An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  No cultural monuments marked the first known contact between Greece and India, although in Macedonia, Alexander’s tutor had been Aristotle himself, and some Greek philosophers, apparently including Pyrrho, even accompanied him to India. The Greeks were very struck by the ways of the people they called the gymnosophists (naked men of knowledge) – probably the sramanas, the homeless wanderers with which India became identified in the West. These Indians lived the kind of life the Hellenistic philosophers themselves recommended: they were immune to ordinary desires and ambitions, and indifferent to conventions or other people’s opinion of them. Pyrrho apparently chose to live a life in seclusion because he heard an Indian confess that he had become incapable of teaching after frequenting royal courts.

  Much later I came upon another story about Alexander’s Indian adventure.2 According to the Greek historian Plutarch, who presented Alexander as a philosophical conqueror bringing civilization to lesser breeds, Greek soldiers captured ten gymnosophists and brought them before Alexander. He asked each of the ascetics a question and said he would execute them if they answered incorrectly.

  The ascetics were brave. When Alexander asked one of them what a man should do to be exceedingly beloved, he was told that he must be very powerful without making himself too much feared.

  Obviously impressed by such plain talking, Alexander sent one of his court philosophers to the oldest and most famous of the ascetics, Dandamis, introduced himself as the son of Zeus, and invited him to become a camp follower, like the historians and philosophers he had brought from the West.

  Dandamis replied that he was as much a son of Zeus as Alexander, and that he was content with ‘those leaves which are my house, these blooming plants which supply me with dainty food, and the water which is my drink’. In the same spirit of renunciation, he also asked the Greek messengers why Alexander had undertaken so long a journey.

  Alexander’s answer is not known. Later historians such as Plutarch would point proudly to the long-term consequences of his conquests. The Greeks had largely been people of the Mediterranean. Alexander opened them up to the wider world, beyond Persia and Egypt. Like Napoleon, he set out on his conquests with surveyors, engineers, architects and chroniclers, seeking to memorialize himself in every way possible. The Greek colonies he founded stretched from the Mediterranean to Central Asia, encouraged trade and cultural interchange, and formed a global civilization that provided the basis for the Roman and Byzantine empires. The Egyptian city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander, became the intellectual capital of early Christianity. In the third century BC, Megesthenes compiled the first partly realistic European account of what had been a setting of fable and myth. The Greek colonies in north-west India brought Greco-Roman art to India and laid the grounds for the Buddhist visual art known as Gandhara, of which the towering statues of the Buddha that the Taliban government of Afghanistan destroyed in 2001 were a late example.

  Plutarch presented Alexander as a cosmopolitan creator of a great civilization, the benefactor and civilizer of the brutish peoples he conquered. Successive historians modified Plutarch’s idealized image of Alexander, and celebrated his success in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of military strategy and realpolitik. Yet to look at Alexander’s life and personality is to wonder about the human costs of conquest; also, about his exalted place in history, and the moral prejudices of historians.

  When in 335 BC, the first year of Alexander’s reign, the Greek state of Thebes rebelled against him, he razed the city, killed six thousand people and sold the survivors into slavery. Such arrogance and brutality became routine with him as he set off eastwards in 334 BC. At Persepolis he looted and burnt the grand palace of Xerxes, who in the previous century had launched a massive invasion of Greece. Then, after defeating Darius, he began to fantasize about a ruling class consisting of Persians and Macedonians; he and his officers later married eighty Persian women in an effort to breed this master race. Suspicious of Parmenio, his powerful second-in-command, he executed him, then killed his retainers.3

  Success made him worse. As he got closer to India, he killed one of his closest commanders with his own hands during a drunken quarrel. He adopted Persian royal dress and demanded that everyone coming into his presence perform the elaborate obeisance of Persian courts. When Callisthenes, a historian and a nephew of Aristotle, refused to abase himself, Alexander had him imprisoned, and probably murdered.

  From India, he returned with his exhausted army to the West, and continued his policy of arbitrary executions and massacres. In Persia, he dressed as Dionysus and participated in a week-long drunken revel. Always keen on gods, he demanded recognition of his divine status from his Greek subordinates, who obliged reluctantly and ironically: ‘Since Alexander wishes to be a god,’ the decree in Sparta read, ‘let him be a god.’ Confirmation of divinity did not bring any relaxation in his savage wars. In 323, he was in Babylon, where after a bout of drinking he fell ill and died ten days later, at the young age of thirty-three.

  This was the man, marked by a progressive mental deterioration, whom some Indian ascetics, probably Buddhists, met and admonished. According to the historian Arrian who reported the encounter, the ascetics beat their feet on the ground as Alexander passed them. When asked about the gesture, they said that Alexander occupied, despite his conquests, no more ground than that covered by the soles of his two feet. Like everyone else, he, too, was mortal, ‘except that you are ambitious and reckless, traversing such a vast span of land, so remote from your home, enduring troubles and inflicting them upon others’.4

  Alexander wasn’t without admirers in the India of his time, although no record of him survives in Indian texts. Plutarch mentions a young Indian named Sandrocottus who offered his help to Alexander in defeating the then ruler of the Magadha empire. This was Chandragupta Maurya, apparently a young man of humble origins, who early in his life had set his sights on the Magadha empire. Soon after Alexander returned to the West, Chandragupta overthrew the ruler of Magadha and annexed part of Central India. He then advanced against the Greek general Seleucus Nicator who after Alexander’s death was trying to recover the Indian part of his empire. Chandragupta defeated Seleucus in battle, imposed a treaty of peace on him and ended the Greek challenge in the north-west. His already considerable empire stretched further to include parts of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  Like Alexander, Chandragupta won his empire through military strength and skill. Maintaining it, however, through sheer force was much harder, as Alexander would have found out had he lived longer. The bigger the empire, the greater its cultural and economic diversity, and the more restive the small political communities it had suppressed. Chandragupta, who was advised by a shrewd Brahmin called Kautilya, wished, no less than Alexander, to hold absolute and centralized power while sitting in his capital, Pataliputra.

  To achieve this, he maintained a large army and built up a ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy and network of spies. It is not clear how far he succeeded with what later became the conventional means of statecraft. Perhaps, not very far. Megesthenes, the Greek ambassador to his court, reported that although Pataliputra was a fine city, and Chandragupta lived in a luxurious palace, he was shadowed constantly by fear of assassination. Peace still eluded his empire by the time his grandson, Ashoka, took over about 269 BC.

  It was Ashoka who, while grappling with his imperial inheritance, offered a radical new vision of both conquest and empire: he made the first large-scale attempt to apply Buddha’s ideas to statecraft, and to implement the Buddhist ideal of the chakravarti.

  Ashoka’s initiation into politics came at a time of crisis. He was sent by his father to put down a revolt in the north-western city of Taxila, now in Pakistan, which, conquered by Alexander, had briefly become a Greek colony before being annexed by the Magadha empire. Ashoka seems to have been lenient with the people who were protesting against the oppressive officials of the Magadha empire. He was sent next to the city of Ujjain in central In
dia. This experience as viceroy or pro-consul must have helped him when his father died and he took over as emperor.

  But empire demanded fresh resources, and generated new enemies, which meant more conquests and suppressions. Following this imperative, in the ninth year of his reign, Ashoka attacked the state of Kalinga, now Orissa on the eastern coast of India, possibly looking for a sea route for trade. According to the thirteenth Major Rock edict, the most famous of Ashoka’s edicts, which he had engraved on pillars and rock faces all across India, 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed and many times that number died in the successful battles for Kalinga.

  It was during the conquest of Kalinga that Ashoka confronted for the first time the human devastation of war: how brutally it disrupts social and individual relations built carefully over decades and centuries, and the customs and traditions which give dignity and meaning to human existence even during times of adversity, without which man lapses into barbarism.

  The thirteenth edict declared:

  When an independent country is conquered…those who dwell there, whether Brahmans, sramanas, or those of other sects, or householders who show obedience to their superiors, obedience to mother and father, obedience to their teachers and behave well and devotedly towards their friends, acquaintances, colleagues, relatives, slaves, and servants – all suffer violence, murder and separation from their loved ones. Even those who are fortunate to have escaped and whose love is undiminished suffer from the misfortunes of their friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives.5

  Such concern for the fate of ordinary lives caught up in war was rare in India. The epic Mahabharata records a violence that is chillingly impersonal: the deaths of hundreds of thousands of nameless people, all of whom were deemed expendable by men pursuing power. But Ashoka could see how war brings about the ‘participation of all men in suffering’. His contrition, as expressed in the edicts, was profound:

  Today, if a hundredth or a thousandth part of those who suffered in Kalinga were to be killed, to die, or to be taken captive, it would be very grievous to (Ashoka)…(who) desires safety, self-control, justice, and happiness for all beings…(and) considers that the greatest of all victories is the victory of Dharma.

  Accordingly, Ashoka made imperative the practice of honesty, truthfulness, compassion, mercifulness and non-violence in his administration. He claimed to set ‘no store by fame or glory’. As the first pillar edict put it, ‘this world and the other are hard to gain without great love of righteousness, great self-examination, great obedience, and great circumspection, great effort’.

  Wishing to rule by righteousness alone, he declared himself available to his subjects:

  At all times, whether I am eating, or am in the women’s apartments, or in my inner apartments, or at the cattle-shed, or in my carriage, or in my gardens – wherever I may be, my informants should keep me in touch with public business…must promote the welfare of the whole world, and hard work and dispatch of business are the means of doing so.6

  He relaxed the severe rules that his grandfather, the empire-building Chandragupta, had introduced. In his edicts, he declared his regard for slaves and servants and his respect for teachers. He advocated concord and courteous dialogue between religions and communities. He planted trees, dug wells and constructed rest-houses for travellers. He told his officials to attend closely to the sufferings and joys of his subjects, particularly the poor.

  However, contrary to what Buddhist texts claim, Ashoka did not convert immediately to Buddhism after the conquest of Kalinga. Nor did he renounce empire and become a monk. Buddhism, which was still one of many religious and philosophical sects in India, did not even become the official state religion. Ashoka came to the Buddha’s teachings gradually, over two and a half years, and then applied them selectively.

  His dharma had much in common with the virtuous conduct the Buddha preached. But it was mostly Ashoka’s own invention, certainly part of his response to the suffering he saw in Kalinga, but also a way of popular liberal governance. He made the state incarnate a higher morality in the hope that it would appeal equally to his multi-religious, multicultural subjects, appease them into peace and brotherhood in this life and hold out the prospect of heaven in the next.

  Ashoka also saw dharma as the way to a world empire. He apparently sent missionaries to Sri Lanka and Central Asia. According to Sri Lankan legend, his son Mahinda brought the Buddha’s ideas to the island around 240 BC and established the first monastery; and his daughter brought a cutting of the Bodhi tree that was planted at the monastery. In one of his edicts Ashoka claimed that dharma had conquered the Hellenic kings of Syria, Egypt, Macedonia, Cyrene and Epirus. This was wishful thinking. The successors of Alexander couldn’t have been much inclined to listen to the voice of moderation coming from distant India. Ashoka was barely able to persuade his immediate successors, none of whom seem to have followed his example. They sought glory in violent conquest, following the classical Indian texts that exalt war and aggression as the proper business of kings. While Alexander’s reputation endured, Ashoka sank into obscurity, and was lost to history until British amateur scholars deciphered his edicts in the nineteenth century.

  In any case, Ashoka was only part Buddhist and couldn’t have been otherwise while holding down an empire. It is not surprising that Ashoka did not abolish capital punishment, or reduce his army, or federalize his empire. In fact, he instituted a new centralized bureaucracy (‘officers of dharma’) to supervise his Buddhist reforms.

  In exhorting both himself and his subjects to moral effort, he was much more pragmatic than the sentimental humanitarians of modern times who believe that democracy and freedom can be imposed upon people individually seething with every kind of desire, discontent and unhappiness. But in trying to apply the Buddha’s ideas to such an essentially un-Buddhistic entity as empire, he was at best a noble failure.

  Ashoka himself may have been aware of this. ‘It is hard to do good,’ he admitted. And it was also easy to grow smug in the awareness that one was and did good. He confessed in one of his pillar edicts:

  One only notices one’s good deeds, thinking, ‘I have done good,’ but on the other hand one does not notice one’s wicked deeds, thinking, ‘I have done evil,’ or ‘This is indeed a sin.’ Now, to be aware of this is something really difficult.7

  The efforts of Ashoka stand at the beginning of Buddhist civilization, which flourished for a whole millennium, spreading across Asia and influencing many indigenous cultures. The Bayon temple built in the twelfth century at the centre of the Angkor Thom city complex in Cambodia, the eleventh-century pagoda at the Burmese city of Pagan, the great ninth-century Borobudur stupa in Java, Indonesia – these great monuments attest to the appeal and persistence of Buddhist ideals that first travelled from India during Ashoka’s reign. The ideas of the Buddha dramatically changed the society and culture of the Tibetans, who were known in the seventh and eighth centuries as particularly ruthless warriors and expansionists. Even today the king of Thailand performs an elaborate ceremony in honour of the famous Emerald Buddha image in Bangkok, which apparently originated in India, with a jewel possessed by Nagasena, the monk and interlocutor of the Greek king Menander.

  Ashoka’s real successor in India was Kanishka, the ruler of north-west and central India and a devout Buddhist, during whose reign in the first century AD trade with China and Central Asia flourished and the first known Buddhist missionaries left for China through the Karakoram route in Kashmir.

  Nagarjuna, the greatest of Buddhist philosophers, seems to have been supported by the Satavahana kings who ruled central and south India in the second century AD. Other Buddhist philosophers, Asanga, Vasubhandhu and Dignaga, whose work travelled through a vast cosmopolitan network of monasteries and universities to China, Korea and Japan, lived under the Gupta dynasty, during whose reign in the early fourth to mid-sixth century the great stupa and carvings of Sanchi were completed, and the university at Nalanda in present-
day Bihar founded.

  The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang, who visited India in the seventh century and reported on the decline of Buddhism in many of its old centres in north and north-west India, was impressed by the liberal social and political climate maintained by the emperor, Harsha, who honoured both the Buddha and the Shiva, hosted a philosophical conference, built monasteries and stupas, and subsidized the university of Nalanda. Even as late as the nineteenth century, there is an example of a Buddhist king attempting to realize the Ashokan ideal of righteousness: King Kirti Sri Rajasinha, who was a devotee of Shiva but revived the Buddhist sangha in Sri Lanka and forgave the head of the sangha who supported an assassination plot against him.

  The policies of many of these Buddhist-influenced rulers acknowledged the plurality of human belief and discourse and the importance of dialogue and non-violence. The lessons of the Buddha have not been so keenly embraced by Buddhists in the modern era. In the 1980s in Sri Lanka, many Buddhist monks supported Sinhalese nationalists in the violent civil war with Tamil Hindu separatists. Most egregiously, Buddhists in Japan in the early twentieth century supported the militarists who led their country into a genocidal imperialist campaign in Asia and then eventually into a disastrous conflict with the United States.

  After centuries of isolation, Japan had opened up to foreigners in the mid-nineteenth century and had immediately found itself faced with the rapidly growing empires of the West. The solution of its Meiji rulers was the same as the one that ruling elites in most Asian countries would later reach: they declared the past corrupt and weakening; they stressed the need to modernize institutions and peoples and give them a central purpose. Japan after 1868 moved faster than any other Asian country to catch up with the West by embracing science and technology, strengthening the state and embarking on imperial expansion.