The Story of Man Part 5

THE STORY OF MAN

AN INTRODUCTION TO 150,000 YEARS

CARROLL & GRAF                       2007

PART V

Chapter 10: The Birth of India

• Around 1500 BC, an invading people entered India from the north-west. They were pastoral nomads with light skins, and they called themselves Aryans.
• For several centuries after their arrival, these Aryans continued with a nomadic way of life based on cattle breeding, and it was not until around 1000 BC that they adopted settled agriculture.
• They left no written records, so the only information we have concerning their lives is contained in the later, largely mythical, epic poems that embody their tradition of oral story-telling.

The closest parallels to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the two great collections of stories known as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Mahabharata – the world’s longest poem – recounts a mythic tale of the early stages of the conquest of India. The Ramayana tells the story of a god-like hero (Rama), and an Indian Helen of Troy (Sita), who is abducted by Ravana, the demon king of Sri Lanka. Both date from the same era as the Greek epics, and have retained much of their resonance. For most Europeans outside Greece, Homer’s stories are something they know of, rather than something they know. For Hindus, and for most other inhabitants of the subcontinent, the characters in these ancient stories are a living presence and the inspiration for an endless stream of film spectaculars.

The other great monuments of early Indian literature are the liturgical texts known as the Vedas. These are the most sacred of the holy books of Hinduism, the most ancient of the world’s great religions. The oldest of the Vedas is the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns to the gods, which appears to date back to a Bronze Age culture, sometime before 1000 BC. All the Vedas were composed in Sanskrit, a classical language that bears the same relationship to modern Hindi and Bengali that Latin does to French and Spanish. In the 19^th century, Sanskrit and Latin were themselves known to be cousins, sharing a common (Indo-European) ancestry, with a homeland somewhere in the Steppe country where eastern Europe meets Central Asia.

• As the Aryan invaders settled in these new lands, the development of their culture echoed that of the Greeks.
• Settled agriculture and iron technology made possible a substantial increase in population.
• By around 500 BC, conflict between rival tribal kingdoms had resulted in consolidation into about half a dozen states, each centred on a small capital city defended by mud-brick walls.
• It was during this period of warring states that the holy books of the Hindu religion took written form.
• Caste was a strict, layer-cake division of society that had its origin in the earliest days of the Aryan invasion, but which crystallized in the period from 800 BC to 500 BC.
• Outside of the four main castes there was a multitude of people of no caste at all, whose status would, over the succeeding centuries, harden into that of ‘untouchable’.

Hinduism is a complex and subtle religion. Even its most erudite practitioners have been known to disagree as to just what its essence is. This is partly a consequence of its age. Having been around longer than other religions, it has had more time to develop complexity.  But it also reflects the two very different aspects that Hinduism presents to the world. In its immediately visible aspect, it is a complicated collection of rituals and celebrations, allowing for the worship of a host of local gods. But Hinduism has another face, which is not seen by the casual onlooker. This is the 3000-year-old philosophical tradition, originating in the Upanishads, a collection of commentaries on the Vedas, whose subject is the search for ultimate truth and a basis for morality. For many Hindus it is this search that is the essence of their religion, not any particular set of observances.

Around the fifth century BC another religion arose in north-east India that became one of the great religions of the world. This was Buddhism. It had its origin in the teachings of a north Indian prince with the family name of Gautama. He was born in the foothills of the Himalaya, sometime between 550 BC and 420 BC – probably nearer to the latter. The uncertainty attaching to his birth is an indication of how little we know about his life. We also know little about the early history of the religious movement he inspired. What is certain is the colossal impact his teaching had on his early followers, and the power his thinking still has today.

Gautama’s outlook and teaching were a product of the time and place in which he grew up. He was born into a society in which the concept of reincarnation – the rebirth of a soul in another body – was a fundamental aspect of religious belief. (Pythagoras, the great Greek mathematician, who lived around the same time, also believed in it.) This was an age when it was fashionable for thoughtful young men to take time out to live a simple life, while they contemplated the sorrows of the world. (Thoughtful young women were too busy having babies to indulge themselves in this way.)

Legend has it that when he was about 30, Gautama walked out on his wife and his new-born son, and rode off into the night. It is also said that he traveled for seven years, living an austerely simple life, in the hope of finding an answer to the problem of suffering, through the medium of meditation. The enlightenment he finally claimed to have experienced led to his being called the Buddha (‘the awakened one’).

Guatama had at first accepted the idea that an individual human life was just one stage in an unending cycle, involving rebirth in different forms. But he came to believe that suffering and disappointment were the consequence of unsatisfied desires, and that the human spirit could escape from the perpetual cycle of rebirth by overcoming desire (in the widest sense of yearnings of an earthly kind.) Another already-existing idea that was incorporated into Buddhist doctrine was that of karma. This was a cause-and-effect relationship between past actions and future experience, whereby good conduct was rewarded both by a happy state of mind and a tendency to further good conduct – either in this life, or in a later one.

Central to Gautama’s teaching was the pursuit of the Middle Way: a path between the extremes of out-and-out worldliness and harsh self-denial. He preached the importance of meditation in the pursuit of nirvana, a state of peace and blessedness, in which the spirit is able to rise above the pain and disappointment of everyday life. Nirvana was not a celebratory condition, like the Christian heaven, with its angels and trumpets, or the Muslim paradise, with its gardens and beautiful maidens. It was a state of peace, in which the soul was no longer troubled by earthly longings and frustrations. The conquest of desire that led to nirvana was to be achieved by pursuing the noble eightfold path: right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right awareness and right concentration.

Buddhism was basically a godless religion, but the need that many human beings have for someone, or something, to worship, would later cause its founder to be venerated as a kind of god. In the centuries after his death, the faith based on his teaching split into fiercely disputing sects, as happened with both Christianity and Islam. These sects went on to develop their own versions of Buddhism, which were spread far and wide by the missionary activities of monks and nuns, supported by the sponsorship of Buddhist merchants who settled in places like northern China.

• The emperor Asoka (pronounced Ashoka) was the last major emperor of the Maura dynasty as the result of a military coup in 321 BC by Asoka’s grandfather, who had created an empire stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Ganges delta.
• It was this enlarged empire, covering most of present-day India and Pakistan, that Asoka inherited when he ascended the throne around 268 BC.
• In the eighth year of his reign, after a bloody war against the state of Kalinga (present-day Orissa), he adopted a Buddhist approach to his role.
• The most striking feature of his reign was his untiring endeavour to persuade people of all faiths to work together in tolerance for the good of everyone (and for the easier management of an enormous and disparate empire).
• For the remainder of his 35-year rule, he devoted himself to the peace of his realm and the welfare of his people.
• The prestige associated with an emperor’s encouragement, and the active support he gave to its missionaries, resulted in the hundreds of millions of followers it has today in Central Asia, South-East Asia and China.
• The empire of Asoka’s grandfather had been a powerful and prosperous state with a huge standing army.
• But it had its dark side. It was what we would call a police state, with a draconian penal code, overseen by an emperor who took care never to sleep in the same bed twice and had his food tasted in his presence, for possible poison.
• The state that Asoka set about creating was as different from his grandfather’s model as it was possible to be.
• The Buddhism to which he now apparently subscribed preached a political morality that included an obligation to fight poverty and insecurity.
• Instead of military conquest, he substituted the principle of ‘conquest by dharma’ (the principle of right life).

He promoted female education. He enforced a regime of tolerance for all religions, and traveled widely in his dominions, to see for himself the lives of his subjects and to ensure the carrying out of his policies. He appointed regional commissioners, whose duties were to listen to complaints and to pay special attention to the needs of women and minority groups. He arranged for his ambitions, and his guiding principles, to be engraved on stone columns throughout the empire. One typical announcement read: ‘All men are my children. As I desire all the welfare and happiness of this world, and the next, for my own children, so do I desire for all men.’

• After he died, around 238 BC, his empire disintegrated. But more than 2000 years later his memory still serves as an inspiration to those who strive to make a better life for the people of the nation he served with such wise endeavour.

The Maurya dynasty, which ended with Asoka, ruled over the most populous, and one of the most prosperous, empires the world has ever known. At the time of his death, the population of India was around 50 million. This was half as big again as the population of China, and a quarter of the population of the entire globe.

• In the year 320, much of India was reunited under a new dynasty, the Guptas.
• The two centuries that followed were a period of busy trade with far-distant countries, which delivered wealth and luxury for those at the top of the social pile. It was a golden age of artistic achievement.

The Gupta dynasty was not only notable for its artistic achievements; it was also an important staging post in the history of science. It witnessed a revival of the universities that had graced the reign of Asoka. Out of these came a stream of writing that would later inspire the scientific culture of Islam, and through Islam the Scientific Revolution in Europe. Preeminent among the scientific innovations introduced by the gifted mathematicians of this period was the system of notation we call Arabic numerals. It was an Indian mathematician, Aryabhata, who, in 499, published the first book employing a system of numbers with place values and a decimal point. His work found its way, via 9^th-centuy Baghdad, to 13^th century Europe, and it would be difficult to overstate the importance of this Indian contribution to the development of modern commercial civilization.

 

Chapter 11: The Making of China