by Harvey Kraft
But, there was also a parting of the ways. The Sumerian “House of Dust,” the barren netherworld, had been replaced by the Vedic creation of Naraka, the dark and deep painful Hells inhabited by violent demons. The mythic Assura demons and the Naraka hells had emerged from painful Arya tribal engagements with Assyrian military (1900–600 BCE).
The Vedic hymns pitted the good-natured, luminous Devas against the Assura demons in an ongoing cosmic battle between chaos and harmony. The Assyrian pantheon of gods, the “Assuras,” was inherited from the Akkadians. It was a variation of the Annunaki, the Assembly of the Gods. But the Arya reframed the “Assuras” as demons, thus invoking the mythic story of the rebellious Titan gods banished to the Underworld. The Vedic cosmology linked the Assuras to the corrupt Akkadian clergy, the fallen Annunaki, and Assyrian brutality. Zoroaster reversed these Vedic polarities when he resurrected the Assura as the good gods and transformed the good Deva into demonic Daeva.
SKEPTICISM
Aryan seers gathered around bonfires for ecstatic rituals. To induce trance travel they chanted the sacred Vedic hymns, drank the hallucinatory “Elixir of Immortality,”109 and sacrificed some of it into the blaze. Worshipping the deity Agni, God of Fire, they called on him to inspire rapture. As they consumed the drink, they praised the moon for providing Soma’s trance-inducing euphoria. The God Indra joined them in consuming the Soma to increase his immortal power. Appearing before them in a vision, he conferred upon the mortal celebrants a temporary state of immortality, allowing them to feel like gods and visit the glorious Devas at their palaces along the Cosmic Mountain.
Once the Arya-led tribes began to settle in the Gandhara region of the Indus, their sages produced the Rig Veda. Slowly transformed from nomads to permanent residents, and under the influences of an indigenous population, they began to spread east into India (1000 BCE) along the Ganges River. Their penchant for exploration continued on a cosmic level as well as a new organized religion emerged from their midst.
As cities and kingdoms quickly sprouted the society needed leadership and organization. A new religion, Brahmanism, and its sage clergy the Brahmins, initiated a dramatic idea—the organization of society based on spiritual progress.
In commentaries on the Vedas called the Brahmanas (900–700 BCE), which included the Upanisads (Skt. “Sacred Name”), they introduced the first concrete, albeit rudimentary conceptualization of reincarnation. The ultimate goal of the Upanisads was the emancipation of the mortal soul (Skt. Ahtman) from the cycle of desire and birth. Through meditations, rituals, and study the Brahmins aspired to “penetrate” the “undetectable” divine self, the spirit and absolute identity of the immortal Supreme Being. This self was the Eternal Soul of the Creator that existed independently of God (Brahma). When a mortal soul merged with the immortal self (Brahman) the cycle of birth was annihilated, and the soul was liberated to be reborn in Brahma’s City of the Gods in Heaven atop the Cosmic Mountain (Skt. Mem).
When all desires which once entered his heart are undone, then does the mortal become immortal, thus he obtains Brahman.110
But the cosmological reformation of the Upanisads ruled that access to the practices and training for merger with God’s self belonged exclusively to highly evolved spiritual beings, defined as males born into a Brahmin caste family. The scripture introduced the concept that one’s birthright determined whether one could qualify to break the cycle of rebirth and graduate to the immortal realm. It dictated that familial circumstances at one’s birth divulged a divine ranking system based on an individual’s spiritual development.
While convincing the general population that they, their spiritual leaders, held a superior station in relation to the divine, they organized the social hierarchy into four tiers (Skt. varnas). This caste system divided society into bloodlines and added rules forbidding class intermarriage.
The Laws of Manu111 echoed the Brahmin view that hierarchical spiritual advancement would be achieved through a journey of many reincarnations. It distinguished one’s spiritual evolution by birth. Bloodline determined that at birth the members of the Brahmin caste were the most spiritually evolved, ahead of all others.
The highest caste would be those most advanced in spiritual progress (Brahmins); followed next by royals, nobles, and warriors (Kshatriyas); then merchants, artisans, and farmers (Vaishyas); then laborers and servants (Shudras); and, at the bottom, an underclass (Chandala), inclusive of hunters, butchers, or handlers of corpses, either of animal meat or human remains, considered untouchable for their sins against life.
Two hundred years passed as Brahmanism took root. Its clerics came to dominate the Arya societies from the Indus Valley to the Ganges River. The Brahmins became the elite caste in every kingdom, and religious scholars or key advisors to the other casts of nobles, military, and farming and business leaders.
The Brahmins upgraded the Vedic cosmology with four new key features: (a) the cyclical afterlife mechanism of reincarnation; (b) the introduction of Brahma,112 the invisible and absolute Creator; (c) the conceptualization of the Brahman, the Eternal Self; and (d) the organization of a social caste system based on reincarnation as a process of spiritual evolution.
As the caste-conscious civilization became increasingly prosperous, the prescription for Brahmanic ascension fueled a challenge from within. Some members of lower castes wanted to liberate their souls from earthly attachments, but had no opportunity to follow such a course.
The ascetic movement (Skt. Sramana), free of caste rules, attracted young people from noble, royal, and other classes. They entered the forests in search of religious teachers willing to train them in visionary skills and help them advance their spiritual awareness.
Doubtful that birth was the only arbiter of religious advancement, these new Skeptics instead adopted the ascetic view that only the purification of the mortal soul would liberate it from repeated birth. The ascetic Skeptics exhibited fundamentalist fervor for rejection of society. They claimed that institutional Brahmanism had lost its way and had become spoiled. The forest teachers of asceticism concluded that the Brahmins had turned the inspired pursuit of spiritual liberty into a controlled regimen that precluded its attainment. They accused religious clerics of hypocricsy as they rejected the sin of attachment to base desires but were guilty of the sin of attachment to spiritual egoism.
Another stream of the Skeptic teachings were the “back to nature” philosophers who espoused liberation from all religious rules, cosmic theories, and the moral judgments of sin. They encouraged followers to enjoy all that life offered, as long as it did no harm.
Skepticism required total commitment either to ascetic practices or philosophical questioning, either a fervent devotion to the denial or embrace of physical needs, emotions, thoughts, and words. Teachers prescribed the need for constantly seeking Universal Truth through strict ascetic practice and cosmic inquiry while maintaining an uncompromising initiative towards the achievement of self-purification.
The overwhelming success of the Skeptics had a profound impact on many Brahmins. Among them a splinter group emerged willing to reject material wealth and social position. These Brahmins agreed with the Skeptics that worldly successes were the sins of the ego, not the accomplishments of spiritually evolved beings. The ascetic Brahmins instituted an important change to their caste. If a Brahmin male so chooses, he may live within society, get married, and raise children while studying the scriptures and praying. Thereafter, when his children were grown and responsibilities have been fulfilled, but no later than age forty, he may retire from secular duties, depart for the forest, and dedicate the rest of his life to ascetic purification.
Thus the Brahmins provided a second wave of ascetic practitioners generally a group older and more mature than the youth of the nobles and wealthy who had protested being locked out of spiritual advancement. Ironically, most ascetics were well-educated men from well-to-do families. Aroused by the Upanisads they all embarked on a spiritual quest for emancipati
on from mortal rebirth.
The protestations against traditional Brahmin orthodoxy produced a generation of anarchist mendicant-ascetics. Rejecting society and its desires and restrictions, they entered the forests determined to recite sacred incantations and to learn the discipline of yoga meditations113 and practice self-denial. Various bands of Skeptics formed around self-styled and charismatic teacher-philosophers espousing a range of paths and doctrines for dealing with the bindings of cyclical mortality.
Mahavira (599–527 BCE), the Skeptic philosopher and cosmologist of Jainism, equated non-violence (Skt. Ahimsa) with the purification of the soul. In his view, causing harm to any living thing stoked the engine of repeated reincarnation. Even the most inadvertent killing of a tiny insect would become a cosmic sin. While respecting all forms of Life as sacred hosts of the Eternal Soul, Jainism also sought to liberate the soul from its physical container. Mahavira devoted himself to physical denial, sitting nakedly on rocks under a hot sun to burn away sin, plucking the hairs from his body to be rid of sensitivity, and fasting for long periods by eating only wild grasses.
The Jaina link between spiritual Puritanism and self-inflicted physical punishment stemmed from a belief that the mortal world was a waste station in the spiritual body of the Universe. The earthly domain sat in the middle of the Cosmic-body, a level commensurate with the waistline of a human being, where the bowels of a man would be infested with foul organisms. But when the Eternal Soul was purified, the outer mortal shell of a living being became a sacred encasement for the immortal, sacred, and pure spiritual essence seeking to rise to the higher realm. For the purpose of cleansing the soul, Jainas were committed to pacifism, meditation, truth, chastity, and purity.
Jaina seers envisioned an eternal cosmology without beginning or end, containing infinite numbers of souls (Skt. Jiva) and an infinite number of inanimate objects (Skt. Ajiva), but absent a Supreme God. Believing that reincarnation was due to the self-polluting of one’s sacred self, they attributed its repetitive process of physical annihilation to a perpetual human cycle of sin and sorrow. The objective of the Jaina yogis was to break the cycle by “burning out” physical encumbrances and eliminating all earthly considerations. The successful achievement of soul purification would bestow upon one the title of Jina, one whose soul qualified to rise to Siddha, a transcendent state of divine consciousness. In the eternal afterlife a Jina’s purified soul lived in immortality as a shining, crystalline, pure, immortal spirit, no longer encumbered by the compulsion for repeated birth. In the Jaina’s version of the three-level Universe, the Siddha was the highest realm of Heaven where the liberated Siddha-souls floated in bliss above the cosmic summit.
THE ARRIVAL
Many of the Magi fleeing the purge in Babylon returned to their homelands or to parts unknown. Some migrated west to the Black Sea and Greece. There they joined others in furthering the mystic understanding of existence through Natural Philosophy, stargazing, and ascetic Orphism. Some headed east entering the forests to join the freedom-seeking ascetic Sramana.
Siddhartha Gautama also headed into the Indus. He and his Budii escort arrived in the forest among old friends.
Years earlier, as a young man he had studied in the Indus region to learn the skills of a seer. In the forests and mountains he had encountered experts providing training in meditation, asceticism, skepticism, hedonism, and nihilism. Some teachers managed to attract hundreds of followers while others guided only one or two disciples. The young Saka student avoided the larger groups.
Determined to excel, Prince Siddhartha Gautama enjoined the personal services of two masters of yoga meditation. His first teacher, Alara Kalama, offered silent and still meditation through which he reached a lofty and sacred stage of transcendence known as “the place where nothing existed.” Siddhartha’s second teacher, Uddaka Ramaputta, had attained an even higher state “where neither thought nor non-thought abided.” The dedicated young prodigy quickly learned to overcome the inherent conflict between mind and body that blocked one from realizing the higher realms of consciousness. In a relatively short time he had equaled the proficiency of these foremost masters of yoga meditation practices. Eventually excelling his teachers, he attained the pinnacle state of meditation, the transcendent “state of non-being,” where the identity of the individual self ceases to be. But here he made a shocking discovery. Even from this lofty super-conscious vantage he could neither solve the essence of existence nor the mystery of death.
Disappointed, he departed from his two meditation teachers and turned to the practice of austerities. Joining a group of five ascetics, Siddhartha subjected himself to severe self-denial far surpassing the endurance levels of his fellows. In the process, he managed to enhance his trance skills and this allowed him to gain control of his mind, suspend his breath, manipulate his body heat, attain visionary access to far-away destinations, and grasp the quintessence of occult powers. Nevertheless, again, his quest for supreme wisdom fell short. Despite his resolute engagement with Universal Truth he could not penetrate it. It all had led to a dead end.
In the Acts of the Buddha,114 the adoring mythic biography of the Buddha, the birth story of Siddhartha Gautama dramatized his future advent as the ultimate Lion-Sun sage to come. Born as the crown prince of the Sun Dynasty (Saka), the infant glowed like the sun.
Like the Sun bursting from a cloud in the morning—so he too, when he was born from his mother’s womb, made the world bright like gold, bursting forth with his rays which dispelled the darkness . . . With glory, fortitude, and beauty he shone like the young Sun descended upon the Earth; when he was gazed at, reflecting such surpassing brightness, he attracted all eyes like the Moon . . . With the radiant splendor of his limbs he exuded, like the Sun, the splendor of the celestial lamps; his aura, radiating the beautiful hue of precious gold, illuminated all the quarters of space.115
After years of diligent studies at the Magi Sanctuary in Babil his ravenous youthful appetite for breaking through the barriers of Universal Truth inspired his first departure for the forest.
Then with his eyes long and like a full-blown lotus, he looked back on the city, and uttered a sound like a lion, ‘Till I have seen the further shore of birth and death I will never again enter the city of Kapil (Babil).116
Burning with a fierce drive for divine knowledge he made the powerful spiritual roar of the Arya (Lion) shaman. He was determined not to return home until he achieved boundless wisdom, as the text reveals in Buddhacartita, Book 5:
His extreme practice of asceticism had left his body emaciated. He suffered from severe exhaustion. Entering a river to wash away the dirt that covered his body, so weak was he that he barely managed to hoist himself out of the water. He climbed out only with the assistance of “adoring branches” stretching out towards him from a tree limb on the bank. A kind-hearted young daughter of a local herdsman happened nearby and approached Siddhartha with an offering of rice porridge boiled in milk. She joyfully and with great respect implored him to partake from her white shell bowl. As he brought the food to his lips, he knew that receiving the food direcdy from a woman’s hands was forbidden to ascetics, but as he ate he regained his vitality and felt his senses restored to satisfaction.
Failing to accomplish his goal, Siddhartha learned that any effort to separate the spirit from the body was futile. With this understanding his sojourn in the forest had come to an end. But as he had vowed not to return to his Saka home, he made up his mind to head instead for Babylon. There he could continue his research into the Universal Truth. In Babylon, Siddhartha Gautama quickly built a reputation as the Sage of the Saka nation (aka Sakamuni), the wisest of all Scythians.
A philosophical treatise derived from his profound observations in the forest led to his becoming the Chief Magus. He espoused the concept that human beings can find a personal inner paradise by mentally entering the “Middle Path,” a state of equilibrium free from distractions. This perfect balance between the two extremes of physical and
spiritual pursuits opened to a psychological state of peacefulness and fulfillment. His insightful approach challenged people to pursue a greater level of personal awareness while remaining free of becoming immersed in either the material or the transcendent. Applying this teaching, he said, would lead to a society based on compassion for all human beings, and eliminate the ravages of selfishness or the compulsion for social status.
This doctrine gained Siddhartha Gautama admirers from India to Greece where it came to be known as the Principle of the Golden Mean.
As Chief Magus he led the effort to develop doctrines that would awaken people to work for the common good. As Lord Governor of Babylon (the Bhagapa), he applied compassion to ease people’s suffering and oppose oppression. As the King of Babylon he was the first philosopher-king espousing freedom and harmony.
But in the coup orchestrated by Darius I, he was called an occultist, demon-spirit, and imposter, and was tagged a “threat” to the Achae-menid Dynasty. It seemed that the greatest hopes of the interfaith Magi Order for unearthing the ultimate knowledge had collapsed. But, as Gautama was about to show, his abdication and decision to head back to the forest recharged his determination to complete this unfinished business—break through to the Truth of the Reality of All Existence and empower humanity with it.
A number of years had passed since Gautama’s youthful days in the Indus. Now as he reentered the forest, the World-Honored One was preceded by his worldwide reputation as the wise chief of the interfaith Magi and the King of Babylon who was supposedly killed in a coup. In spite of this news, everywhere the agents and spies of the Emperor Darius and the Prophet Zoroaster searched for a trace of Gautama. But they encountered only people who insisted they never saw or heard of him. Throughout the many kingdoms when the Persians marched in people would communicate in code: “Daevadatta, the Exorcist is coming!”117 As far as anyone needed to know, Gautama had gone deep into India to the far end of the Ganges beyond the reach of his pursuers.
