by Peter Watson
This then was the background out of which Siddhartha Gautama–the Buddha–appeared. His life is nowhere near as well documented as the Israelite prophets, say, or that of Jesus. Narrative biographies have been written, but the earliest dates from the third century AD, and though they were based on an earlier account, written down around a hundred years after his death in 483 BC, that text has been lost, and we can have little idea of the accuracy of the extant biographies. But it would appear that Gautama was about twenty-nine when, c. 538 BC, he suddenly left his wife, child and very well-to-do family and embarked on his search for enlightenment. It is said that he sneaked upstairs for one last look at his sleeping wife and son, but then left without saying goodbye. Part of him at least was not sorry to go: he had nicknamed the little boy Rahula, which means ‘fetter’, and the baby certainly symbolised the fact that Gautama felt shackled to a way of life he found abhorrent. He had a yearning for what he saw as a cleaner, more spiritual life, and so he did what many holy men did in India at the time: he turned his back on his family and possessions, put on the yellow robe of an itinerant, and lived by begging, which was an accepted form of life in India at the time.
For six years he listened to what other sages had to say, but it was not until he put himself into a trance one night that his world was changed. ‘The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced…There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One.’117 Buddha ‘believed’ in the gods that were familiar to him. But he shared with the Israelite prophets the idea that the ultimate reality lay beyond these gods. From his experience of them, or his understanding of them, according to Hinduism, they too were caught up in the vicissitudes of pain and change, in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Instead, Gautama believed that all life was dukkha–suffering, flux–and that dharma, ‘the truth about right living’, brought one to nirvana, the ultimate reality, freedom from pain.118 Buddha’s insight was that, in fact, this state had nothing to do with the gods–it was ‘beyond them’. The state of nirvana was natural to humanity, if people only knew how to look. Gautama claimed not to have ‘invented’ his approach but to have ‘discovered’ it, and therefore other people could too, if they looked within themselves. As with the Israelites in the age of the prophets, the truth lay within. More specifically, the Buddha believed that man’s first step was to realise that something was wrong. In the pagan world this realisation had led to ideas of heaven and paradise, but Buddha’s idea was that we can gain release from dukkha on this earth by ‘living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately and by refraining from anything like drugs or intoxicants that cloud the mind.’119 The Buddha had no conception of heaven. He thought such questions were ‘inappropriate’. He thought that language was ill-equipped to deal with these ideas, that they could only be experienced.
But Buddhism, as we shall see, did develop notions of salvation very similar to Christianity (so similar that early missionaries thought that Buddhism was a counterfeit faith created by the devil). Buddhism developed a concept (and a word, parimucyeran) for being set free from life’s ills, and three names for saviour, Avalokitresvara, Tara and Amitabha, who all belonged to the same family.
The Greeks are generally known for their rationalism, but this tends to obscure the fact that Plato (427–346 BC), one of their greatest thinkers, was also a confirmed mystic. The main influences on him were Socrates, who had questioned the old myths and festivals of the traditional religion, and Pythagoras, who, as we have seen, had decided ideas about the soul, and who, in addition, may have been influenced by ideas from India, by way of Egypt and Persia.
Pythagoras believed that souls were fallen, defiled gods, now imprisoned in the body ‘as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth’.120 Pythagoras, and the Orphics, thought that the soul could only be liberated through ritual purification, but Plato went further. To him there was another level of reality, an unchanging realm of the divine, which was beyond the senses. He accepted that the soul was a fallen divinity but believed that it could be liberated and even regain its divine status through his own form of purification–reason. He thought that, in this higher unchanging plane, there were eternal realities–forms or ideas, as he put it–fuller, more permanent and more effective than anything we find on earth, and they could only be fully understood or apprehended in the mind. For Plato there was an ideal form which corresponded to every general idea we have–justice, say, or love. The most important of the forms were Beauty and Good. He didn’t dwell much on god, or the nature of god. The world of the forms was unchanging and static and these forms were not ‘out there’, as the traditional gods were, but could only be found within the self.121
His own ideas, outlined in The Symposium and elsewhere, were to show how love of a particular beautiful body, for example, could be ‘purified and transformed’ into an ecstatic contemplation (theoria) of ideal Beauty. Plato thought that the ideal forms were somehow hidden in the mind and that it was the task of thinking to discover and reveal these forms, that they could be recollected or apprehended if one considered them long enough. Human beings, remember, were fallen divinities (an idea resurrected by Christianity in the Middle Ages) and so the divine was within them in some way, if only it could be ‘touched’ by reason, reason understood as an intuitive grasp of the eternal realm within. Plato didn’t use the word nirvana but his pattern of belief is recognisably similar to that of the Buddha, leading men back within themselves. Like Zarathustra, for Plato the object of the spiritual life was concentration on abstract entities. Some have called this the birth of the very idea of abstraction.
The ideas of Aristotle (384–322 BC) were no less mystical, even though he was a much harder-headed scientist and natural philosopher (aspects of his thought which will be considered in the next chapter). He realised there was an emotional basis of religious belief, even though he thought of himself as a rationalist. This is why, for example, Greek theatre, in particular its tragedies, started life as part of religious festivals: theatrical tragedy was for Aristotle a form of purification (he called it katharsis) whereby the emotions of terror and pity were experienced and controlled. Whereas Plato had proposed a single divine realm, to which we have access via contemplation, Aristotle thought there was a hierarchy of realities, at the top of which was the Unmoved Mover–immortal, immobile, in essence pure thought though he was at one and the same time the thinker and the thought.122 He caused all the change and flux in the universe, all of which stemmed from a single source. Under this scheme, human beings were privileged, in that the human soul has the gift of intellect, a divine entity, which puts man above the animals and plants. The object of thought, for Aristotle, was immortality, a kind of salvation. As with Plato, thought was itself a form of purification but again theoria, contemplation, did not consist only of logical reasoning, but of ‘disciplined intuition resulting in an ecstatic self-transcendence’.123
Confucius (Kongfuzi, 551–479 BC) was by far the least mystical of all the prophets/religious teachers/moral philosophers to emerge in the Axial Age. He was deeply religious in a traditional sense, showing reverence toward heaven and an omnipresent spiritual world, but he was cool towards the supernatural and does not seem to have believed in either a personal god or the afterlife. The creed he developed was in reality an adaptation of traditional ideas and practices, and was very worldly, addressed to the problems of his own times. That said, there are uncanny parallels between the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, Plato and the Israelite prophets. They stem from a similarity in the wider social and political context.
Even by the time of Confucius’ birth, the Chinese were already an ancient people. From the middle of the second millennium BC, the Shang dynasty was firmly established and, according to excavations, appears to have comprised a supreme king, an
upper ruling class of related families, and a lower level of people tied to the land. It was a very violent society, characterised, according to one historian, by ‘sacrifice, warfare and hunting’. As with ancient Hindu ideas, sacrifice underlay all beliefs in early China. ‘Hunting provided sacrificial animals, warfare sacrificial captives.’124 Warfare was itself considered a religious activity and before battle there took place a ritual of divination, prayers and oaths.
In early China there were two kinds of deities–ancestors and sky gods. Everyone worshipped their ancestors, whose souls were believed to animate living humans. But the aristocracy also worshipped Shang Di, the supreme god who ruled from on high, together with the gods of the sun, moon, stars, rain and thunder. Shang Di was identified with the founder-ancestor of the race and all noble families traced their descent from him.125 The hallmark was eating meat. There were three forms of religious functionary: the shih, or priest-scribes, whose duty was to record and interpret significant events, which were regarded as omens for government; the chu, or ‘invokers’, scholars who composed the prayers used in the sacrificial ceremonies–they became ‘masters of ritual’, making sure that the correct form of sacrifice was preserved (just like the Brahmans in the Buddha’s India); the third group of religious figures were the experts in divination, the wu, whose duty was to communicate with the ancestor spirits, usually by way of the so-called ‘Dragon bones’.126 This practice–‘scapulimancy’–was not discovered until the end of the nineteenth century, but some 100,000 bones have now been collected. The wu would apply a hot metal point to the shoulder blades (scapulae) of a variety of animals, and interpret the resulting cracks as advice from the ancestors. The soul was represented on these bones either by kuei, a man with a large head, or a cicada, which became the accepted symbol of immortality and rebirth. Around the time of Confucius, the idea developed that everything there is, is the product of two eternal and alternating principles, yin and yang, and that within each person there are two souls, the yin-soul and the yang-soul, one deriving from heaven, the other from earth.127 The yin was identified with kuei, in other words the body; the yang was the life principle and the personality. The aim of Chinese philosophy was to reconcile the two.
Confucius was born near Shantung at a time of great warfare but also of great social change, and he was shaped by both processes. Cities were growing in size (up to 100,000 inhabitants, according to some sources), coinage had been introduced, and commercial progress was so marked that certain areas were already well known for particular products (silk and lacquer in Shantung, iron mining in Szechuan). Most particular to China was the class known as shih (inflected differently from the shih, priest-scribes, mentioned above): these were families of noble descent who had slipped down the social scale and become commoners. They were not merchants but scholars, educated but dispossessed of their former cachet. Confucius was of this class.
Bright enough to be educated at a school for the aristocracy, his first job was as a clerk in the state granaries. He was married at nineteen but little is known about his wife and family.128 He was greatly influenced by Zi Zhaan, the prime minister of Cheng, who died in 522 BC, when Confucius was twenty-nine. Zi Zhaan introduced the first law code in China, the text for which he ordered to be inscribed on bronzes and displayed publicly, so that all would know what rules they were expected to obey.129 A final influence on Confucius was the prevalent scepticism which the Chinese then felt towards religion. There had been so much war that no one any longer believed in the power of the gods to aid kings, with the result that many temples–historically the most prominent buildings in the cities–had been destroyed. The fact that prayer and sacrifice had failed so dismally created circumstances for a rise in rationalism, of which Confucius was the finest fruit.
He and his most important followers, Motzu (c. 480–390 BC) and Mengtzu (Mencius, 372–289 BC), were members of an important group of thinkers, the so-called ‘hundred schools’ (= a great many). Confucius’ learning gradually established him a reputation, and he was given a government job, along with several of his students. But he resigned, and journeyed on the road for ten years, after which he set up a school–the first in Chinese history–taking students from all classes of society, and where he could begin to broadcast his ideas more effectively. His main concern was an ethical life, facing the problem of how men can live together. This reflected China’s transition to an urban society. Like the Buddha, like Plato and like Aristotle, he looked beyond the gods, and taught that the answer to an ethical life lies within man himself, that universal order and harmony can only be achieved if people show a wider sense of community and obligation than their own and their family’s self-interest.130 He thought that scholarship and learning were the surest way to harmony and order and that the natural aristocrats in the sort of society he wanted were the sages.
There were three key elements in his thought. The first was tao, The Way. He never defined this too closely–like Plato he believed that intuition served a role here. But the Chinese character tao originally meant a path or a road, the way to a destination. Confucius meant to emphasise that there is a path which one ought to follow in life, to produce wisdom, harmony and ‘right conduct’. He implied that we intuitively know what this is, but often, for narrow, selfish reasons, pretend we don’t. The second concept was jen. This is a form of goodness (again, echoes of Plato’s ideal forms), the highest perfection normally only achieved by mythical heroes. Confucius believed that an individual’s nature was pre-ordained by heaven (a word he used widely in place of an anthropomorphised god) but, importantly, he thought that man can work on his nature, to improve himself: he can cultivate morality, hard work, love towards others, the continued efforttobegood.131 One should be (as the Buddha also said) gentle, polite, considerate always, in conformity with li, the mores of polite society. This inner harmony of mind, he thought, could be helped by the study of music. The third concept was I, righteousness or justice. Again, Confucius was wary of defining this idea too closely, but he affirmed that men can learn to recognise justice from everyday experience (as Plato said we can learn to recognise Beauty and Goodness), and that this should always be their guide.
The Taoist religion is in many ways the opposite of Confucianism, though it still shares many similarities with Aristotle and the Buddha. Some believe that the founder of Taoism, Laotzu, was an older contemporary of Confucius. Others contend that he never existed: the words lao tzu mean ‘old man’ and, say the doubters, the Lao tzu, the book–the most-frequently translated work in Chinese–is an anthology compiled by various authors. Whatever the truth of this, whereas Confucianism seeks to perfect men and women within the world, Taoism is a turning away from the world, its aim being to transcend the (limited) conditions of human existence in an effort to attain immortality, salvation, the perpetual union of several different soul-elements. Underlying Taoism is a search for freedom–from the world, from the body, from the mind, from nature. It fostered the so-called ‘mystical arts’: alchemy, yoga, drugs and even levitation. Its main concern is tao, the way, though that name is not really applicable because language is not adequate for such a purpose (as with nirvana in Buddhism). The tao is conceived of as responsible both for the creation of the universe and its continued support (as with the primal sacrifice in the Vedas). The way can only be apprehended by intuition. Submission is preferable to action, ignorance to knowledge. Tao is the sum of all things that change, and this ceaseless flux of life is its unifying idea. Taoism stands against the very idea of civilisation; its view of God, as the Greeks said, was that he was essentially unknowable, ‘except by the via negativa, by what he is not’.132 To think one can improve on nature is a profanity. Desire is hell.133 God cannot be understood, only experienced. ‘The aim is to be like a drop of water in the ocean, complete and at one with the larger significant entity.’ Laotzu speaks of sages who have attained immortality and, like the Greeks, inhabit the Isles of the Blessed. Later, these ideas were ridiculed by Zhuangt
zu, a great rationalist.134
In all cases, then, we have, centring on the sixth century BC, but extending 150 years either side, a turning away from a pantheon of many traditional ‘little’ gods, and a great turning inward, the emphasis put on man himself, his own psychology, his moral sense or conscience, his intuition and his individuality. Now that large cities were a fact of life, men and women were more concerned with living together in close proximity, and realised that the traditional gods of an agricultural world had not proved adequate to this task. Not only was this a major divorce from what had gone before, separating late antiquity from ‘deep’ antiquity, it also marked the first split that would, in centuries to come, divide the West from the East. In all the new ethical systems of the Axial Age, the Israelite solution stands out. They, as we shall see, developed the idea of one true God, and that history has a direction, whereas with the Greeks and in particular with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, the gods stood in a different relation to humans as compared with the West. In the East the divine and the human came much closer together, the Eastern religions being commonly more inclined to mysticism than Western ones are. In the West, more than the East, the yearning to become divine is sacrilege.
