Buddha_A Very Short Introduction Page 3

  But much of the other material still exists in translation. For still later, slightly less than a thousand years after the death of the Buddha, Buddhism moved to China, and subsequently to Tibet, and a great deal of the material which has now been lost from Indian languages was translated into Chinese and Tibetan and thereby preserved. In these translated canons, however, the old teachings were now quite surrounded, and in effect obscured, by teachings different from those espoused by the Buddha. The Buddhist world, as Western scholarship found it in the nineteenth century, presented practices and opinions at least as varied among themselves as those among Christian churches.

  It at first seemed easy to accept that the Pali canon, preserved by the Theravadins (School of the Elders) of Sri Lanka Burma and Thailand, was the oldest and most genuine. This is what Theravadins themselves claimed. Since then, however, individual scholars have learned the Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese which are required to check such claims, and quite ancient texts have come to light from Central Asian hoards. It now appears that, though the Pali texts are still the single most useful source on the Buddha, in many respects they can be corrected and improved by readings from the Central Asian finds or from Tibetan and Chinese. Certainly the Tibetan and Chinese sources are indispensable for establishing what the oldest sources are. In this book the translations and terms are from the Pali sources, but I have used the conclusions of scholars working in other languages to supplement them.

  These texts have many virtues, but they are peculiarly weak on one account, the facts that would make up the Buddha’s Who’s Who entry. Most troublesome is the Buddha’s chronology. The scriptures give us licence to accept that he lived to a ripe age, eighty years, and that he taught for forty-five years. But the actual dates are another matter. Sources preserved in Sri Lanka and corrected by Western scholars yield a date for the Buddha’s death in 483 BC. Sources preserved in Chinese suggest 368 BC. The question is still being actively debated, and will probably go on being debated, for in either case the argument depends upon a long and tenuous chain of inference. The problem illustrates a trait characteristic of the ancient Indians altogether: that they were very little interested in chronology but much exercised over philosophy. Hence we are in the paradoxical situation of having a better idea of what the Buddha thought than of what century he lived in.

  The social world of Buddha’s India

  This is not to say, however, that the sources are weak on history. The Buddha was a practical man who often spoke through concrete examples from the life around him, and this reveals a great deal about his world. The monks’ efforts to conserve the Buddha’s words in a realistic setting have the same effect. We learn about what occupations people pursued, how people classified each other, what kinds of political arrangements there were, and what religious institutions were current. It is possible to construct quite a rich and complex picture of the Buddha’s India, a picture that can be corroborated from the scriptures of the Buddhists’ rivals, the Jains. Indeed it may be said that with the Buddha India first enters history, for in any narrative account it is only at the Buddha’s time that detail becomes clear enough to write with confidence of particular kings and states, particular economic arrangements, particular religious teachers and their doctrines.

  This relatively static picture can moreover be set in motion by comparison with other sources. For the period preceding the Buddha we have the Sanskrit texts of the Brahmanical tradition (what was later to become Hinduism proper), the Brahmaṇas and Upanishads. These possess little of the revealing detail of the Buddhist scriptures, since they are the technical literature of a sacrificial, and later an esoteric, cult; nor do they refer to a single period, having been composed over many centuries. But they do testify that the earlier society was quite different in kind from that of the age of the Buddha. These differences are moreover confirmed by the archaeological record. A few centuries before the Buddha there were no cities proper and no states, only a series of small warrior principalities. At the time of the Buddha there were both cities and states, and a century or two after his death North India was to support the Mauryan empire, the greatest state in the subcontinent until the British Raj. The Buddha lived amidst the rise of Indian civilization, just as Socrates lived amidst the rise of Western civilization in ancient Greece.

  There also developed in ancient India new and enduring habits of thought, which are in some respects so similar to our own that we have difficulty recognizing them at all. Here the comparison with ancient Greece is especially helpful, for only by looking back to that period of our own history do we find these habits actually being formed. We now take for granted a language and a way of thinking in which we can talk about human societies in general, or discuss what a universal morality might entail. We are acquainted with the notion that fundamental questions may be asked about ourselves, and that the answers might apply broadly to people in quite different situations. Moreover we easily suppose that such matters can be discussed according to impersonal criteria of truth available to anyone. In sum, we are familiar with thought which is general not particular; abstract not concrete; and argued rather than certified by supernatural sanction, illustrated by customary imagery or sanctioned by tradition.

  But when we look to Socrates and his predecessors in Greece, and to the Buddha and his forebears in India, these habits seem fresh and newly acquired. This does not mean that the earlier Greeks or Indians were unable to consider their nature or their society. They certainly did so. But they did so in a way that constrained their reflections within the narrow viewpoint of their own group. They spoke best for themselves and to themselves, and only someone born within the society could fully participate in the fruits of their thought. For their thought was symbolic, in the specific sense that it evoked or expressed – rather than questioned or explained – the shared experience and values of a relatively small-scale community. So long as that experience was shared, and so long as that community did not embrace too many disparate elements, there was no reason, indeed no occasion, for questioning the values.

  But with the rise of cities and the growth of a complex, cosmopolitan community, experience was no longer shared nor values unquestioned. The easy correspondence between traditional thought and life no longer held. There were substantial changes in the forms of common life, and with those changes arose the possibility that those forms could be reconsidered, discussed, and reasoned over; people could now philosophize about them. This is the import of Cicero’s dictum about Socrates, that he ‘first called philosophy down from the skies, set it in the cities and even introduced it into homes, and compelled it to consider life and morals, good and evil’. Much the same could be said of the Buddha. Neither was much interested in God, gods, or the supernatural, but both were passionately concerned with the ends and the conduct of human life.

  Chapter 2

  Early life and renunciation

  Later traditions embroidered a great deal on the Buddha’s early life and appearance, but of this we can rely on little. The conventional images of him are perhaps true to his characteristic posture in meditation, but since such images were not made until centuries after his death they cannot be portraits. There are some grounds for believing that he was handsome according to the tastes of his time, for a relatively early source, the Aggañña Sutta, praises his beauty at the expense of the neighbouring king Pasenadi. As for his character apart from his philosophy, little can be said, for in our sources his character is his philosophy. We might justifiably assume, however, that he was passionately intense and rebellious in his youth, for no placid and obedient character could have set out to do what he did, still less achieve it.

  We are on firmer ground with two facts. First, the Buddha was born among the Sakya people, probably at their capital, Kapilavatthu, now the town of Lumbini in the lowland Terai region of Nepal. Second, his family or clan name was Gotama (Sanskrit Gautama; he was not called Buddha, ‘awakened’, until after the awakening, but for convenience I
will use the title throughout). These facts reveal nothing about his childhood or education, but they do place him in the wider Gangetic civilization of which he was a part, and they suggest something of the circumstances which he inherited.

  The Sakyas were one of a number of peoples spread along the northern edge of the Ganges basin, at the periphery of the then developing North Indian civilization. When the Buddha was born these peoples were still more or less independent and had roughly similar systems of government. They were ruled by oligarchies or councils of elders, or some mixture of the two, and might therefore best be called tribal republics. Some of these might have elected a leader for a fixed term, but they did not have kings in the strict sense, and therefore the later tradition that the Buddha was a king’s son must be dismissed. However the Sakyas considered themselves to have the effective rank of kings, nobles, and warriors in respect of the wider civilization, and indeed they probably did not recognize, as others did, the ceremonial precedence of Brahmans, priests of high rank. They considered themselves an élite, and it is difficult to resist the impression that the Buddha had the confidence of high birth in his dealings with the wider world.

  There is evidence that the Sakyas struggled to remain aloof from that world, but they were already deeply embroiled in it. The Buddha’s clan name, Gotama, was itself used elsewhere, and probably originally, by Brahmans. Indeed, the very scale against which the Sakyans claimed their high status really only made sense beyond their borders. Moreover they were already in effect tributaries to a king in the south, and were probably tied economically to southern commerce. The Sakyans, and the tribal republics as a whole, were more acted upon than acting. They were to contribute to Indian civilization only their great kinsman, the Buddha, and certain of their values preserved in his teaching.

  The centres of change, and of power, lay in the central Ganges basin. A collection of small heroic warrior societies had spread along the river centuries earlier, and these societies developed into centralized monarchical states. There was a traditional list of sixteen of these ‘great countries’, but already in the Buddha’s youth some had swallowed others and were on the way to further conquests. One, Kosala, conquered the Sakyas in the Buddha’s lifetime. Another, Magadha, already ruler of western Bengal and destined to be the nucleus of the Mauryan empire, was to engulf the Vajji confederacy of tribal republics after his death. The future lay with the kings, and not with the republics.

  At the heart of these states appeared true urban centres where there had been none before. These swelling cities contained the kings’ courts, and to the courts and cities were drawn the makings of an urban life: merchants and craftsmen with new skills, soldiers and labourers, conquered lords to render tribute, the displaced, the foreigners, the opportunists. There was a more complex division of labour and of status between people, and those of different languages and cultures were now thrown together to get along as best they could. The court and the city also drew the countryside into relation with this urban life, through force wielded by the king’s soldiers and officials, through the subtler effect of long-distance commerce and through movements of population. The archaeological record shows no planning in these ancient Indian cities: they were chaotic, and that chaos perhaps best symbolizes both the difficulties and the creative possibilities of these newly complex societies. Above all the question was, how were the Indians to understand themselves among these unprecedented forms of common life?

  The four estates

  They began with one very old intellectual tool, a conception of the different estates in society. This was the property of the old heroic warrior societies, and is reminiscent of the medieval European division of society into those who pray, those who fight, and those who labour: Church, nobility, and peasants. In the Indian case there were four estates (Sanskrit varṇa). At the top were the Brahmans, priests of the sacrificial religion and intellectuals. Despite their rank, however, they did not wield power. That was left to the second estate, the Warriors (khattiya, Sanskrit kṣatriya), whose duty it was to fight, to rule and to pay for sacrifice. This is the rank claimed by the Sakyas, and into this category fell kings and nobility. The third estate were the commoners, the producers, Husbandmen (Sanskrit vaiśya). And the fourth estate were the Servants (Sanskrit śudra), those ineligible for the benefits of sacrificial religion and compelled to a life of servitude under the other three orders. This conception prescribed an orderly and hierarchical relationship between the estates, each having certain claims on the others and certain obligations towards them, and each owing respect to the ones above. It also more or less described society, for these were communities of rank in which a warrior élite, with their priests, ruled over commoners and the still lower populace of the conquered.

  But, most important, this conception of estates was a deeply held and pervasive way of looking at the human world. It was not merely an ideology of different occupations or social ranks, for it also purported to describe the essential characteristics of the people in each estate. To call someone a Warrior, for example, was not just to designate him as a bearer of arms and a ruler, but also to say that he was rich, powerful, generous, heroic, and of noble birth. A Brahman was not just a priest by function, but also inherently endowed with wisdom, virtue, learning, personal purity, and purity of birth. And to call someone a Servant was not merely to refer to his job, but also to his poverty, weakness, vileness, and low birth. Everything significant that was to be known about a person was known through his estate, whether for religious, psychological, political, economic, or social purposes. A person’s appearance, psychic and physical endowments, his very essence was determined by his estate. It was as if the estates were different species. In this conception there were no human beings, only Brahmans, Warriors, Husbandmen, and Servants; rather as in the theory of apartheid there are only Blacks, Whites, and Coloureds. In the texts of the older warrior societies, the Brahmaṇas, this order of estates is wholly taken for granted. It arose from the experience of the pre-urban Gangetic Indians and expressed the nature of their society. If it was unfair from our point of view, that unfairness was already built into their world in many ways.

  However, the estates theory did not bear the same intimate and organic connection to the world centred upon the cities as it had to the earlier heroic world, and that for several reasons. First, it did not comprehend the new variety and complexity of occupation and position. In the older texts, for example, we read nothing of merchants; but in the Buddhist and Jain texts they are a very visible and active part of the scene. In the older texts there are only Warriors, but in the newer there are paid soldiers and salaried officials as well. These and other specializations were dependent upon the new states and the use of money, which arrived in North India only with the cities. These new categories of persons presented the estates theory with formidable difficulties. The theory envisaged a simple agrarian and pastoral world inhabited by four kinds of people. Where did these new figures fit in? What sort of persons were they?

  But that was by no means the most pressing challenge offered by the new circumstances, for there was another which struck at the very heart of the estates. This is adumbrated in a Buddhist discourse (M II no.84) which makes two relevant points. First, it asserts that a criminal, whether Brahman or Servant, Warrior or Husbandman, would be sentenced by the king of a newly centralized state strictly according to the seriousness of his deed, not according to his estate. This was quite contrary to the old view, however, for there the punishment – envisaged as reparation or penance – was to be appropriate to the person, to the estate of the transgressor, not only to the crime. Were Brahmans and Warriors to be treated like common criminals? Were the estates not to be respected? And second, the discourse points out that, in the urbanizing world of the Buddha, it was quite possible for someone born of high estate, a Brahman or a Warrior, to be employed as a servant by someone of low estate, a Servant or a Husbandman. Such an eventuality was wholly inconceivable under the old orde
r: Servants could only serve, Brahmans and Warriors only command.

  In the discourse these observations are meant to reveal the real state of the world, as opposed to the hollow pretensions of the Brahmans, the upholders of the estates theory. And it is plausible. If we compare the pre-Buddhist texts with another new literature which began to appear at about the Buddha’s time, the Dharmaśastra (Science of Law; I refer to the earliest, the Gautama Dharmaśastra), we learn that kings were indeed taking new powers of judgement and punishment. In any case they could depose old élites, as in the tribal republics, and raise new ones. We also read in both Buddhist sources and the Law literature that new financial arrangements – credit and debt, interest, a market in land – had come into existence. This bore the possibility that a person of rank and wealth could lose everything through rapacious business practices, or that a person of low status could rise by the same means.

  The difficulty for the estates theory was that it had described four ideal types of persons, and each type had been a harmonious blend of characteristics. A Warrior, for example, was a Warrior by birth, a Warrior by political power, and – since power was power over people and land, the only sources of wealth – a Warrior by wealth. But now this was too evidently contradicted by facts. There were Warriors by birth who had neither power nor wealth. There were wealthy men, merchants, who had neither birth nor power. And there were powerful men in the new states who were not Warriors by birth. A person in any of these positions could have found his actual plight at painful variance with the one attributed to him in the estates scheme. That old version of human nature and the human world simply did not express the new reality.