by Peter Watson
Before the Axial Age, as we have seen, ritual sacrifice was central to the religious quest. The divine was experienced through sacred dramas that introduced another level of existence. What Karen Armstrong calls the ‘axial sages’ changed this. Ritual was still important but morality was now installed at the centre of the spiritual life. The only way to experience ‘God’, ‘Nirvana’, ‘Brahman’, or the ‘Way’ was to live a compassionate life.4 Moreover, one must commit oneself to the ethical life to begin with. Then, habitual benevolence not metaphysical conviction, would bring about the ‘transcendence’ one looked for.5
The first people among whom this Axial Age spirituality emerged were the pastoral nomads living on the steppes of southern Russia, who referred to themselves as Aryans, a loose network of tribes who shared a common culture. Over time they developed a number of sky and other gods – Varuna, Mithra, Mazda, Indra and Agni. The hallucinogenic plant, soma, or haoma, introduced in chapter 10, was also worshipped.6
Karen Armstrong says that none of these divine beings were what we would call gods: they were not omnipotent and had to submit to the (higher) sacred order that held the universe together. This arrangement essentially reflected the situation in Aryan societies, where people had to make binding agreements about grazing rights, the herding of cattle, marriage and the exchange of goods, a system of fluid contracts serving a culture that was semi-abstract because it was not tied to one place.
Sacrifice was an important aspect of Aryan ritual. Cattle as well as grain or curds were offered, usually while soma was being consumed. Only meat that had been ritually and humanely killed could be eaten. The horses, sheep or cattle were killed, the soma distilled, and the shaman/priest laid the choicest parts of the victims on to the fire so that Agni could convey them by smoke to the land of the gods. By a process similar to that known as potlatch among North American Indians, the sacrifice enhanced a person’s standing in the community. To begin with, the Aryans had no concept of an afterlife, but by the end of the Bronze Age the view gained ground that wealthy people, who had made a lot of sacrifices, would join the gods in paradise after their death.7 This all produced the germ of a new idea: that what one did in this life was important for what happened in the afterlife.
The original Aryan religion had favoured the values of reciprocity, and respect for animals, an approach that was a hangover from hunter-gatherer days that survived well in pastoral nomadic societies where animal/human contact was crucial. But as the drying of the steppes intensified, conflict and violence increased and with it cattle raiding. This new aggression was reflected in the iconography of Indra, the dragon-slayer who rode a chariot in the clouds – ferocious exploits were much admired. But then, amid this chaos, about 1200 BC, Zoroaster, an Iranian prophet, whose name may mean ‘Owner of the Golden Camel’, claimed that Ahura Mazda, the supreme god, had commissioned him to restore order to the steppes. As a result, there came about the first sighting of what would become the Axial Age. No less important, Zoroaster claimed that Ahura Mazda was no longer ‘immanent’ in the natural world – the traditional understanding of divine powers, which infused rocks and streams and plants – but had become ‘transcendent’, beyond the range of normal perception and therefore different in kind from any other previous divinity. Associated with this was the idea of the ‘great judgment’, on which access to the afterlife would depend. There had been no apocalyptic vision like this before anywhere in the ancient world.8
Above all, the spirituality advocated by Zoroaster was based on non-violence. The great conflicts of the late Bronze Age, the conflicts that had imported male storm and sky gods from the steppes and had overwhelmed the Great Goddess, as discussed in chapter sixteen, had provoked a reaction, one that would be widespread and profound. It also embodied another revolutionary belief, that everyone, not just the elite, could reach paradise.9
Traditionally, one of the best-known aspects of the Aryans, if not the best-known aspect, is their move into India, where they are supposed to have accounted for the demise of the Indus Valley civilisation (Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa), and where they imported the horse, Indo-European languages, and possibly the cow, cattle rustling being regarded by them as a sacred activity. The problem with this interpretation, certainly from the point of view of indigenous Indian scholars, is that there is very little archaeological support for such a migration. The Vedic hymns do describe a cosmos convulsed by terrifying conflict and the Harappan evidence, such as it is, features mother goddess figurines which appear to have been replaced. But the most recent scholarly analysis of the Aryan idea, Edward Bryant’s The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (2001), concludes that neither the invasion hypothesis, nor the idea that the ‘Aryans’ were indigenous Indians, is supported by much convincing evidence. That should be born in mind in what follows.10
Judging from the Vedic hymns in the early first millennium BC, the Aryans developed the concept of brahman, the ‘supreme reality’. Brahman was not a traditional deity, more a power that was ‘higher, deeper, and more basic than the gods’, a raw force that held the universe together. It followed that Brahman could never be defined or described, only ‘sensed in the mysterious clash of unanswerable questions that led to a stunning realization of the impotence of speech . . . The visionaries of India were moving beyond concepts and words into a silent appreciation of the ineffable.’11 An allied element was a desire to eliminate violence from sacrificial rites and this probably had something to do with the fact that, if the Aryan migration to India is accepted, life was becoming more settled, the economy depended more on farming than on raiding, and there was a growing consensus that the destructive cycle had to stop.
One aspect of this was a marked change in the actual practice of sacrifice. Traditionally, sacrifices had been the dramatic climaxes of ritual, involving the bloody decapitation of the animal, which was understood to replay Indra’s slaying of Vritra. But in the new climate Indra was less important now and, in the reformed ritual, the animal was suffocated as painlessly as possible. Already, says Karen Armstrong, at this early stage the ritualists were moving towards the idea of ahimsa (‘harmlessness’) that would become a dominant virtue of the Indian Axial Age.12
Added to which, any reference to war was removed from the Agnicayana, the hymns which had sacralised the easterly migration of the warrior bands and the conquest of new territory. Attention was now directed away from the external world and instead focused on the interior realm, known as the atman, or the self.13 ‘Gradually the word atman came to refer to the essential and eternal core of the human person, what made him or her unique.’ This was a marked change in the spiritual quest of India.
THE DANGERS OF DESIRE
Although life in the Ganges region of north India became more settled as time went by, older traditions still had influence. There were, for instance, some men who took the (for us) extraordinary step of leaving settled family life and instead living rough, letting their hair grow wild and begging for food. They were known as ‘renouncers’ (‘samnyasins’) and are mentioned in the Rig Veda where they are described as wanderers with ‘long loose locks’ and ‘garments of soiled yellow hue’ who were able to fly through the air and ‘go where gods had gone before’, and see things from far away. Clearly, there are shamanistic ideas mixed in here, though they appear to have had no community role, as early shamans had. The renouncers worshipped Rudra, a ferocious deity with long braided hair ‘who lived in the mountains and jungles and preyed on cattle and children’. They liked to wear ram skins over their shoulders and practised the ‘three breaths’, inhaling and exhaling ‘in a controlled manner’ to induce a change of consciousness. This early form of yoga, also with obvious roots in shamanism, became central to the spirituality of the renouncers and then of India more generally. And here too, we have the advent of a less violent, more interior, form of religion, underlined by the practice of young brahmacarin, who left their families in order to live with their teachers to study the Veda. They too w
ore an animal skin, but in addition had to spend time alone in the forest, expressly forbidden to hunt, to harm animals or ride in a war chariot. The brahmancarya, or holy life, could only be lived by committing no act of violence, by not eating any meat, instead ‘sitting by the fire’ and exercising controlled breathing. These rites, almost all of them recognisably shamanistic, were believed to internalise the ‘sacred fire’ that the novitiate would henceforth carry around within him. This form of asceticism, it was said, ‘heated up’ the individual and confirmed that the new ‘hero’ of Axial Age India was no longer the warrior but a monk dedicated to ahimsa.14
This new approach culminates in the scriptures known as the Upanishads, also known as the Vedanta, or ‘end of the Vedas’. These do include a discussion of horse sacrifice, so the link to earlier practices isn’t ignored or forgotten, but the main focus of the Upanishads is no longer the performance of ritual but a consideration of what it means internally. The word ‘Upanishad’ means ‘to sit down near to’, a term which implies that there is an esoteric form of mystical knowledge that must be imparted by great men to a few spiritually gifted disciples. The internal references of the early Upanishads contain little agricultural imagery but have many references to weaving, pottery and metallurgy – Indian society of that time was in the early stages of urbanisation. They show furthermore that individuals travelled considerable distances to consult the sages, which meant that transport was improving. The Upanishads embody the view that human beings contain a divine spark at their core, moreover a divine spark that was from the same lineage as the immortal brahman that gave life and meaning to the entire cosmos.15 As a result, the goal of this new spirituality was knowledge of something that was essentially unknowable – the atman again. The point was that, in this long, slow quest for self-discovery, people became ‘calm, composed, cool, patient’; uncovering knowledge of the self became a journey towards an experience of pure bliss, an ekstasis. In time, people formed the view that this was the only way to escape the endless cycle and recycle of pain and death.16
Allied to this was the system of thought known as Samkhya (‘discrimination’). This too focused on an inner light, the practice of Samkhya espousing the idea that dukkha, ‘the entanglement of life’, which inevitably brings suffering, could be overcome by yoga, which Karen Armstrong describes as one of India’s greatest achievements. ‘Yoga means “yoking”, originally used to describe the tethering of draught animals to war chariots.’ In effect, yoga is regarded as a way to approach the unconscious mind, believed to be responsible for so much of the pain we experience in life. The followers of Samkhya did not, however, believe they were approaching god; instead they were developing the natural internal capacity of the human being. In particular, they believed their new method enabled them to experience a new dimension of their humanity – the experience of ‘nothingness’, a new way to free themselves from dukkha.17
This idea of dukkha, the entanglement of life, was to prove powerful in India and by the late fifth century BC it had been added to by the doctrine of karma, the belief that human beings were caught up in the endless cycle of death and rebirth, the wheel of desire. ‘A householder could not beget children without desire, could not succeed at farming or business without wanting to succeed, in a perpetual round of activity that bound him to the inexorable cycle of samsara’, rebirth in different forms. The essentially unchanging nature of this doctrine produced despair among many people who as a result longed for a way out, either in the form of a Jina, a spiritual conqueror, or a Buddha, an enlightened one.
But this was not the only factor: there were social/economic elements too. This was a time when ever larger permanent communities were beginning to form, and when iron technology, including the plough, was making it possible to clear greater areas of forest and irrigate them. As a result a greater variety of crops was produced and farmers were growing richer. Disparities in wealth were showing themselves, small chiefdoms were being absorbed into larger political units and the warrior class was again becoming more dominant.18 In addition, the new political entities, the new states, stimulated trade, aided by the fact that coins replaced cattle as the symbol of wealth, promoting the development of a merchant class, even mercantile empires. Both warriors and merchants tended to ignore priests and traditional sacrificial practices, and in any case in the new cities individualism began to replace tribal identity.
In this system of new social divisions anomie spread, particularly in the cities. Vedic religion appeared increasingly out of touch, not least because cattle were becoming scarce and sacrifice seemed increasingly wasteful and cruel.19 In such a situation – of general anomie – the goal became not to find a metaphysical truth but to obtain peace of mind.
And it was in these circumstances that, towards the end of the fifth century, a kshatriya from the republic of Sakka, in the foothills of the Himalayas, shaved his head, changed into the familiar saffron robe of the ‘renouncer’, and set out on the road to Magadha, the ancient kingdom in the north-east of India. His name was Siddhatta Gotama and he was aged twenty-nine. He was a popular son and his parents wept bitterly when he left home. He recounted later how, that night, he crept into his wife’s bedroom for one last look at her and his son.20 Gotama was just one of many at that time who was concerned about dukkha and the cycle of suffering, but he was convinced that the dilemma could be turned around, that man’s predicament must have positive counterparts. He therefore set out on his own quest, a journey that was so successful that later generations called him (and call him still) the Buddha, the enlightened or awakened one.
To begin with, Gotama studied with a number of yogins and explored various states of trance. He concluded, however, that neither doctrine nor trance, for him, achieved any real transformation. All he had left, he decided, were his own insights, and this reality he elevated to become one of the central tenets of his spiritual technique: nothing, he said, should be taken second hand, there must be no reliance on authority figures. Like others before him, and elsewhere, Gotama became convinced that desire was at the root of our suffering and for him the way forward lay in reversing that predicament. It was important, he insisted, to eliminate desire, craving and greed from our nature. Selfless empathy, compassion, desiring the welfare of all other human beings – this, he said, was the answer to dukkha.21
There was no place for God or for gods in his system. Gotama did not make a song and dance about rejecting deities – he simply put them out of his mind. To live morally, he said, was to live for others and, among other things, this meant his method was not a religion for the elite, as the Vedic rituals had been, but ‘for the many’. Like Socrates, in Greece (see the next chapter), he wanted to examine himself, his life, to discover the truth within himself and in order to do that, paradoxically, he became convinced that one must behave as though the self did not exist.22 Buddhism later split into two schools. Theravada Buddhists retired from the world and sought enlightenment in solitude. Mahayana Buddhism was more involved in the world, in democratic fashion, and emphasised the virtue of compassion.23
It would be wrong to give the impression that Buddhism was the only spiritual development in India: it wasn’t. With the accession of the Gupta dynasty in AD 320, after a ‘dark age’, Indian religion became theistic, the people discovered, or rediscovered, the Hindu ‘extravaganza of brilliantly painted temples, colourful processions, popular pilgrimages and a multitude of exotic deities’. ‘Absolute reality’ was now identified with the personalised god Rudra/Shiva, who would liberate his followers from the painful cycle of samsara. The fact is that many people needed a more emotive religion than Buddhism could offer, something reciprocal, in which their central act of bhakti, was rewarded by a God who loved and cared for his worshippers. Bhakti was a powerful idea that would find an echo in other parts of the world. It meant ‘surrender’.24
The Bhagavad-Gita, the great Hindu text, was one of the last great books of the Axial Age, being composed some time between the f
ifth century BC and, according to recent scholarship, the first century AD, marking the end of the era of religious transition that we have been considering, a new insight inspired by revulsion from violence. The message of the text, a conversation between Arjuna and Krishna, before the start of a great war, is that only by imitating Krishna can one detach oneself from egocentric desires. It is essential, Krishna tells Arjuna, to empty oneself of desire. ‘The whole material world is a battlefield in which mortals struggle for enlightenment with the weapons of detachment, humility, non-violence, honesty and self-restraint.’25
NOTHING, EMPTINESS, STILLNESS
In China at this time, religious ideology went through several transformations, some similar to what was happening in India and elsewhere, some characteristic of China in particular.
The kings of the Shang dynasty, who had ruled in the Yellow River Valley since the sixteenth century BC, believed fervently that they were the direct descendants of God. At Yin, the Shang capital, the walls of the city were only 800 yards in perimeter: the residential complex had room only for the king and his vassals and was surrounded by high walls to guard against flooding or attack. This emphasised that the Shang had a passionate preoccupation with rank and hierarchy, with the Shang nobility devoting all their time to religion, warfare and hunting.26
They had no interest in agriculture but landscape had meaning, with mountains, rivers and winds all being important gods. Sacrifice was important, with many soldiers being slaughtered at rulers’ funerals. This ritual was important because it was believed that the fate of the dynasty depended on the goodwill of deceased kings. Ceremonies were held in which members of the royal family would dress up as deceased relatives, believing themselves to be ‘possessed’ by the ancestors they were impersonating.