. They have never experienced the violent conflicts that have marked relations between Catholics and Protestants and between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

  The Buddha encouraged individual bhikshus to become exemplars for the society of laymen; he may even have wished the organization of the sangha to become a model of a higher politics and morality. With its rules and its respect for consensus and tradition, the sangha does seem a prototype for the close-knit political organization – something that could conceivably serve as an alternative to the unmanageably large states in which two new human categories were coming into being: the rulers and the ruled.

  But the Buddha knew that the monarchies could not be wished away, and that the sangha was far from becoming the whole of human society. This made him pragmatic rather than a revolutionary. He concerned himself with maintaining the conditions in which his teaching could take root and influence more and more people. And so he befriended the powerful monarchs of the day. He also reached out to the common man, with teaching modulated to appeal to him.

  The picture of the common man that emerges from Buddhist texts is not a flattering one. He is a slave of his senses and addicted to pleasure; he craves and welcomes fame and praise, but resents obscurity and blame. He is greedy and lustful, easily provoked to morally unwholesome deeds. Pain overwhelms and bewilders him; he dislikes the sight of disease, old age and death. Old age crushes him, and his death is a sorry affair. All this happens because he fails to see things as they really are.

  Not surprisingly, the Buddha reserved the most complex parts of his teaching for individuals who expressed a very strong urge to cease being common men. At the same time, he was sanguine about the common man’s abilities to transcend his lot and to achieve, if not enlightenment, then a decent rebirth. He gave lessons in morality to lay people. There were the usual rules: do not take life, steal, be unchaste, lie or take intoxicants. In a comprehensive homily called Sigala, he prescribed six sets of reciprocal duties between parents and children, pupils and teachers, husbands and wives, friends and companions, masters and servants, and householders and members of the sangha.3

  Good behaviour was ensured by attentiveness, by a constant awareness of what one did and thought. Virtue lay in acting in a way that helped not only oneself but others. The Buddha deemed generosity and compassion essential for the layman, particularly in respect to the bhikshus. Giving alms to the bhikshus put one in a charitable frame of mind, but it also helped the bhikshus appease their hunger. On the whole, to be kind and gentle and honest to others was not only to cultivate moral wholeness but also to encourage the cultivation of similar attitudes in others.

  For bhikshus a mind so cleansed of negative attitudes was an essential prerequisite for meditation. But for the lay people it was an end in itself, much as it was for the Stoics, for whom there was no higher form of spirituality than an active self-awareness. In the unexamined life that the common man lived, the Buddha introduced not the hard-to-achieve goal of nirvana, but the task of achieving self-knowledge through spiritual vigilance. As Marcus Aurelius put it:

  Everywhere and at all times, it is up to you to rejoice piously at what is occurring at the present moment, to conduct yourself with justice towards the people who are present here and now.4

  Although the Buddha believed in what the Greeks called the ‘unwisdom of the multitude’, he looked for ways to mitigate it through the bhikshus. The bhikshu had liberated himself from the greed, folly, conceit and ignorance of the ordinary mass of people. He now discharged his responsibility towards the mass of society that fed him by restraining the common man from evil action, directing him towards honourable ends, sharing his knowledge, dealing with his difficulties and doubts, and showing him the way to heaven. Higher insight involved the bhikshu deeper in the life of society rather than placing him above it as ruler or recluse. This Buddhist notion was realized, if fitfully, in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma, where the Theravada tradition dominated, and where the sangha had much influence over the monarch and the state.5 In Tibet, where a quarter of the
male population had become monks, a monastic order effectively ruled the country from the seventeenth century through the office of the Dalai Lama.

  Although the Buddha did not talk directly about politics, or offer the kind of theories of democracy and citizenship that Plato and Aristotle are known for, he followed closely the political events of his time, and drew several implications from them. For the Buddha as much as for Plato, life in society was the inescapable obligation faced by human beings. There was no private salvation waiting for them. In fact, as the Buddha defined it, liberation for a human being consists of entering a non-egotistical state, where he felt the conditional and interdependent nature of all beings.

  But the Buddha did not distinguish between contemplation and action in the way Plato did, creating a hierarchical difference between the wise rulers who think and their ignorant subjects who act without thinking. In his view, contemplation and speech and action were inseparable links in the same mental and physical process; they could not be isolated or set above each other, or distributed among different groups of individuals. What mattered in all aspects of human existence – political, economic, social – were awareness and moral skilfulness. The ruler was no more immune to the law of karma than the ruled.

  As Plato found out during his lone foray into politics in Sicily, the philosopher as king was more attractive in theory than in practice.6 Disillusioned with his own utopia, he then wrote the Laws, in which he explained meticulously the intent and purpose of laws necessary for a stable political realm.

  Unlike Plato in Syracuse and Athens, the Buddha seems neither to have given much political advice to the major rulers of his time, the kings of Kosala and Magadha, nor to have criticized the political systems they presided over. But his lack of theoretical passion came from a wider and deeper political experience. In his travels across North India, he seems to have known more political forms – republics, monarchies, and then, just before his death, empire – than Plato, who was familiar only with the polis.

  He preferred to address the question of what constitutes the ruler’s right to rule. He is unlikely to have assumed that the philosopher earned this right through some exclusive and permanent access to forms of truth, beauty and justice. What made the exercise of power legitimate for him did not exist in some transcendent realm or in nature. The ideal ruler was a chakravarti, the political equivalent of the Buddha, who ruled in accordance with the morality of dharma, with the norms of compassionate justice, and whose realm was free of oppression and hospitable to all classes of society, townsmen as well as villagers, religious teachers as well as birds and beasts. As the many stories in the Jatakas about the ideal king and government attest, righteousness served as the only proper basis for the ruler’s authority.

  In this the Buddhists differed sharply from the Indian theorists who claimed divine sanction for kingship. The Buddhists saw the king as originally a human being like any other, who had been exalted by other human beings and his own actions, and who had more duties than rights. It was essential for him to possess generosity, honesty and integrity, gentleness, self-control, forbearance. And personal righteousness wasn’t enough. Dharma, or Buddhist principles of compassion, had to be applied to the state administration. A later Buddhist text called the Mahavastu gave more detailed advice to kings. It told them among other things to admit large bodies of immigrants, to cultivate friendship with neighbouring kings, and to favour the poor and protect the rich.

  The philosopher Nagarjuna advised a Satavahana king to support doctors, set up hostels and rest-houses, eliminate high taxes, care for the victims of natural disasters and keep profits level in times of scarcity.7 A Buddhist text called the Kutudanta Sutra even outlined a social and economic ethic for the chakravarti.8 In it the Buddha narrates the story of a rich and powerful king who wanted to offer sacrifice to secure his kingdom and was told by his Brahmin advisor, apparently the Buddha in a past life, that thieves and brigands were undermining the kingdom, and that neither sacrifice, nor executions and imprisonments, would solve the problem. The advisor told the king that he could best ensure his power and the prosperity of his kingdom by giving subsidies of food and seed-corn to farmers, making available investment capital to merchants and tradesmen, and paying adequate wages and food to people in government services.

  Given their times, the early Buddhists seem to have proposed radical programmes for a welfare state. There were kings, such as Ashoka, who attempted to realize them, at least partly. But even the Buddha might have sensed towards the end of his life that they were too utopian. The economic revolution of North India had made the elites of large kingdoms greedy for territory. Wars of expansion seem to have become more common than welfare programmes by the time of the Buddha’s death.

  Roughly seven years before the Buddha’s death, Bimbisara, the king of Magadha, was deposed and murdered by his own son, Ajatashatru. Ajatashatru was wary of the Buddha, whom he had met only once or twice. His ambitions were for empire. Kosala was floundering under the inefficient Prasenajit. The smaller states or chiefdoms, such as those Buddha had come from, looked more and more vulnerable. Ajatashatru moved fast after usurping the throne of Magadha. He attacked Kosala and humiliated Prasenajit in battle. He then began to plan his moves against the Vrijjis.

  The Buddha was aware of these events. Although Prasenajit was his follower, he spoke neutrally of his defeat by Ajatashatru. He warned of the vengefulness that humiliation creates: ‘Victory breeds hatred; the defeated live in pain. Happily the peaceful live, giving up victory and defeat.’9

  Prasenajit didn’t give up. He fought and won a second battle with Ajatashatru and confiscated his weapons and army. The Buddha was once again cautious. His comment was:

  To the slayer comes a slayer

  To the conqueror comes a conqueror

  To the abuser comes abuse

  Thus by the evolution of karma

  He who plunders is plundered in turn.10

  This was proved when Ajatashatru struck again. This time he defeated Prasenajit comprehensively and over-ran Kosala. Prasenajit was deposed by his own son Vidudhaba.

  The more successful Ajatashatru was, the weaker grew his moral inhibitions. While meeting the Buddha, Ajatashatru reported to him what a sramana called Purana Kassapa from the Ajivika sect had said to him:

  Your majesty, by the doer or instigator of a thing, by him who mutilates, burns, causes grief and weariness, agitates, takes life and robs…no evil is done. Even if with a razor-sharp discus he were to make the beings of this whole earth one single mass and heap of flesh, there would be no evil as a result of that…

  That a king should echo this advice, hoping for philosophical legitimacy for his realpolitik, suggests that such views had some currency at the time. The Buddha was much agitated by the Ajivika denial of karma. He denounced Makkhali Gosala, the leader of the Ajivikas, as a ‘madman’ who had brought ‘harm, damage and misfortune’ to many people.

  For the Buddha, any kind of aggression, whether justified or not, always led to more violence. He was immune to the cult of the warrior. Once asked by a professional soldier whether a soldier goes to a special heaven after falling in battle, he remained silent at first and then, when pressed again, replied that the soldier was reborn in hell or as an animal.

  He specifically warned merchants against the arms trade. Centuries would pass before the making of arms became a powerful industry in Europe, and helped turn the First World War itself into an industrial process, calling for the total mobilization of a country’s population and resources. The Buddha’s own experience of war was limited to what he saw in North India. But he could see signs of danger in the large states: how the kingdoms emerging out of tribal republics had already concentrated power in the hands of a few remote rulers and deprived their subjects of control over their lives.

  Empires and Nations

  Soon after the Buddha’s death, Ajatashatru defeated the republic of Vrijjis and sacked their capital, Vaishali. Not much is k
nown about Ajatashatru after the Buddha’s death. His successors are even more obscure. But when Magadha re-enters history in the third century BC, through the record of a Greek ambassador called Megesthenes, it is the supreme power in North India. Its capital is the fabulous city of Pataliputra, which was founded by Ajatashatru just south of the old Magadha capital, Rajagriha. It controls most of the territory around the Ganges with its fertile lands and river ports. The smaller states have vanished, or have been reduced to subjection.

  Such empires were coming into fashion, at the cost of smaller states and tribal republics, around the Buddha’s time. Magadha was the first such Indian empire. In Persia, just sixteen years before Bimbisara’s accession, the man who would later be known as Cyrus the Great had come to power. He had quickly suppressed Greek cities on the Aegean Sea, conquered Babylon, the greatest city of the ancient world, and then turned his attention to Central Asia. The Achaemenian empire he founded was the greatest there had ever been. Cyrus had many admirers even among the enemies of the Persians, including the Greeks. Herodotus wrote glowingly of him. Xenophon, a disciple of Socrates and a severe critic of Athenian democracy, presented Cyrus in his Cyropaedia as the ideal ruler, powerful, tolerant, generous, one the Greeks ought to emulate.1

  Ajatashatru is very likely to have heard of the rising empire to the near west. But if he emulated Cyrus the Great, it was not by being tolerant and generous. Nor were the lessons of Cyrus fully learned by the Macedonian prince, who followed self-consciously in his footsteps and whose exploits earned him the title ‘Great’.

  Alexander the Great was the first famous western figure to whom I was introduced at school. The history books often referred to him by his Persian name, Secunder, and said that he had conquered much of the known world in just twelve years. In 326 BC, he had come as far as the Punjab, looking as if to invade the Magadha empire, and fought one of his greatest battles against an Indian ruler called Porus. He had established Greek colonies and founded new cities in north-west India.