A DEVOUT PILGRIM worships at the huge, flower-strewn feet of a statue of Commatesvara, one of the Jain sect's major saints. Since the Sixth Century B. C., followers of this religion have taught ascetic self-denial.
By an odd coincidence in history, the Sixth Century B. C. was a century of remarkable intellectual discovery for nearly every ancient civilization. In Israel the prophet Jeremiah was urging on his people a deep sense of individual responsibility for their destiny. In Greece the philosopher Anaximander was proposing that all forms of life arose from a single source, and Heraclitus was asserting that the basic feature of life was impermanence. In China the great Confucius was preaching a code of ethical behavior similar to the Biblical Golden Rule. In Persia Zarathustra asserted that humankind faced a choice between truth and evil—a choice that "each man [must decide] for his own self."
Everywhere that man had developed a complex culture, human thought was rising to higher levels of abstraction, reaching new conceptions of the universe, clarifying the human role in the world order, and formulating durable religious beliefs. India, no less than other lands, was in a state of intellectual ferment. Indian philosophers addressed themselves to the same questions that caught the imaginations of men in Israel, Greece, China and Persia. The answers they found in the Sixth Century B. C. made India a center of religious creativity. They drew on an existing body of sacred teachings, but they went beyond these to found an important heterodox sect. Jainism, and a religion of world importance, Buddhism, both of which interacted with the older religion of the brahman priests to catalyze the development of the Hindu religion. In so doing they transformed India from a country primarily given to the worship of natural forces and magic ritual to a nation justly famed for its concern with deep religious understanding.
Perhaps so many stimulating ideas arose simultaneously in these far-flung lands because men communicated with one another through trade; perhaps the coinciding of genius was due solely to chance. The historical facts can probably never be known, much less the causes. Changing social and economic conditions may have played a role in all these places. In a good many parts of Sixth Century India trade and agriculture were thriving, cities were growing, large kingdoms were superseding the rule of old tribal families. The rise of commerce brought a higher standard of living, and with it.
Time to think. Such a shift in social structure generally brings alienation as well; with old supports gone and old values coming to seem irrelevant, new ones have to be found.
Even before the Sixth Century B. C. men of India had demonstrated a philosophical bent. Their earliest religious scripture, the Rig Veda, appeared sometime in the Second Millennium B. C. This consisted chiefly of hymns to a host of deities—the war-god, the fire-god; animistic spirits of sky, sun and moon, of rivers and storms, of animals and trees. Some of the Vedic hymns, however, expressed a spirit of philosophical inquiry. One of them, after listing a host of deities, asked: "Whom, then, shall we honor with our sacrifices?"
After the composition of the Rig Veda, Indian philosophers began to compose commentaries on the hymns, a practice they continued for hundreds of years. The final and most significant portion of the resulting literature is a collection of philosophical speculations. This portion, begun about 700 B. C. and called the Upanishads, contained many of the themes that inspired the originators of Jainism and Buddhism and provided the religious foundation for Hinduism. The name comes from two Sanskrit words, upa, meaning "near," and shad, "to sit," because the Upanishads, developed before writing was common in India, were passed on orally by sages to pupils sitting nearby.
The Upanishads probe into the nature of the universe and the human soul, and the relation of each to the other. They make no absolute statements of right and wrong, of creation, the gods or man; instead they speculate, seeking always to find truth, as opposed to stating it, and offering a wide range of possibilities. But the Upanishads set the tone for all further religious development in India, and in this they are the most sacred of literature.
"Whence are we born, where do we live, and whither do we go?" the Upanishads asked. In
A MYSTERIOUS FIGURE, resembling a man, is one of many copper objects dating from about 1000 B. C. that have been found on the Cangetic plain and connected to the Vedic religion that thrived there. The use of this piece is not known, but a similar one was found imbedded in a sacrificial altar.
Searching for answers to these questions about the nature of the universe, they did not forsake ancient beliefs. They accepted the many gods of the ancient Vedic pantheon, but they sought to find unity in the multiplicity of the world around them. In that effort they developed the idea that all the gods, all people, all the many aspects of the universe devolved from a single world spirit—and that spirit, which they called Brahman, resided in all the forms that proceeded from it.
Brahman cannot be precisely defined; the Upani-shads described the spirit only in general terms as the Divine Essence "hidden in all beings, all-pervading, the self within all beings, watching over all works, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the per-ceiver. ... He is the one ruler... he makes the one seed manifold."
Despite their recognition of an all-encompassing being, the Upanishads continued to praise the many ancient gods, and in this the Indians remained polytheistic. But in the effort to find unity in multiplicity, to find one pervasive spirit that abided everywhere, they moved toward monism—not monotheism, the Judaic concept that says "There is one God," but a belief that all gods, all people and all things are merely different manifestations of one spirit that pervades the universe. In this view they related the whole of the universe to each man's "self" or soul, the Atman.
As Brahman cannot be defined, neither can the Atman. It exists, but it cannot be captured; life proceeds from it, yet it has no tangible quality. This idea is expressed in a famous parable:
“Fetch me a fruit from the banyan tree," said Svetake-tu's father to his son.
"Here is a fruit, 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?"
"Why, nothing, sir."
"Dear son, what you do not see is the essence of the banyan tree. In that essence the mighty banyan tree exists. The essence, my dear, is the unseen spirit which pervades everywhere. It is the Self of all things. And you are that Self, Svetaketu."
"You are that Self"—you are one with the spirit that pervades the universe—is the meaning of monism and the predominant theme of Indian religions.
Elsewhere in the Upanishads the connection between individuality and Brahman is expressed in another image. "As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all."
This idea lies at the opposite pole from one of the major themes of Western thought, which extols the individual above all else. But the absorption of individuality in a greater whole was—and is—the Indian idea of bliss. The Upanishads say, "When to a man who understands, the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble, can there be to him who once beheld that unity?"
Until man achieves that understanding, the Upanishads explain, he must endure repeated rebirths. The existence of his Atman has nothing whatever to do with the body in which it happens to reside at a given time. The body is like a suit of clothes the soul wears; as a suit of clothes is shed when it is worn out, so the soul sheds a worn-out body and puts on a new one.
The process of putting on a new body, shedding it at the appropriate time, then putting on still another one—the cycle of reincarnation or transmigration of the soul—is one of three fundamental ideas of Indian thought. The "clothes" of the soul may be subhuman creatures—insects and animals. But not until a human body clothes the soul does it become conscious, responsible for its behavior and hence for progress toward its birth in a higher state. Then it can strive for the ultimate goal, awareness of its unity with the universe.
The progress of the soul is regulated by karma, the law of cause and effect that is the second key Indian concept. Because of karma, a good act reaps a good result and an evil act reaps a bad result; a good life will lead to rebirth in a better life in the next reincarnation, but a bad one will merit return to a lower order. Karma, then, is not unlike the Biblical maxim "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Each man's condition in life— his tranquillity or misery, his mental scope, his social standing—is a direct and unavoidable result of his particular karma, of the good or evil acts he performed in his previous life. In the same manner his next life will depend on the karma set by the way he thinks and acts in the present one.
The doctrine of karma sanctifies the status quo, making things as they are seem inevitable. By enshrining traditional ways, it stifles innovation, supports the rigid segregation of the caste system and excuses social injustice. Nevertheless, it also imbues Indian life with inextinguishable hope and ambition for personal improvement. The lowliest man may look forward to a better lot in the next life if he lives this one well. Indeed he is driven toward righteousness by the knowledge that his actions determine his condition.
To help the Indian advance in his cycle of rebirths, he has a third concept that interacts with the other two: that is dharma, the duty by which he is bound, according to his present station in life. If he abides by his dharma, acting out his life as duty stipulates, his karma will be good; if his karma is good, his rebirth in a good life the next time around will be his reward.
The three concepts of a cycle of rebirth, an immutable karma and a duty-bound dharma, all leading to the ultimate goal of absorption in the universal spirit, had by the Sixth Century B. C. formed the foundation of Indian belief. It was an enduring foundation, and it remains the support of several distinct religions to this day. But it was not the only contribution of the Upanishads.
While the Upanishads were expounding basic ideas they were also transforming man's view of himself. This resultant reassessment of the human estate may be their most significant achievement.
In the earliest Vedic writings, the gods had been paramount. Religion had been concerned primarily with sacrifice—the consuming of animals and food by sacred fire, which carried the offerings up to the gods, and the utterance of magic formulas. But in proposing that the human soul is one with the Supreme Spirit, the brahman priests who composed the Upanishads had in effect deified mankind.
That idea had far-reaching consequences. By the middle of the Sixth Century, other men besides the brahmans had begun to engage in philosophical exploration. When they did, they built on the foundations laid in the Upanishads, but many of them challenged the intellectual and religious rule of the brahmans. Some turned hedonistic and preached a philosophy of worldly enjoyment; others sought an explanation of life in asceticism and contemplation. Among them they spawned a plethora of cults that either openly challenged the brahmans and their ritual, or went their own way quietly.
The hedonists were far outnumbered by the ascetics. These men left their families, friends and all their possessions and retired to peaceful forests, where they devoted themselves exclusively to spiritual meditation. They aimed at rendering themselves oblivious to sensation, that they might find inner peace in their withdrawal from the world.
Some of the ascetics were so avid to free themselves of all worldly interfereirce that they spent most of their energies on bizarre, even psychotic, exercises—such feats of self-mortification as sitting near a blazing fire in the broiling sun, walking on nails or holding one hand above the head until the arm atrophied. Not all ascetics indulged in practices quite so extreme as these; the more moderate among them learned to sit motionless for hours, immune to the stimuli of the physical world, so that they could concentrate on mental exploration. They turned their complete attention inward, going, as the Upanishads put it, “from darkness to darkness deeper yet,” seeking always to solve the mystery of man and the universe.
By a combination of intense thinking and mystic concentration, many ascetics enabled their minds to roam with rarely attainable freedom, sometimes so successfully that they came upon fresh and valuable insights. When they did reach new theories about the meaning of life, they were eager to share their discoveries with others. Numbers of them then left their forest retreats and wandered through the countryside, preaching to all who would listen. Apparently there were many people ready to listen to new philosophical ideas in Sixth Century India. Hundreds of the ascetics acquired followers and heterodox cults proliferated throughout the land.
Some of the cults were antibrahman; a few seem to have been antireligious. "When the body dies," said the leader of one such cult, denying both rebirth and karma, "both fool and wise alike are cut off and perish." Most of the cults seem to have flourished briefly and disappeared. Out of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cults that arose, two survived to alter brahman tradition and endure as independent, significant sects. They were Jainism and Buddhism.
The founder of Jainism was a youth named Var-dhamana. If he had been born in medieval Europe, he might well have been a "verray parfit gentil knight" such as the one described by Chaucer. He was born about 540 B. C. into a setting of wealth, nobility and pride. His father was an Indian lord, a powerful chieftain of the Jnatrika clan that lived south of Nepal. Vardhamana seems to have been drawn to asceticism early in his life, but to have resisted the call and lived in the manner of his aristocratic family until he was 30, when his parents died. Then he left his home and all his worldly possessions to become a mendicant. From the start he practiced extreme austerities. He set out wearing one thin garment; after 13 months, he discarded even that, and went for the rest of his life "sky-clad"—naked.
He devoted 12 years to austerity, debate with other wanderers and meditation, and finally he reached the goal of all ascetics: an instant of perceiving the meaning of life and death. Then he set about sharing his enlightenment with others. So persuasive was he that disciples quickly rallied to him, calling him Mahavira, the "Great Hero," and Jina, the "Conqueror." From that word came the name of his cult. Jainism—"Religion of the Conquerors."
Like many of the reformers of medieval Christianity some two thousand years after him, Mahavira accepted without quarrel the fundamental principles of established doctrine, but challenged the ruling hierarchy. Mahavira accepted karma and reincarnation and the concepts of Atman and Brahman, but he provided new interpretations of the ideas. Previously karma, for instance, had been an abstract principle; Mahavira likened it to material substance. He taught that karma consisted of impurities that clung to the soul like spiritual barnacles. Everything had a soul—not only man and animals, but trees, rivers, even stones as well. The soul of man was clear and pure at first.
THE BABY MAHAVIRA, who grew up to found the fain sect, rests beside his mother, Trisala, in this 15th Century manuscript painting.
But actions sullied its purity. By rigorous abstention from evil behavior, man could shed his impurities just as by action he had gathered them; then, free of its masses of impurities and restored to its pristine state, the soul would cease to be reborn. To a Jain, then, the purpose of life was to cleanse the soul.
Soul-cleansing was a difficult job, since virtually all activity produced impurities. The only way to achieve salvation was to enter a monastery and try, in effect, to do nothing at all. Mahavira warned against such actions as stealing and lying, which would add to the impurities already covering the soul. Especially did he warn against violence to other souls. Since everything in the universe had a living soul, killing any form of life would produce terrible spiritual results. So seriously did Mahavira and his monks take the ban on killing that they carried whisks to brush aside insects they might otherwise step on, and wore masks over their noses and mouths lest they accidentally breathe in any living creature. All beings, Mahavira said, "shun destruction and cling to life. They long to live. To all things life is dear."
Today, orthodox Jains consume no meat and eat only in the daytime to prevent accidental harm to insects in the dark.
Contrasting with this veneration of life, however, was a paradoxical delight in death. For a Jain the supreme accomplishment was to commit suicide by starvation. This was the end Mahavira chose for himself. He fasted to death at the age of 72, leaving a sect that survives to this day.
Mahavira's regimen was harsh, but his teachings caught on and endured. The ascetic life that he extolled as a means to salvation was a well-established Indian tradition. But he had taken old ideas and given them new life. By defining karma so graphically, he made concrete and understandable a process that the brahmans had presented as an abstraction. Although he asserted that only as a monk could a man achieve salvation, he and his followers always welcomed laymen to retreats in Jainist monasteries and encouraged them to emulate the lives of monks as closely as possible. They could indeed live as good Jains in the world outside the monasteries, for Mahavira's precepts of honesty and fairness were compatible with the rising urban life. Jains could not be farmers, because plowing destroyed creatures that lived in the soil, but with easy conscience they could be merchants in an India that was increasingly busy with commerce and trade. They soon slipped comfortably into the social framework as a separate but fully accepted religious group.
Jainism answered certain needs and appealed to certain elements of Indian society, and thus it had a hardier life than most of the sects that preceded it. But a more charismatic figure and a religion of greater import were to come from another person. That person was Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha—one of the two or three most inspired and inspiring figures in the history of mankind.
All great heroes are surrounded by legends that obscure the facts of their lives, and the Buddha is no exception. Under the legends lie a few historical facts known to be true. Siddhartha Gautama, like Mahavira, was the son of a lord of a tribe that lived in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. He was born sometime in the Sixth Century B. C., probably in 567. From that point the legends take over. According to one tale, he was conceived when his mother was visited in a dream by a sacred white elephant, which touched her left side with a white lotus held in its trunk. Gautama's birth is described in equally miraculous terms: he came from his mother's right side while she stood in a garden. Light flooded the world, the blind saw, the deaf heard and the halt and maimed ran toward the infant. The babe took seven steps in each of the four directions, then announced: "This is my last birth—henceforth there is no more birth for me." In his tiny footprints, lotus blooms burst forth.
As the son of a rich nobleman, he lived in royal manner. He had the run of three palaces, the entertainment of 40,000 dancing girls and a herd of elephants decked in silver ornaments. He is said to have been handsome, a fine student and a skilled athlete. At 16 he married a highborn lady, whom he won by feats of prowess at a contest. But while still in his twenties, he was apparently stirred by a sort of divine discontent.
No factual history tells how Gautama came to assume a religious calling, but the legend of the Four Signs grew up to explain his undertaking. Five days after his miraculous birth, the legend says, soothsayers predicted that the boy would be a Universal Emperor unless he were summoned to become a Universal Teacher by four signs, which would reveal to him the misery of the world. These alternatives permitted only one choice to Gautama's father, a worldly and aristocratic man, who determined that the prince should see no human sorrow and ordered the royal parks cleared of the sick and destitute. But the gods arranged that one day, while riding through the grounds, Gautama should come upon a bent and decrepit old man. He asked his charioteer what this creature was, and from the answer learned that all men age. The First Sign of the prophecy had been fulfilled. Not long afterward, on another ride through the park, Gautama saw a man disfigured with sores and trembling with ague; from this encounter, the Second Sign, he learned that men suffer sickness. The Third Sign was a dead man; this taught him the fact of death. The Fourth Sign was a beggar unmistakably contented although he wore nothing but a yellow garment and carried a bowl for begging food. From this last sign, Gautama learned that men could find peace in withdrawing from the world, and he understood that this was to be his own destiny.
Not long afterward he slipped away from home in the middle of the night, bidding only a silent farewell to his sleeping family because he feared he would not be able to leave his wife and newborn child if they were awake and smiling at him. Attended by his charioteer and a host of demigods—who silenced the clatter of his horse's hooves so he could get away undetected—he galloped away from the palace. Nearing a forest, he took off his princely robes and donned some beggarly rags handed him by one of the demigods. Then he sent his charioteer back to the palace with locks of his hair as trinkets for his family. His horse dropped dead of grief.
Gautama began his attempt to discover "the realm of life in which there is neither age nor death" when he was 29. He approached the task in the traditional way—by going to sit at the feet of a guru, a learned teacher who taught the wisdom of the Upanishads. But the teachings failed to satisfy him, and he left the guru to try another traditional way of finding salvation, the life of austerity. Joining a band of five ascetics, he retreated to a forest, where he outdid his companions in the rigors he imposed on himself. He ate only a single bean a day and eventually grew so thin that he said he could touch his spine when he put his hand on his stomach. After six years of this regimen he collapsed one day and revived only when a village maiden happened along and gave him some gruel to eat. When he recovered sufficiently for reflection, the idea came to him that without the use of his body he could hardly use his head to gain enlightenment; severe self-denial was not the path to knowledge that he was seeking. His fellow-ascetics gave him up as a reprobate, and Gautama turned to solitary meditation.
This time, determined to succeed, he settled himself under a fig tree outside the town of Gaya, near Banaras, and resolved not to rise until he understood the mystery of life. Like Jesus, he was assailed by a demon with all manner of temptations, but he withstood the taunts until the demon fled in defeat. After Gautama had sat beneath the tree for 49 days, he awakened from a trance to see the condition of mankind with superhuman clarity. Thus he became the Buddha, the "Enlightened One." For another 49 days he remained under the tree, pondering the riddles he had solved, then set out for the holy city of Banaras to teach what he had learned. In a park outside that city he delivered his first sermon. His only audience was the band of five ascetics who had abandoned him before; they turned to him now as rapt disciples. The sermon was to become one of the most celebrated in the history of religion.
In this sermon the Buddha proclaimed the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, concepts that have remained fundamental to Buddhism, though many have changed greatly.
The First Noble Truth is that life is dukkha, a word usually translated as suffering. But in the Pali language, in which the Buddhist scriptures were first recorded, the word is applied to an axle that separates from its wheel or a bone that comes loose from its socket. In the Buddha's statement, life is out of kilter; that is why man is doomed to suffer.
The Second Noble Truth is that the reason for suffering is tanha—a word that is usually translated as thirst or desire, but in the Buddha's terms meant specifically a craving for individual fulfillment. So long as man strives for himself he will remain dislocated from the universe at large, and he will suffer. In this the Buddha was building on an idea from the Upanishads—that every man should seek identification with all other things. The Buddha, however, did not regard this
A BENIGN FACE OF THE BUDDHA is shown in a Second Century B. C. sculpture from Candhara. The dot between the eyebrows and the protuberance on top of the head are traditional identifying marks intended to symbolize the Buddha's great spiritual powers.
Identification process as involving a universal spirit like the Brahman of the Upanishads.
The Third Noble Truth is that the craving for individuality must be overcome; and the Fourth Noble Truth is that the means for overcoming it is the Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold Path, like the Ten Commandments, is a code to live by; but unlike the Commandments, which are held to be equally true and binding for all men at all times, the Path is a set of rules to be followed in ascending order; until the first step has been mastered, one cannot expect to succeed in the later steps.
The first step on the Eightfold Path is Right Understanding. Man must know what he is about if he is to win salvation; he must know the Four Noble Truths. The second is Right Purpose: he must aspire to reach salvation. The third is Right Speech: he must not lie and he must not commit slander, for both arise out of the will to perpetuate individuality, and thereby shut the aspirant off from salvation. The fourth is Right Behavior, toward which the Buddha offers five precepts: Do not kill; do not steal; do not lie; do not be unchaste; do not drink intoxicants. The fifth is Right Means of Livelihood: one must be engaged in an occupation conducive to salvation—preferably the monastic life. The sixth is Right Effort: one must exercise will power if he would succeed. The seventh is Right Awareness: one must constantly examine one's behavior and, like a patient in psychoanalysis, trace it to its cause, trying to understand and remove the cause of misdeeds. The eighth and final step on the Path is Right Meditation: one must ponder often and deeply on ultimate truth if one is to find salvation.
Through the legends of the Buddha comes a picture of a world hero who is an extremely endearing and human person. On one occasion he encountered an outcaste who lived by scavenging
Rubbish heaps in the street. The outcaste, accustomed to the rule that he remove himself from the presence of the upper castes, cowered against the wall of the nearest building. But the Buddha broke convention and spoke to the frightened creature. "Sunita," he said, "what to you is this wretched mode of living? Can you endure to leave the world?" The poor scavenger was overcome. "If such as I may become a monk of yours, may the Exalted One suffer me to come forth." The Buddha took him into his religious order, where he excelled as a monk.
On another occasion a woman approached him carrying the corpse of her only child; she be-seeched the Buddha to bring the baby to life. He asked her to bring him some mustard seed from a family in which no one had died. She searched all over, but naturally she could find no family that had never suffered death. Finally understanding the meaning of his request, she gave up the search, then entered the Buddhist order as a nun.
Several aspects of the Buddha's teachings displayed insight of astonishing power for the time. First, he taught in the vernacular instead of the arcane Sanskrit in which the teachings of the Upanishads were preserved, thus making religious ideas available to far more people than before. Second, he opened a path to salvation that was independent of complex ritual—anyone could follow the path, provided he exercised self-effort. Finally—and in this the Buddha stands alone among the religious leaders of the world—he refused to engage in metaphysical speculation about the universe. The result was the unique phenomenon of a religion without a god, without worship, even without a human soul. The Buddha seems never to have reconciled the meaning of karma and transmigration in the absence of a soul, but that did not deter people from flocking to him. In time hundreds of monasteries all over the land contained thousands of monks and nuns seeking salvation along his Eightfold Path.
He made a stunning impact on the India of his day. The Upanishads had taken account of man's growing moral conscience, but they were esoteric in their beliefs and were made even more inaccessible to most of the people by the fact that they were written in Sanskrit. And insofar as salvation was contingent on knowledge of the truths in the Upanishads, it was denied to the lower castes. The Buddha made it available to all.
If Buddhism was unique, as a religion without a god and without worship, it did not long remain so. During his life some of the Buddha's followers tried to deify him—a move he resisted; later their heirs succeeded. In time the religion split into sects, as all religions are wont to do, and the major divisions came to be called the Greater and Lesser Vehicles (vehicles because both claim to carry man to salvation). The Greater Vehicle, which has the larger number of followers (some 250 million throughout Asia today), not only deified the Buddha, but supplied the metaphysical scheme he had resolutely omitted: a
Cosmology adorned with heavens and hells and peopled with saints, as well as a worship embellished with incense, candles and holy water.
Oddly enough, although Buddhism spread all over the world, it eventually disappeared from India. Its message was not lost, however. Many of the noblest principles of Buddhism worked their way deep into Indian thought. By the time of the Buddha the religion of the brahman priests was already changing of itself, reflecting the growing moral conscience of the times. Yet to come was the final development of Hinduism—a religion sufficiently broad and flexible to accommodate the ancient gods, the philosophic speculations of the Upanishads, the censure of violence inspired by Jainism and the ethics of Buddhism.
World History
