Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  204. With the exception of Sanskrti Buddhism in Nepal, pointed out above.

  205. For a good brief summary of this history, see Hartmut Scharfe, The State in Indian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1989), chap. 6, “A Synthetic View of the Development of the State in India.”

  206. I use the spelling of Kautaliya preferred by Romila Thapar in her important book Anoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, rev. ed. with new afterword (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). The new afterword discusses research between the first edition of 1961 and the publication of the revised edition. Other authors prefer the spelling Kautiliya.

  207. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 162-163. For Asoka’s Dhamma, I will use italics to distinguish it from Buddhist Dhamma.

  208. My account of Anoka and his teaching relies largely on Thapar’s book, Anoka, including her translations of the edicts in appendix 5. In addition to the afterword in that book, which takes account of research up until 1997, her treatment of Anoka in Early India, though abbreviated, gives her views as of 2002 when it was first published.

  209. See on the Web the Wikipedia article “Full Translation of the Behistun Inscription.”

  210. Translated by Thapar, Anoka, 253.

  211. From Pillar Edict 7, translated in ibid., 265.

  212. From the 11th Major Rock Edict, translated in ibid., 254-255.

  213. From the 12th Major Rock Edict, translated in ibid., 255.

  214. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 5, 7.

  215. Ibid., 2-10.

  216. Ibid., 60.

  217. Ibid., 50.

  218. Ibid., 3, 76.

  219. Ibid., 300.

  220. Ibid., 198.

  221. Thapar, Asoka, and especially her appendix 1, “The Date of the Arthasdstra,” 218-225.

  222. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin, 2009), 202.

  223. Olivelle, Dharmasutras, xxxiv.

  224. Patrick Olivelle, The Law Code ofManu (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), xix. Wendy Doniger has also translated Manu, in The Laws of Manu (New York: Penguin, 1991). Both are worth consulting. Olivelle is translating a critical edition of the text and has a useful introduction. Doniger is translating the traditional version and also has a useful introduction.

  225. Olivelle, Law Code ofManu, xiiii.

  226. Doniger, 7heLaws ofManu, xlii.

  227. Ibid., xiiii.

  228. Doniger, The Hindus, 209; but see her discussion of the ends of life in chap. 8.

  229. Ibid., 210.

  230. Doniger, The Laws ofManu, 286.

  231. Olivelle’s translation is clearer in this passage. See his Law Code ofManu, 217.

  232. Doniger, The Hindus, 211.

  233. Olivelle, Law Code of Manu, 14-15. For Doniger’s translation of this passage, see The Hindus, 210. This sounds remarkably like Calvinist double predestination if one can make such a remote comparison.

  234. Doniger, The Laws ofManu, xlvi.

  235. In so doing, Manu illustrates a possibility that under quite other circumstances was often a feature of Japanese thought. See the introduction to Bellah, Imaginingjapan.

  236. Olivelle, Law Code ofManu, 105.

  237. Ibid.

  238. Ibid., 218.

  239. It would seem that Manu understood the position of universal ethics and consciously rejected it. Instead he opted for moral/political regression, with unhappy consequences for as long as his text was influential.

  240. Olivelle, Law Code ofManu, x1i-x1v.

  241. The standard English translation of the Ramayana is The Ramayana of Vdlmiki: An Epic ofAncientIndia, vol. 1: Balardmdyana, trans. Robert P. Goldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Five further volumes had been published by 2009, each volume containing one book of the epic, with one more volume to go.

  242. The Rdmdyana of Valmiki: An Epic ofAncient India, vol. 2, Ayodhyakanda, trans. Sheldon I. Pollock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 70.

  243. Ibid., n. 12, 70-71. Pollock cites the inscriptions of Asoka that parallel passages in the Ayodhyakanda.

  244. Ibid., 70.

  245. Pollock, Language of the Gods, 81.

  246. Pollock, Ramayana, 2:72.

  247. One might want to qualify the idea of the Ramayana as a comedy if one seriously considered the second most important character in the epic, Rama’s wife Sita, whose tribulations and ultimate fate, and whose treatment by Rama, are problematic indeed. The standard English translation of the Mahabharata is that published by the University of Chicago Press: The Mahabharata. Vol. 1, bk. 1, The Book of the Beginning, trans. and ed. J. A. B. van Buuitenen, was published in 1973. Three more volumes have been published subsequently: vol. 2, containing books 2 and 3; vol. 3, containing books 4 and 5; and vol. 7, containing book 11 and part 1 of book 12. There are eighteen books in all.

  248. Pollock, Language of the Gods, 17-18.

  249. Ibid., 225.

  250. Pollock, Ramayana, 2:48-52.

  251. Ibid., 67-68.

  252. Ibid., 51.

  253. On this point see Sheldon Pollock, “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India,” Journal ofAsian Studies 52, no. 2 (1993): 261-297.

  254. To explain the double parentage of the Pandavas would take far more space than I have, this being an example of plot complexities defying brief description that characterize the whole epic.

  255. The cousin-brothers of the Pandavas.

  256. Thapar, Early India, 178.

  257. A translation of book 10 can be found in W. J. Johnson, trans., The Sauptikaparvan of the Mahabadrata: The Massacre atNight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). In his interesting introduction, Johnson points out the cosmological level of the concept of dharma, which is only one of several such levels treated in the vast epic. I have stayed with the ethical/ political level, which has implications for other levels of meaning, but is complex enough for my brief treatment.

  258. Doniger, The Hindus, 266, 270.

  259. Alf Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 208. See his general discussion of these issues, 202-214.

  260. It would take us too far afield to discuss this incident in detail, but Gananath Obeyesekere, in The Work of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 80-81, notes that it is the only Hindu example of Freud’s classic Oedipus complex, and a highly ambiguous one, whereas examples of the classic Oedipus complex are frequent in Buddhist literature. See the whole discussion of the Hindu case, 75-88.

  261. Doniger, The Hindus, 274-275.

  262. Pollock refers to the Rajasuya as a “consecration [of Yudhisthira] as a cakravrtin” (Language of the Gods, 226), the universal ruler. The term seems to have dropped out of later Hinduism, though it continued to be important in Theravada Buddhism. Pollock is particularly interested in the conquest of the four directions by Yudhisthira’s four brothers in preparation for the consecration, and in the fact that the description of the conquest geographically includes the known world of Indic culture. The description of the world occurs three times again in the Mahabadrata and helped define the political geography of subsequent Indic civilization, and also the political trope that a truly good king is a world ruler (e.g., Rama or the ruler described near the end of Manu above), regardless of the size of his actual kingdom. Here the example of Asoka has a continuing afterlife. See Pollock, Language of the Gods, 226-237.

  263. Ibid., 227.

  264. Ibid., 554.

  265. Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabadrata, 214.

  266. Margaret Cone and Richard F. Gombrich, The Perfect Generosity of Prince Vessantara: A Buddhist Epic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). For a recent collection of Jataka stories, see The jatakas: Birth Stories of the Bodbisatta, trans. Sarah Shaw (
New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), which contains the interesting Temiya jataka, somewhat parallel to the Vessantara jataka.

  267. Although there is no way of dating exactly the most comprehensive Pali text from which the other versions seem to derive, we know that the story goes back to the second and first centuries BCE because episodes from it are to be found in relief carvings of that period in northern India. Cone and Gombrich, Vessantara, xxxv.

  268. Ibid., xv.

  269. Collins, Nirvana, 501. In connection with his discussion of Buddhist utopian thought in this book, Collins cites the very interesting article by Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 109-134. (This essay was originally published in Daedalus 99, no. 2 [1965]: 323-347.) Frye makes a powerful defense of literary utopias against their contemporary detractors.

  270. Collins, Nirvana, 522.

  271. Ibid., 333.

  10. Conclusion

  1. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, rev. ed., trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995 [1670]), 323. There is another passage in Pascal relevant to this book: “As we cannot be universal by knowing everything there is to be known about everything, we must know a little about everything, because it is much better to know something about everything than everything about something.” Pascal, Pensees, 58. Here Pascal rejects overspecialization, but, even trying to follow his injunction, all I could do is know a little about a lot of things, not even a little about everything. Pascal is sarcastic about philosophers who claim to know everything about everything.

  2. As indicated in Chapter 2, I owe a great debt to Gordon Burghardt for his work on animal play and to Johann Huizinga for his work on play as the basis of human culture. Perhaps just a word about why Chapter 2 was the only substantive chapter to be rewritten after the others were completed (I did write a new Preface in the fall of 2009 to replace one that had been written at the beginning before I had an adequate sense of where the book was going). Although it is true that the understanding of biological evolution had changed dramatically in the decade or so since the first draft was completed, to a lesser degree that is true of the subject matter in each substantive chapter and alone would not have justified a rewriting. The main reason is that, though I still believe that religion in any intelligible sense does not precede our own species and so arose in the Paleolithic period, I had come to see that the deep background that made that origin possible was also of such importance that it needed extensive discussion.

  3. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education ofMan, trans. Reginald Snell (New York: Dover, 2004 [1801]).

  4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power ofJudgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]), sec. 43, 183.

  5. Gordon M. Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 77-78. Upon inspection I found that Burghardt not only refers to Schiller in his book, but actually quotes a passage that partly overlaps the following quote from Schiller on p. 28 of his book, a reference that I failed to follow up on first reading. It was Burghardt more than anyone else who opened my eyes to the enormous importance of animal play in evolutionary history.

  6. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, letter 27, pp. 133-134. Italics in original. One might perhaps see in Schiller the distinction we found in Abraham Maslow in Chapter 1 between Deficiency cognition (D-cognition) and Being cognition (B-cognition). Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962).

  7. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, letter 15, pp. 78-80. Italics in original.

  8. Ibid., letter 14, p. 74. Italics in original.

  9. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 1516, where he says, “It is as if music and mythology needed time only in order to deny it.”

  10. Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 253. Italics in original.

  11. Ibid., 256-257.

  12. Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 218-219.

  13. On aristocratic play in early state societies, see particularly Eli Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State (New York: Knopf, 1985), esp. 166-183.

  14. Of this situation Rousseau wrote: “They now began to assemble round a great tree: singing and dancing, the genuine offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of the men and women, free from care, thus gathered together. Everyone began to notice the rest, and wished to be noticed himself; and public esteem acquired a value. He who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be the most respected: this was the first step toward inequality, and at the same time toward vice.” Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin oflnequality, in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964 [1755]), 149.

  15. On the negative side of play, including play as an addiction (gambling would be an example), see Gordon Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimalPlay, 385-393.

  16. Although play in humans can occur throughout life, it is characteristic particularly of childhood. The consequences of “some work, others play” in Brazil is vividly pointed out by David F. Lancey, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): “in Brazil childhood is a privilege of the rich and practically nonexistent for the poor” (1).

  17. Jurgen Habermas, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979 [1976]), 163. Italics in the original.

  18. Perhaps it would be best to call only Plato a renouncer. Andrea Nightingale argues with Simon Goldhill, who called Socrates a “performer in exile” because he did not display his wisdom in the assembly or other political gatherings (except on one important occasion). She holds that in his exchanges with his fellow citizens Socrates remained intimately tied to the city. See Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 73 n. 2. Can we call Socrates a “dissident,” who, like Vaclav Havel, criticized his city but refused to leave it at whatever cost? Fortunately Havel only had to serve four years in prison.

  19. Of course, as in many legitimation struggles, what began as a tradition of criticism could become a tradition of legitimation.

  20. Nightingale, Spectacles, 40-41.

  21. Ibid., 74-77.

  22. Ibid., 78.

  23. Ibid., 98.

  24. Ibid., 80.

  25. Ibid., 81.

  26. Ibid., 80

  27. Ibid., 105-106.

  28. Ibid., 106.

  29. Ibid., 106-107.

  30. Ibid., 111.

  31. Ibid., 110-116.

  32. Ibid., 134. Italics in original.

  33. Ibid., 135.

  34. On the Buddha’s visions in his “meditative trance” on the night of his “Awakening,” see Gananath Obyeyeskere, Imagining Karma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 158. For the words of the Brahman, see Ariyapariyesand Sutta 19-21, in The Middle Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya, trans. Bikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), 261.

  35. This is the well-known “Birth Story of the Dumb Cripple” (Mugapakkha jataka, Ja.6.lff., no. 538) as recounted and partly translated in Steven Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the PaliImaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 425-433. For a complete translation, see “The Story of Temiya, the Dumb Cripple,” in The jatakas: Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta, trans. Sarah Shaw (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), 179-221.

  36. Collins, Nirvana, 426.

  37. Ibid., 430.

  38. Ibid., 233-234.

  39. Ib
id., 417. The quote is from Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53. It is worth noting that the “gentle violence” of which Brown speaks was inflicted by an empire that had become “Christian,” just as “Buddhist” empires would do the same.

  40. I know that there are those who don’t consider meditation to be ritual and that the Buddha dismissed Vedic ritual as unhelpful. But in my terms, even private meditation, and surely communal meditation, is ritual. Anyone who has ever been in a Zendo would see that.

  41. See Burghardt, Genesis ofAnimal Play, 393, on war as “the ultimate form of play” for many of the world’s leaders.

  42. Kant, Power ofJudgment, sec. 43, 183.

  43. Hans Joas, The Creativity ofAction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 164- 167, citing Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

  44. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

  45. Joas, The Creativity ofAction, 155.

  46. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934), in John Dewey: The Late Works, 1925-1953, vol. 10 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 283.

  47. Ibid., 284.

  48. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), chap. 7.

  49. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997).

  50. Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning ofLife (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 129.

  51. Gopnik notes that flow is something unique to adults, whereas lantern consciousness is fundamental for babies but attainable under certain circumstances by adults. She gives the example of “open awareness” meditation by Zen monks who consciously seek to prevent spotlight consciousness so that they can be open to the whole undifferentiated world. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 127-128. Interestingly Pierre Hadot has described similar practices among ancient Greek philosophers who tried to focus on the present moment alone, without any concern for past or future. The practice was common to Stoics and Epicureans, who otherwise differed on almost everything. He notes that for these thinkers, “The instant is our only point of contact with reality, yet it offers us the whole of reality,” and he quotes Seneca describing that instant by saying, “For Seneca, the sage plunges himself into the whole of the universe (toti se inserens mundo).” Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 229-230.