The Hindus (53 page)

Buddhist monuments, rather than Hindu, are our main source of the visual record of this period. The gloriously miscellaneous quality of the culture of the time is epitomized in the reliefs on the great Buddhist stupa at Amaravati, in the western Deccan, which depict scenes of everyday life that defy denomination: musicians, dancers, women leaning over balconies, horses cavorting in the street, elephants running amok, bullocks laboring to pull a heavy (but elegant) carriage, ships with sails and oars. In a nice moment of self-referentiality (or infinite regress), there is a scene depicting masons constructing the stupa that depicts a scene of masons constructing the stupa.
⁶
This sort of self-imaging later became a characteristic of Hindu temples, in which the individual pieces of the temple mirror the grand plan of the whole temple.
⁷

There was constant movement, constant trade from Greece, Central Asia, West Asia, the ports of the Red Sea, and Southeast Asia.
⁸
Trade flowed along the mountainous northern routes through Central Asia and by sea to the great ports of South India. A book with the delicious title of
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
, composed by an unnamed Greek in about 80 CE, gave detailed navigational instructions to those planning to sail to what is now Gujarat and thence to gain access to the Deccan, where one could buy and export such delicacies as ginseng, aromatic oils, myrrh, ivory, agate, carnelian, cotton cloth, silk, Indian muslins, yarn, and long pepper. The Indians, for their part, imported “fine wines (Italian preferred), singing boys, beautiful maidens for the harem, thin clothing of the finest weaves, and the choicest ointments.” As always, horses were imported from abroad but now were also bred in various parts of India.
⁹

In return, Indians traveled to and traded with Southeast Asia and Central Asia,
¹⁰
exporting Indian culture to the Mekong Delta, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Sinkiang, to Afghanistan and Vietnam, to the Gobi Desert, on the Silk Route. This economic porosity continued well into the fourth century CE, with trade the one thing that was constant.

The Kushanas, nomadic pastoralists, came down from Central Asia into the Indus plain and then along the Ganges plain to Mathura, beyond Varanasi. Like the Vedic people before them, these horsemen herders were also good cavalry-men
¹¹
and, like them, they may well have come as merchants, allies, or even refugees rather than as conquerors. Their empire (from 78 to 144 CE) culminated in the rule of Kanishka (112 to 144 CE)
¹²
who encouraged a new wave of Buddhist proselytizing. The Fourth Buddhist Council was held under his patronage, and at his capital at Peshawar an enormous stupa was built, nearly a hundred meters in diameter and twice as high. Some coins of his realm were stamped with images of Gautama and the future Buddha Maitreya. He was the patron of the poet Ashvaghosha, who helped organize the Buddhist Council and composed, among other things, the first Sanskrit drama and a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.

Yet Kanishka also supported other religions.
¹³
The Kushana centers of Gandhara and Mathura in the second century CE produced Hindu images that served as paradigms for regional workshops for centuries to follow.
¹⁴
A colossal statue of Kanishka has survived, high felt boots and all, though without a head; on the other hand, the Greeks put nothing but heads on their coins.
¹⁵
This headbody complementarity, familiar to us from the tale of the mixed goddesses, well expresses the delicate balance of political and religious power during this period. Kanishka’s successor issued coins with images of Greek, Zoroastrian, and Bactrian deities, as well as Hindu deities, such as the goddess Uma (Ommo in Bactrian), identified with Parvati, the wife of Shiva, and sometimes depicted together with Shiva. The coins also have images of the goddess Durga riding on her lion and the goddess Shri in a form adapted from a Bactrian goddess.
¹⁶
Buddhism and Jainism were still vying, peaceably, with Hinduism.

In 150 CE, Rudradaman, a Shaka king who ruled from Ujjain, published a long Sanskrit inscription in Junagadh, in Gujarat; he carved it, in the palimpsest fashion favored by many Indian rulers (temples on stupas, mosques on temples), on a rock that already held a set of Ashoka’s Prakrit Major Rock Edicts. Himself of uncertain class, Rudradaman leaned over backward to praise dharma and pointed out that he had repaired an important Mauryan dam without raising taxes, by paying for it out of his own treasury. He also boasted that he knew grammar, music, the
shastras
, and logic and was a fine swordsman and boxer, an excellent horseman, charioteer, and elephant rider, and a good poet to boot.
¹⁷
His is the first substantial inscription in classical Sanskrit (Ashoka and Kanishka had written in various Prakrits, usually Magadhi or Pali). Rudradaman’s choice of Sanskrit, underlined by the fact that he wrote right on top of the Prakrit of Ashoka, may have been designed to establish his legitimacy as a foreign ruler, “to mitigate the lamentable choice of parents,” as the historian D. D. Kosambi suggested.
¹⁸

The Kushanas gradually weakened, while the Shakas continued to rule until the mid-fifth century CE,
¹⁹
but both dynasties left plenty of room for others, such as the Pahlavas (Parthians) in Northwest India and the Shatavahanas, whose capital was at Amaravati in the western Deccan, to spring up too. The Shatavahana rulers made various claims: that they were Brahmins who had intermarried with people who were excluded from the system, that they had destroyed the pride of Kshastriyas, and that they had prevented intermarriage among the four classes.
²⁰
They were orthodox in their adherence to Vedic sacrifice and Vedic gods, and they made land grants to Brahmins, but they also patronized Buddhism, in part because it was more supportive of economic expansion than Hinduism was: It channeled funds into trade instead of sacrifice and waived the caste taboos on food and trade that made it difficult for pious Hindus to travel. (Buddhists, unlike Hindus, proselytized abroad.) Royal grants to Buddhist monasteries would be seed money, quickly matched by donations from private individuals and guilds; the lists of donors in the cave temple inscriptions include weavers, grain merchants, basket makers, leatherworkers, shipping agents, ivory carvers, smiths, salt merchants, and various craftsmen and dealers, some of them even Yavanas (Greeks or other foreigners).

The Shatavahanas completed building the Great Stupa that Ashoka had begun at Amaravati,
²¹
and mercantile associations living under the Shatavahanas carved out, also in the western Deccan, between about 100 BCE and 170 CE,
²²
the magnificently sculpted, generally Buddhist caves of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik, and parts of Ajanta and Ellora. Merchants would cluster around the great Buddhist pilgrimage sites, setting up their bazaars and rest houses, shops and stables.
²³
This later became the model for Hindu pilgrimage sites and temples. There are no remains of stone Hindu temples from this period, though the ones that appeared later seem to be modeled on now-lost wooden temples.

The Hindu response to the Buddhist challenge was not only to reclaim dharma from
dhamma
and but to extend it. Dharma in the ritual sutras had been mostly about how to do the sacrifice; the
dharma-shastras
now applied it to the rest of life, dictating what to eat, whom to marry. So too, while karma in the ritual texts usually designated a ritual act, in the
dharma-shastras
, as in the
Mahabharata
, it came to be understood more broadly as any morally consequential act binding one to the cycle of death and rebirth. Then there was
moksha
to deal with, not only (as in the earlier period) in the challenge posed by Buddhism and Jainism, but now, in addition, in the more insidious problem posed by the deconstruction of dharma in the
Mahabharata
. The challenge facing not just the Brahmins but everyone else trying to ride the new wave was to factor into the systematizing modes of thought that were already in place the new social elements that were questioning the Brahmin norms. These cultural changes, shaking the security of the orthodox in an age of flux, were tricky for the
dharma-shastras
to map, let alone attempt to control,
²⁴
and go a long way to explain the hardening of the shastric lines.
²⁵
And so the Brahmins began, once again, to circle their wagons.

At the end of the long interregnum, a kind of scholasticism developed that was capable of sorting out all the intervening chaos neatly—or not so neatly. In the first millennium Sanskrit still dominated the literary scene as “the language of the gods,” as it had long claimed to be. But now it also became a cosmopolitan language, patronized by a sophisticated community of literati and royalty. It was no longer used only, or primarily, for sacred texts but also as a vehicle for literary and political expression throughout South Asia and beyond.
²⁶
It was now the language of science and art as well as religion and literature, the language, in short, of the
shastras
.

Shastra
means “a text, or a teaching, or a science”;
ashva-shastra
in general is the science of horses, while
the Ashva-shastra
is a particular text
^gg
about the science of horses. The word
shastra
comes from the verb
shas
, meaning “to teach or to punish,” but it also means “discipline” in the sense of an area of study, such as the discipline of anthropology, thus reflecting both of Michel Foucault’s senses of the word. It is related to the verb
shams
(“injure”), which is the root of the noun for “cruelty,” and it is probably related to our own “chasten,” “chastise,” and “chastity,” through the Latin
castigare
. Like dharma, the
shastras
are simultaneously descriptive and proscriptive.

Like the class and caste system itself, the shastric structures were formulated to accommodate diversity. Yet many Brahmins perceived this same diversity as a threat and therefore set out to hierarchize, to put everything in its proper place, to form, to mold, to repress, to systematize—in a word, to discipline (
shas
) the chaos that they saw looming before them. They herded all the new ideas, like so many strange animals, into their intellectual corrals, and they branded them according to their places in the scheme of things. Attitudes toward women and the lower classes hardened in the texts formulated in this period, even while those same texts give evidence, almost against the will of their authors, of an increasingly wide range of human options. It was as if the gathering chaos of the cultural environment had produced an equal and opposite reaction in the Brahmin establishment; one can almost hear the cries for “law and order!”

The spirit was totalizing and cosmopolitan, an attempt to bring together in one place, from all points in India and all levels of society, a complete knowledge of the subject in question. Totality was the goal of the encyclopedic range both of the subject covered in each text (everything you ever wanted to know about X) and of the span of subjects: beginning with the Trio—dharma, politics (
artha
), and pleasure (
kama
)—and going on to grammar, architecture, medicine, dancing and acting, aesthetics in fine art, music, astronomy and astrology, training horses and training elephants, various aspects of natural science and, in particular, mathematics—everything you can imagine and much that you cannot.

The persistent open-endedness, and even open-mindedness, of many of the
shastras
can be seen in the ways in which they consider variant opinions and offer escape clauses. Each
shastra
quotes its predecessors and shows why it is better than they are (the equivalent of the obligatory review of the literature in a Ph.D. dissertation). The dissenting opinions are cited in the course of what Indian logic called the other side (the “former wing,”
purva-paksha
), the arguments that opponents might raise.
^gh
They are rebutted one by one, until the author finally gives his own opinion, the right opinion. But along the way we get a strong sense of a loyal opposition and the flourishing of a healthy debate. The
shastras
are therefore above all dialogical or argumentative.

Take medicine, for instance, known in India as the science of long life (
Ayurveda
). There are a number of medical texts, of which those of Charaka and Sushruta (probably composed in the first and seventh centuries CE, respectively) are the most famous. The medical texts teach how to care for the mind and body in ways that supplement the advice offered, on this same subject, by the
dharma-shastras
, the teachings of yoga, the Tantras, and other schools of Hinduism. Surgery was generally neglected by Hindu doctors, for reasons of caste pollution, and taken over by Buddhists; the Hindu
shastras
on medicine derived much of their knowledge of surgery from Buddhist monasteries.
²⁷

A passage from Charaka is typical of the way that all of the
shastras
strive to be open-minded and inclusive: