A History of the World (15 page)

The ancient hymns, or ‘vedas’, of the Indian Aryans, orally transmitted with great care, show them to be warlike and horse-obsessed. On the other hand, they had no words for ‘plough’, ‘writing’ or ‘elephant’,
¹⁶
so they may indeed have had to learn from the indigenous people they merged with, defeated or displaced. We do not know what happened, though these Aryan incomers had a culture of animal sacrifice and cattle-stealing, which fits with herders turning into raiders. They had clearly been part of the wider Near Eastern family. Stories such as those included in the Puranas show similarities with the tales of Mesopotamia and the Bible, including a great flood in which a god, Vishnu, warns the lawgiver Manu to build a boat, then takes him to a mountain peak to save him.

The Aryans had followed a familiar historical path. They had moved from roaming with animals to settling. The Rig Vedas, the oldest Sanskrit stories, paint a picture of a tribal culture with chieftains, priests, orgiastic sacrifice parties, and cattle as the common currency. The historian John Keay has memorably compared it to the
clan system of the Scottish highlands before the arrival of sheep cleared the glens: ‘All . . . whether Indian or Scots, shared a language (Gaelic/Sanskrit), a social system in which precedence was dictated by birth, and a way of life in which both wealth and prestige were computed in cattle. In Scotland as in India, the rustling of other clans’ herds constituted both pastime and ritual.’
¹⁷

But in India as in Scotland, farming eventually won. By the time of the Scottish clans, Scotland’s original forests had long gone, cleared for fuel and farmland and leaving behind a thin ecology that could sustain few people. The Indian Aryans were luckier. Northern India then was very different from the heavily populated and intensively farmed khaki plains of today. As the ancient texts make clear, once the invaders left the Punjab and migrated eastwards, they found a lushly forested terrain, rich in wildlife and game, spreading slowly to the waterlogged Ganges delta itself. The land was inhabited by forest people, hunter-gatherers whose way of life was comparable to that of the people of the Amazon or the highlands of New Guinea. Even in twentieth-century India there were forest-dwellers excluded by, and suspicious of, the urban and farming culture all around them.

The Iron Age was the age of the iron plough as much as of the iron sword. Mile by mile, the forests were burned for farmland, the soil broken by ploughing, and crops of barley were sown. The game retreated, and villages became small towns. The Aryans settled. Eventually rice paddies would be carved out of the watery land where the forests ended. This was a long-lasting and stable change. Parts of today’s India, for instance in Bihar towards the border with Nepal, contain villages built of wood and woven reeds, whose farmers plough with oxen and tend rice and vegetable fields, burning cow-dung for fuel, as they have done ever since the Iron Age. Yet soon the great Indian rivers were being used for trade and transport, and a network of roads began to link the north. Thus, under the great white ridges and the blue arms of the Himalayas, in the valleys and plains, a northern Indian civilization was evolving.

As with ancient Greek, Semitic, Nordic and Mesopotamian cultures, the Vedic-age Indians had a family of gods and goddesses who required endless and complicated sacrifices. These gods were the
responsibility of the Brahmin priests, who occupied the top rung of a developing caste system.

Caste is a complicated and much argued-about issue. To begin with it was no more than a rough and ready division of people by their role, such as happened in Europe and Russia too. In the Indian formulation, after the priest-teachers, the Brahmins, came the warriors and administrators (
kshatriyas
); then the farmers and traders (
vaisyas
), and finally the workers and servants (
shudras
). This is not, of itself, surprising. Agricultural societies and early urban ones maintained skills and knowledge by passing it down within families. Before mass education, know-how was too precious to squander by allowing everyone choice. It was hoarded. Potters shaped potters and charioteers gave their sons the reins.

Evidence from early scriptures suggests that, nevertheless, some people could move between these groups. On the other hand, some DNA evidence (much contested) suggests that today’s higher-caste Indians have closer genetic links to Europeans than lower-caste people have. In which case, the Brahmins,
kshatriyas
and
vaisyas
may be the children of Indo-European invaders, while the lower castes, doing the rougher, dirtier and more routine work, are more likely to be descended from the earlier people of India. If true, this would be a remarkable example of cultural persistence. But we also have to remember that, in terms of biology, ‘ancient history’ is hardly even yesterday; if we think of modern lifespans, say seventy years, then the Greeks of Marathon and the ancient Aryans of India are only around forty spans away.

What is unarguable is that this early Vedic system of caste became steadily more rule-bound and hard to evade. As the towns and trade grew, there was more specialization, so that functions were defined and slotted into a more complex structure, like drawers added to a giant chest. As in other cultures, the growth of towns and states led to more complicated and overbearing hierarchies of power and wealth, and made what we would call social mobility harder, too. At the bottom of the scale, the worker-families with the nastiest duties were turned into a subclass of exploited helots, the ‘untouchables’. But then, after all, the Greeks had their slaves.

The Rebel at the Tree-root

There were other parallels between northern India and the Greek world. As the clans settled down, many of them came under the rule of kings, some hereditary and others elected. Other clans developed a system that has been translated as ‘clan organization’ or ‘government-by-discussion’. More simply, it was a form of republic in which most men had a say, at regular meetings. The term
rajah
could mean something close to ‘elector-citizen’ as well as ‘ruler’. Thus a political map of northern India at around the time of the birth of classical Greece shows a patchwork of rival states not so very different from the states of the Greek world, which also had government-by-discussion, contending with tyrannies.

By 600
BC
in northern India there were sixteen
mahajanapadas
, or ‘great states’, from the Indus in the west to the Ganges and its tributaries. Magadha, Licchavi, Kosala, Kura and Panchala were names possessing something of the resonance there of Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes in south-eastern Europe. Kingdoms challenged republics. How best to rule, how best to live, were issues as live in India as in Athens. Here too there were leagues and alliances, wars and fallings-out; and great interest in the best balance of power and in the duties of citizens. There were cruder quarrels too. One particularly long war was fought between King Bimbisara of the powerful Magadha state and the republican ‘knights’ of Licchavi. A courtesan at the Licchavi capital of Vaishali, called Amrapali, who was seduced by Bimbisara and bore him a child, was at the centre of the affair – a Helen of the Ganges. Such are the old stories, still told in modern India. This same woman, Amrapali, later became a follower of an individual who was certainly more than a legend.

The first biographies of the Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, appear around six hundred years after he lived. They give place names, dates and a plausible life story. But the pause is a long one, making him the least historically visible of the major ethical revolutionaries of the age of the great empires. Confucius did not get a biography until some four hundred years after he died, the work of the Chinese historian Sima Qian; but Mengzi, or Mencius, who lived a century after
Confucius, did write about him; and his own reported conversations fill in gaps. (Compared with Buddha and Confucius, Christ is a much clearer historical figure. St Mark is reckoned to have written his account only forty years or so after the death of Jesus, in the year 70 when Jerusalem fell. There are good reasons to think he may have had the stories directly from St Peter, the historical Christ’s companion. In addition, there is supporting evidence from non-Christian sources, such as the Jewish historian Josephus and mainstream Roman writers, about large numbers of followers of ‘Chrestus’ less than a century after his death.)

Yet archaeology and ancient texts do explain a lot about the society the Buddha emerged from, as well as his teaching. By his time, the Brahmin system with its priestly hierarchy and sacrifices was very strongly entrenched, but it was also being challenged by dissident travelling teachers and sects. This probably reflected the severe social disruption being experienced by north India at the time, which was undergoing a major increase in population and fast changes to many people’s lives. The villages and local markets had been added to, with sizeable towns and even cities of around thirty-five thousand people springing up, accompanied by a money culture, shops, cart paths, moats and fortified walls.

Unlike stone-built Greece or Persia, we have almost no architectural remains of a people who built with pounded earth, mud bricks and wood. Their words, repeated in scriptures and poems long enough to make Homer look terse, have lasted better than their buildings – or anything they made that was much larger than pottery and ironwork. In the so-called republics or
gana-sanghas
,
¹⁸
Brahmin authority seems to have been more questioned than in the kingdoms. Siddhartha Gautama came from one of the former, the small clan-republic of Sakya, inside today’s Nepal, which elected its own chief. Academic arguments persist about just when Siddhartha was born; recent scholarship is shifting his dates forward by about eighty years, from around 566
BC
to nearer the middle of the following century. But the often quoted description of him as a prince, living a life of royal luxury, hardly squares with what is known of the Sakya clan and seems an embellishment.
¹⁹
He was more likely to have been a reasonably well-off leading clan member.

Siddhartha married his cousin, had a son and lived a comfortable
life until, aged twenty-nine, he rebelled and set off to seek enlightenment, leaving his family behind with the briefest of farewells and no apparent remorse. Some traditions say this happened after his refusal to take part in another bloody bout of inter-clan warfare. Walking off would not have seemed such a strange thing to do in the India of Siddhartha’s time. There was a tradition of men leaving their villages and families and going to seek spiritual truth in the forests, or begging by the roads. Shaven-headed ‘seekers’ in ragged robes seem to have been widely respected, even if their views differed wildly. The tradition can be likened to the wilderness treks of Israelite prophets, or those of the later Christian saints and mendicants moving from village to village.

At a time of social change and civil warfare, the appetite for new thinking is famously keen. In 1949 the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the period from 800 to 200
BC
‘the axial age’ because the revolution in spiritual thought was so powerful that the rest of human history rotates around it. It seems an essential product of the greater leisure and wealth created by the rise of town- and city-based civilizations, and the disturbing effect of the wars between them. As a phrase, the ‘axial age’ has fallen from fashion, but there was clearly a rethinking of old beliefs going on from Greece to China. The conflict between small Indian states in the Buddha’s time is a perfect example of it.

We are told that Siddhartha tried some of the techniques used by other seekers, beginning with ascetic renunciation and begging in a nearby city. He gave this up to wander, study under hermit monks, and meditate. He rejected extreme mortification, the practice of starving until one was almost a living skeleton, for a ‘middle way’ between that and worldly indulgence (attractively, rice pudding seems to have helped do the trick). After meditating under a sacred fig (or Bodhi) tree for forty-nine days and nights at a small village in northern India, he achieved enlightenment at the age of thirty-five, finally understanding the source of human suffering. What did he conclude? That the pains of birth, illness, ageing and death were caused by a lust for sensual pleasure and renewed life, which repeats itself in the cycle of death and rebirth until overcome by mental and moral willpower. At this moment, the seeker breaks the tragic cycle. He achieves a state beyond the physical world, of pure mind and serenity, or nirvana.

The Buddha or ‘enlightened one’, as Siddhartha was now known,
started to gather disciples, who became monks. With them he travelled around the Ganges flood plain, preaching to anyone who would listen. The former courtesan Amrapali, who (as noted earlier) had provoked a war, became a devoted follower; her son became a Buddhist monk. The Buddha founded monasteries, including some for female monks. He rejected both animal sacrifices and the caste system, and survived assassination attempts by supporters of Brahminism, to live on to the age of eighty. Or so it is said – and, again, how can we know? Stories of the Buddha’s life and his sayings were transmitted by methodical mass chanting, rather like rote-learning in traditional schoolrooms. This allowed them to be passed on, generation by generation, with the minimum of error, though corruptions will always appear. But much early history starts as oral history, and it is confirmed surprisingly often by archaeology. We cannot brush it away.

In this story there are obvious similarities with the stories of Christ and Muhammad: the leaving-behind of ordinary family life to seek enlightenment in natural solitude (under a tree, in a cave, or in the desert); then there is the gathering of disciples; preaching through stories to everyone, not just an elite; and the rejection of earlier religious systems. Unlike the founders of the great monotheisms, however, the Buddha never claimed divinity for himself, or his system. Many would argue that strictly speaking Buddhism is not a religion but a system of self-control, which allows its followers to escape the limitations and pains of everyday life.