Buddha_A Very Short Introduction Read online

  To this problem there were two responses. The first was that of the Brahmans, the theorists of the estates. In their Science of Law, a series of texts which appeared over many centuries after the Buddha, they gradually amended that theory. Their strategy, as in so much of Indian thought, was to keep the old but to build on new additions. They retained the hierarchical order of the estates simply by putting new occupations in old slots: merchants were placed with Husbandmen, while many craft specialities were put in the Servant estate. Regional groups or tribes were distributed among the lower three estates. They also devised a theory to explain the appearance of hereditary local or occupational groups – now called castes – as the result of intermarriage between different estates. In this enterprise they were, in the long run, so successful that Indians today still understand the complex order of castes according to the simple estates scheme.

  But our interest lies with the other response. This was formed, quite in opposition to the Brahmans, by the ascetics and philosophical wanderers whose ranks the Buddha was to join. Their answer is found in both Buddhist and Jain sources, and it is so fundamental to the ascetics’ point of view that it must have been already present, in rough form at least, when the Buddha arrived on the scene.

  The Buddha expressed this common view in an especially clear form in dialogue with a Brahman (D I no. 4). In the dialogue he asks the Brahman the leading question, ‘what makes a true Brahman?’ This in effect amounts to asking, ‘what makes the best, the supreme species of humankind?’, for according to the estates scheme the Brahman is just that. In reply the Brahman claims that he and his fellows hold their elevated position by virtue of a number of qualities which they enjoy simultaneously. They are at once of highest birth, of greatest learning, the most beautiful, the wisest, and the most virtuous.

  This is perfectly orthodox: the Brahman believes himself to be an harmonious bundle of praiseworthy qualities. But then the Buddha dissects this claim by enquiring into its details. Could one fairly claim to be a Brahman without pure descent through seven generations on both sides? Well, apparently so. Could one claim to be a Brahman without mastery of Brahmanical learning? Yes. Could one claim to be a Brahman without physical beauty? Most assuredly. But could one claim Brahman status without wisdom and without virtue? No, replied the Brahman, for these were the very grounds on which Brahmans stood, the foundation of their claim to spiritual leadership and high rank.

  Wisdom and virtue. One doubts that a Brahman could really have been forced to make these damning admissions, but the very fact that an argument of this form could be made points to a substantial change in intellectual climate. For now not only was the Brahmanical view challenged, but also those two qualities, wisdom and virtue, had become detached from traditional Brahmanical interpretations of them. Virtue: now there was some general view of what might constitute good behaviour quite apart from what might be appropriate to a particular estate. For the Buddha’s point is that virtue is something anyone can have: it is not ascribed by birth, but achieved by application. And likewise wisdom is to be achieved and cannot just be ascribed. So the true Brahman is simply the person, born of whatever parentage, who has both wisdom and virtue.

  The argument is directed against Brahman pretensions and favours the ascetics’ claims to possess wisdom and virtue. But the implication is far greater, for it implies that there is some basic human nature, capable of wisdom and virtue, quite apart from one’s estate or position. At a stroke the bewildering variety of different ranks and different fates was set in the background, while in the foreground was set one simple common endowment. In principle any human being can become wise and good. This assumption was made, in one way or another, by many of the Buddha’s contemporaries. They spoke, not merely to this or that condition, to this or that estate, but to the human condition as such. It was a revolutionary step, for until it was taken the Indians had no way of speaking of human life beyond the narrow local conception of estates, bound to the older order of Indian society. They now had the opportunity to speak to a very much wider world, and it was an opportunity that the Buddha exploited more than any of his fellows.

  Renouncing the world

  This may seem momentous to us, but in fact it was but a small part of a much greater project which the Buddha inherited from the wanderers when he renounced the world. Their concern was not so much human society as its horizons: birth and death, and the vast spiritual cosmos which lay behind the fleeting appearances of this life. They looked upon the society of the Ganges basin as though from afar, and disdained it. They were indeed homeless wanderers (paribbajakas), spiritual strivers (samaṇas), renouncers of the world and all its fruits. But they were also perhaps India’s only true cosmopolitans, citizens of the whole, not just of part.

  Their cosmopolitanism is shown by the fact that the young Buddha-to-be knew enough of them in his provincial home to decide to join them. The earliest sources on his renunciation are bare and simple, but they attest well enough to the perspective of the renouncers. He was just ‘a youth, with coal-black hair, in the early stages of life’ (M I 163) when he left the world. This casts doubt on the existence of the wife and child later traditions awarded him, but it does illustrate that to leave the world was a whole life’s vocation.

  There was also a specific motive for renunciation: ‘it occurred to me that life in the home is cramped and dirty, while the life gone forth into homelessness is wide open; it is difficult to live a spiritual life completely perfect and pure in all its parts while cabinned inside’ (M I 241). From this we can infer some of the adventurous high-mindedness associated with the wanderer’s life in the Buddha’s time. They sought an ideal of perfection elevated beyond the squalid exigencies and mean quarrels of ordinary experience. They were bent not on their own pleasure, but on a lofty enterprise which sometimes brought them honour but also struggle and difficulty. To be a renouncer was a young man’s, indeed a romantic’s, aspiration, and from this point of view the Buddha was but one of many youths who left home, attracted by the challenge of the wandering life.

  But the counterpart to this enthusiasm was a sombre and deeply serious view of such a life’s task. First, the refined ideals of virtue and wisdom laid upon these wanderers a burden of perfection which perhaps few could achieve in detail. And second, they left ordinary life not just because of its irritations, but also because of its dangers. In the bare account of his reflections before renunciation the Buddha’s first great change of heart is described thus:

  Why, since I am myself subject to birth, ageing, disease, death, sorrow, and defilement, do I seek after what is also subject to these things? Suppose, being myself subject to these things, seeing danger in them, I were to seek the unborn, unageing, undiseased, deathless, sorrowless, undefiled supreme surcease of bondage, the extinction of all these troubles?

  This account is filtered through the Buddha’s later thought, but what we can see through the filter is the starkness of the alternatives. The unexamined and uncontrolled life of the home leads only to sorrow and despair, endlessly repeated. Only the renouncer’s life offers hope, the hope of looking down upon a morass of desire and suffering from an eminence of knowledge and dispassion. Western writers have often counted this view as unrelieved pessimism, but they have missed the optimism, the prospect of attaining ‘the deathless’. The renouncers’ attitude was compounded of dark bitterness and bright hope.

  What rendered this attitude compelling was a larger theory which lay behind it, explaining and justifying the renouncers’ rejection of the world. In this view the ordinary activity of the householder was contrasted with the extraordinary inactivity of the renouncer. For the householder must commit acts or deeds (Sanskrit karman) in pursuit of his worldly ends such as sexual pleasure, procreation, the acquisition of goods, and power over others. Such deeds do not include inconsequential ones such as, say, brushing your teeth, but only those which are consequential or fruitful, which substantially affect your own or someone else’s conditi
on. Moreover these deeds have spiritual consequences beyond the purely visible ones, for they are charged with the power to create another body and life for the hapless householder, causing him to be reborn. (If this seems peculiar it should be remembered that it is no less rational than the belief that our deeds consign us to heaven or hell, or that they call down on us supernatural retribution.) And in being reborn he is condemned to suffer and desire in another life just as he does in this one. The suffering of one life, therefore, is but a sample of the endless suffering one will inevitably experience as one dies and is reborn again and again in the ‘running on and on’, saṃsāra, of life in the world, of desire and sorrow.

  In contrast the renouncer lives in celibacy, poverty, harmlessness, and desirelessness, which amount not so much to good activity as to inactivity, for he simply does not commit acts which are charged with the awful power to cause him to be reborn. Thereby the successful renouncer escapes the cycle of rebirth completely. True, the householder may achieve a better rebirth (in heaven or as a Brahman) by good deeds, or a worse one (in hell or as an animal) by bad deeds. The householder can control his fate to this extent. But this is as nothing beside the fact that, in whatever birth, even the most exalted, suffering, death, and rebirth are inevitable. Only by renouncing the world entirely, by giving up all flawed activity, can one escape from this awesome mechanism into the ‘unborn, unageing, undiseased, and deathless’.

  This law of causation is impersonal, not administered by a god, and universal, for it applies to all sentient beings, animal, human, or supernatural, who are reborn in accordance with their acts. Certainly it must have been the development of this view, and not just a criticism of the estate theory, which led the renouncers to discover human nature. For the Buddhist discourse which remarks that anyone can become a servant, or that anyone is punished by a king according to his deeds, also appeals to this universal law of causation. Everyone, the discourse says, whether Brahman or Servant, must experience the consequences of his deeds in another life, but anyone, Brahman or Servant, may become a renouncer to escape rebirth entirely. These are the fundamental refutations of the estate theory: the social criticism was incidental. What the renouncers saw was the plight of all sentient beings, among whom the human condition was but a special case.

  As a novice the Buddha must have found this clearer in outline than in its details. But in any case both the theory of moral causation and the project of escaping it were already established, though on the scale of centuries it was relatively new. In the older pre-Buddhist texts there are only a few hints of it. In later pre-Buddhist texts, the Upanishads, it had taken shape. And by the Buddha’s time reincarnation was commonly accepted and the renouncers had become in effect a fifth estate, a notably important part of the life of society. There are many unanswered, and unanswerable, questions about how the renouncers and their world-view developed, but in any case their practices and their theory must have developed together. Only a body of men whose practices were moving away from ordinary life could have come to adopt such a distant and sombre view, and only such a grand, general, and all-embracing theory could have justified such a hard life or inspired people throughout the Ganges basin to respect and support the renouncers as mendicants.

  The renouncers were made by their world, but they also made it, as teachers, preachers, and exemplars. Their theory of reincarnation has frequently been treated as an irrational religious view, perhaps even a very old one which was already present when the warrior societies conquered North India There may be some truth in this, but it ignores the power of the theory to explain a complex world, as it ignores the theory’s relative sophistication. Whether one were favourably endowed by birth or not, whether one were rising in the king’s court or had lost one’s ancestral lands, whether one were successful in business or were defeated by the king’s armies, the theory could explain it. Success, beauty, and power in this world are the result of good acts in a previous life. The humble goodness of the poor now will garner its just reward in the next life, while prosperous wrongdoing will be punished. Moreover, not only events within life, but its ultimate ends – birth, old age, and death – were set within a much larger scheme within which they could be remedied. It is not at all surprising that the theory was accepted so widely, in one form or another, throughout Indian civilization, and even by Brahmans. In its use of abstract moral categories of good and evil to apply to all acts, in its positing of a natural law of cause and effect, and in its impersonality it was the product of generations or centuries of intellectual effort. It would continue to be refined and developed by the Buddha and his contemporaries.

  Three movements

  In the earlier Brahmanical texts the discussion and debate which led to these developments is relatively muted or even silent; but in the Buddhist and Jain texts which reveal the Buddha’s immediate environment a multitude of contending voices speak, as though in a tumultuous market-place of philosophical opinions and ascetic practices. There were indeed public debating halls where ascetics of all stamps gathered to dispute. The public lecture or sermon, directed to disciples but also to potential lay supporters, was a common institution. Certain practices were shared – begging, wandering, celibacy, self-restraint – but upon this basic fabric were embroidered a welter of different opinions and philosophies and a fantastic variety of inventive self-torments.

  There was an element of self-display in this. Some ate like dogs, others adopted the posture of a chicken, many went naked. More important, much of the self-display was intellectual: the Buddha was later to inveigh against those who were ‘clever, subtle, experienced in controversy, hairsplitters who writhe like worms in argument’. But the very terms of abuse put in the mouths of such ‘hairsplitters’ demonstrate a heightened quality of debate and the spread of those habits of mind which would allow people to decide between one argument and another: ‘you conclude with your assumptions, you assume your conclusions’; ‘work to clarify your views’; ‘disentangle yourself if you can’. There were different schools of sceptics, philosophers doubtful of the possibility of effective knowledge in this or that matter, and their existence was perhaps the surest sign of the heat and sophistication of the intellectual climate. There were materialists who wholly denied the existence of that unseen spiritual cosmos of transmigration. There were predestinarians who believed in transmigration but who felt that every sentient being must pass through every possible fate before release was possible.

  Most relevant to the Buddha, however, are three movements, the first of which can be traced through the Brahmanical texts. In the oldest sacrificial literature the sacrifice had been directed to the person of the sacrificer, in his bodily parts and faculties, in order to imbue him with magical power for the this-worldly ends of success, fertility, and long life. This evolved towards a concern with the other world, life after death, and simultaneously towards a more inward conception of the sacrificer’s person, now his Self. And in the Upanishads, composed perhaps not long before the time of the Buddha, it is the Self, the inner essence, which is the subject of transmigration, travelling from birth to birth.

  The second movement was that of yoga, which in the relevant aspects was so similar to the Upanishadic movement that we may fairly speak of a spectrum of yogic/Upanishadic doctrines. Through the Buddhist scriptures which attack these yogic/Upanishadic views we glimpse a wealth of speculation and many finely differentiated teachings proposing various views of the Self: some said that it was material, some that it was fine-material or made of mind only, while yet others held that each individual has several increasingly refined Selves. With each view went a slightly different construction of the spiritual cosmos and a panoply of meditation techniques aimed at attaining this Self so that one could sink into it, beyond the pain and confusion of the world and of transmigration.

  The third movement is one which we associate today most closely with Jainism. The founder of Jainism was Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha; but there is ample evid
ence that his teaching was largely given in doctrines already in existence, and these doctrines enjoyed a wide influence. This school held a particularly strong version of the transmigration theory, to the effect that to hurt any living being, each of which has a soul, is to injure one’s own soul by making defilement adhere to it, as dirt to a cloth. In order to cleanse oneself of defilement already acquired one was to undertake voluntary self-mortification such as fasting; and to avoid further defilement one was to avoid any injury to living beings, great or small: this is the doctrine of harmlessness or nonviolence, ahiṃsa. Jain self-mortification blended on one extreme with the self-restraint generally expected of all renouncers, and on the other with self-torments of a quite spectacular kind. And similarly harmlessness or non-violence was a common part of the renouncer’s morality, practised perhaps most enthusiastically by Jains and proto-Jains but found among others as well.

  The Buddha’s relation to these movements was complex. In the first place he took some of their offerings and rejected others. He built upon the yogic/Upanishadic concern with introspection and he developed their meditative techniques, but he rejected the yogis’ doctrines of the Self. He adapted the teaching of harmlessness to his own purposes, but he discarded self-mortification. However, it was never just a matter of borrowing what he found plausible or of being passively influenced by his predecessors and contemporaries, for what he did accept he transformed, and what he rejected he rejected for reasons which were original and creative. The Buddha found himself in a vigorous, competitive world which importuned him on all sides with predatory demands for total intellectual allegiance and total acceptance of one way of life or another. The relative simplicity and the cool, magisterial tone of the Buddha’s teaching disguise the intensity of his struggle to find his own voice among so many others.