by Peter Watson
Sir William Jones’ association of Sandrokottos with Chandragupta was one flash of insight. Another was the brainchild of James Prinsep, the assay-master at the British mint in Calcutta, who in 1837 made what John Keay calls ‘the single most important discovery in the unravelling of India’s ancient history’.78 Prinsep was familiar with a massive Buddhist stupa (or monument) at Sanchi, near Bhopal, in central India, which was covered with writing in an unknown script. This script was also reported from other parts of India. It was found on rocky outcrops, on cliffs, and on massive pillars, and many of the inscriptions seemed to say the same thing. Prinsep eventually identified the language as Pali, one of the derivatives of Sanskrit which, significantly, was popular in the Buddha’s time. In fact, as Prinsep guessed (because so many of the inscriptions were similar), it was the sacred language of Buddhist scripture. In a sense Prinsep was only half right. Pali was the sacred script of Buddhism but the inscriptions were not only religious tracts; they included also ‘hard statements of policy…the directives of a single sovereign.’79 They became known in India as the Edicts after being attributed to a certain Devanampiya Piyadassi. The first term means ‘Beloved of the Gods’ and though Prinsep had at first no idea who this figure was, it soon became clear that he was Ashoka, the third Maurya, the grandson of Chandragupta, and the greatest of Indian emperors, who was elevated c. 268 BC and ruled for forty years. Ashoka championed Buddhism in India and sent his son to introduce the system in Sri Lanka, where there were many records of his achievements among the Buddhist literature there.80
The Edicts–divided now into the fourteen Major Rock Edicts, the eight Minor Rock Edicts and Inscriptions, and the seven Major Pillar Edicts–describe Ashoka’s accomplishments. The ‘big idea’ in the Edicts is Ashoka’s concept of dhamma, equated with ‘mercy, charity, truthfulness and purity’, the renunciation of violence, piety, duty, decency and ‘right conduct’.81 The innovations of Ashoka cannot be fully understood other than against the background of the main classic text of the time, the Arthasastra, written by the ‘steely Brahmin’, Kautilya.82 Chief minister to Chandragupta, Kautilya’s treatise was a comprehensive compendium of statecraft–how the state should be administered, how taxes should be levied and collected, how foreign relations, and war, should be conducted. It has been described as an almost paranoiac document, with sections on how to detect dissent, how the state should intervene in almost all activities and with bloodthirsty suggestions for ruthless law enforcement. On the other hand, it has also been described as laying the ground for the world’s first secular welfare state.83 Recent textual analysis by computer has shown that it was in fact written by several hands but it still remains ‘a guide not only for the acquisition of this world but of the next’.84 In the Arthasastra, the author(s) say(s) that it is the sacred duty of a king to conquer neighbouring states. The ideology of dhamma, in contrast, was an attempt by Ashoka to go beyond this. He had conquered many states and his empire was enormous. Dhamma, therefore, was an attempt to unify his empire: common laws were introduced, common taxes and, where possible, standardisation–of measurements, punishments, and so on. It was an admirable aim, well justified by the comment of John Keay that this could be regarded as India’s ‘classical’ age, with Chandragupta as Julius Caesar and Ashoka as Augustus.
But learning too was encouraged by Ashoka and other Maurya rulers. Originally, the main debates had been between the Brahmans and the monastic sects–Buddhists and Jains. Not much written material has survived from that time but it is known that when the Buddha was alive there were two centres of learning or, as we would say, universities. These were at Kasi and Taxila but they were overshadowed later, in the early part of the fourth century BC, by the institution at Nalanda, in Bihar, which has been called the Oxford of Buddhist India.85 It consisted of a cluster of courtyards and buildings and many large-scale sculptures of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas. Brahmanical universities did not appear until much later, around the time of Christ, at Kasi (as Varanasi was then known). The foundation of the curriculum was grammar, politics and caste law, with medicine, fine arts, logic and philosophy introduced later.86 It was the custom for the students to nail their theses to the doors of the lecture halls. The public would gather, read the theses, and then hear the students defend their arguments in the hall.
The rise of the universities encouraged the spread of literacy and of learning, including(1) the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, (2) the Upanishads, short religious poems for memorising, (3) sutras, brief philosophical guides, in prose, for learning, (4) sastras, didactic verses presenting philosophical and legal principles, (5) dramas, (6) animal tales, and (7) the Puranas, the scriptures of later Hinduism.87
The Mahabharata, which means the Great Bharata, had its origin in Vedic times. Legend has it that this epic work existed in several forms in antiquity, variously of 24,000 and 100,000 verses. The version we have, however, was produced probably as late as c. 100 BC. Its theme is a fratricidal war of succession.88 The story opens with Pandu being consecrated as emperor in the Bharata dynasty. He becomes emperor because his elder brother, Dhrtarastra, who should be emperor by rights, is blind and therefore legally disqualified. However, Pandu dies before his brother, who seizes power while claiming to act as regent for Pandu’s son, Yudhisthira. Yudhisthira had been named as crown prince, given part of the kingdom to rule, and formed a marital alliance with Krsna (Khrishna), leader of another dynasty. This provokes jealousy in Duryodhana, Dhrtarastra’s son, who challenges Yudhisthira to a gambling duel, where he knows the odds have been fixed. In the duel, Yudhisthira loses everything, and is consigned to exile. After twelve years, Yudhisthira sends Krsna as envoy to negotiate the restoration of his kingdom. But Duryodhana will not give up even the smallest part and a great battle becomes inevitable. This takes eighteen days but, with the aid of Krsna, who engages in various acts of deceit, the Pandavas regain their kingdom and destroy their enemies. In the main the Mahabharata is seen as criticising the effects on man’s nature of too much worldly ambition. In a sense this is both Buddhist and Greek.89 Even today in India, TV adaptations of the story bring the country to a standstill.
The Ramayana, traditionally held to have been composed by Valmiki (fl. c. 200 BC), was the first narrative poem in Sanskrit. Metrically, it is later than the Mahabharata, lacking the archaic rhythms of the earlier epic and it has less material added in later ages. Here too we have a story of palace intrigue. Rama is excluded from the succession to his father’s throne, and sentenced to twelve years’ exile, in the south. There, he finds the land constantly raided by demons from Lanka (Ceylon) and even his own wife is abducted. In retaliation, he raises an army, invades Lanka, rescues his wife, and kills Ravana, the demon king. When he returns home the period of exile has lapsed and his brother magnanimously surrenders the kingdom. The Ramayana is a more generous story than the Mahabharata. Later translated out of Sanskrit into the vernacular languages of India, it became the nation’s favourite poem and Rama its most popular hero. Episodes from the narrative were widely used in sculpture and the other arts.90
The five hundred years between the displacement of the Mauryas and the emergence of the Guptas (in AD 320), straddling the year 0, were once regarded as India’s ‘dark age’.91 This view can no longer be justified. It was a time of great cities, of Pataliputra and Kasi, of Mathura and Ujjain, often built to a common plan, four-square, with a gate at the centre of each wall, surrounded by a moat. It was, above all, a great era of sculpture and rock-cut temples, for which India would become justly famous. The great sculptural reliefs of Bharhut, Sanchi and Amaravati all date from this period, commissioned not by emperors but by the newly-successful merchant class. Principally found in western India, in the hinterland behind Mumbai (Bombay), where the folds in the edges of the Deccan plateau create hundreds of natural caves, many of these monuments are more than temples–there are entire monasteries, with meditation cells, pillared halls, and elaborate connecting staircases, all carve
d out of the natural rock. Besides the rock-temples, two forms of sculpture emerged at this time. One, in the north, in the Punjab and Afghanistan, was very much influenced by Greek ideas, showing Buddhas and other figures with the attributes of Apollo and other Greek gods (this is now known as the Gandharan school). The second developed around the city of Mathura, using the distinctive pink sandstone of the area, showing mainly voluptuous female figures that may have been associated with various cults.92 Indian sculpture–Indian carving–is much less well known than classical Greek carving of the same period, but it deserves similar acclamation.
The time straddling the year 0 in India was equally notable for its literature. In the second century BC, Patanjali, a Sanskrit grammarian, compiled the standard text on yoga. Yoga is defined as a cessation of mental states.93 The yogin learns to position him- or herself in a particular position (asana) and to steadily arrest the processes of breathing. At the same time he or she increasingly focuses on his or her own mental state, the aim being to ‘deconstruct the fabric of the mind’, learning a ‘transcendental loneliness’ (kaivahya), which brings with it ethical purity or a new wisdom. The greatest religious work was the Bhagavad Gita, a work of post-Maurya India. The Bhagavad builds on the Upanishads in a mixture of social administration and philosophy. It accepts the four castes and the four types of duties attached to them. For the brahmana, the duties are sacrifice and study; for the kshatriya, it is fighting and protection of the subjects; for the vaisya it is economic welfare, trade and agriculture; and for the sudra it is service and the menial jobs. Philosophically, the aim is to free oneself from all of the ‘impurities of passion’–greed, antipathy, self-love. But even the seer or sage, the wise man, must pursue his public duties, as an example to others who may not possess his advantages.94 However high a man may soar, in a philosophical sense, he is still bound by his social ties here on earth. The highest wisdom cannot be divorced from the world in which we live: it has to co-exist alongside. The Bhagavad Gita is scarcely less conservative than the Analects of Confucius.
The Buddhist equivalent of the Gita is The Lotus of the Good Law, Saddharmapundarika (see below, page 195). In some ways this was even more influential because, as we shall see, Buddhism was much more of a missionary religion than Hinduism. The Lotus provided China and Japan with new ideas about God and man and is found today on every Buddhist altar in Japan. In the second century AD, the Kamasutra of Vatsyana, the Manusmriti (‘Manu’s code’ of law) and Kautilya’s Arthasastra all found their final form.95
Probably the most significant long-term intellectual trend at this time in the East was the move of Buddhism out of the subcontinent, to China, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and so on, and of Hindu-Buddhist diffusion into Java, Malaysia and elsewhere. According to tradition, Buddhism entered China during the reign of Ming-ti (AD 58–75), but actually it was the main religion in the various states of Tokharestan long before this and it was from there, in 2 BC, that the Chinese ambassador, Tsing Kiang, received Buddhist texts as gifts to take back to the Chinese court.96
An official Chinese history, The Record of the Later Han, tells us that, by the first century AD, Buddhism had reached the Chinese capital. Liu Yang, a half-brother of the emperor, had received permission to practise Buddhism, which he did alongside worship of Laotzu. After the emperor had had a vision ‘of a golden man with sunlight passing from the back of his neck, who flew about in time and space’, envoys were sent to India to inquire after Buddhism and returned with monks, a number of sacred texts and many works of art. There are several accounts of journeys made into India, with drawings, written by Chinese pilgrims in the first century AD. For example, Wang Huan-ce travelled to India several times and made a copy of the Buddha image at Bodhgaya, the location where he achieved supreme enlightenment, which was then brought back to the Imperial Palace and served as the prototype for the Kongai-see temple. This early Buddhist art, imported from India, served only to stimulate a Chinese art of even greater beauty. By the middle of the first century, Buddhism was established north of the river Huai (half-way between modern Canton and Beijing), in eastern Honan and southern Shantung.97
The reasons why Buddhism caught on so quickly in China have to do with the nature of life and thought among the Han Chinese, who ruled from 206 BC to AD 222, neatly straddling the year 0. The earliest settlements in China appeared around 3500 BC, with writing dating from the Shang period (c. 1600 BC). The origin of the Chinese script is a matter of lively debate. One theory, about the birth of numbers, is that–as in the Americas–characters began with knots in string, large knots for important memories, small knots for more trivial things. Figure 9, for example, shows the way string knots may have given birth to the Chinese characters for number.
Figure 9: Chinese ‘knot’ numerals
[Source: Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000, page 374]
Another theory is that rock art gave rise to some of the characters (for men, women, snakes, feet, mountains), and a third is that pottery marks, pictographs, which were used to indicate superstitious rites regarding the production and protection of pottery, also developed into Chinese characters. Finally, there are the oracle-bone inscriptions which also seem to prefigure the characters for, among others, the sun, the eye, and so on. It may well be, then, that Chinese characters had several origins. Their general shape, long and narrow from top to bottom, with the characters for animals having their heads at the top and their tails at the bottom, suggest they were originally written on bamboo stems, which have perished. The fact that the first known users were the diviners and scribes of the Shang kings suggests that writing proper in China did not emerge before 1600 BC and that its origin was religious/political rather than economic as in Mesopotamia.
From the earliest times the calendar was taken very seriously, with the Almanac Maker being a prestigious post in the imperial court. Excavations made between the two World Wars at Anyang, near the Yellow river, have uncovered many of the so-called oracle bones, usually the shoulder blades of oxen, or the under-shells of turtles. These produced cracks when heated, which were interpreted as part of the diviner’s art. Some of them also concern payment of tribute and so contain information on the calendar. They show that originally the Chinese divided the day and night into one hundred equal units (baike) and that they were aware of the 365¼ year and a lunation of 29½ days (there were originally four words for ‘year’ in Chinese). There were no eras, as such, in China, but time was understood to consist of a series of cycles. There was a ten-day cycle, with the days known as ‘ten heavenly stems’, and a twelve-day cycle, of the ‘twelve earthly branches’. Together, these produced a sixty-day ganzhi cycle (the lowest common multiple), which by tradition was begun in a year corresponding to 2637 BC. But other cycles were known: the chi, of 31,920 years, the ‘grand conjunctions’, when all the planets came together after a cycle of 138,240 years, and a ‘world cycle’ of 23,639,040 years, the beginning of which was referred to as the ‘supreme ultimate grand origin’.98 Already, then, the Chinese had a very different idea of ‘deep’ time from anyone else. The Chinese also had a concept of approximate numbers (yueshu), so that, for example, wulu wushi means ‘about 50’. The numbers 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 were used to indicate orders of magnitude and were known as xushu, hyperbolic numbers, similar to the English ‘dozens’ or ‘hundreds’. The numbers 3, 9 and 12 were used respectively to mean ‘several’, ‘many’, and ‘a lot’, and some numbers were auspicious, associated with authority, power and longevity–thus all the doors in the Forbidden City have nine rows of nine nails. Alteration-proof characters were given to numbers to prevent falsification.
In 163 BC a new system, nianhao (reign-year title), was introduced and thereafter every emperor proclaimed a new nianhao at the beginning of the year following his accession. In 104 BC a new calendar was introduced, with twelve lunations and a thirteenth intercalated month, very similar to the Indian system and, indeed, t
o the zodiac. The seven-day week, however, was not adopted in China until the thirteenth century AD; before then the year was divided into twenty-four fortnightly periods beginning with Li Zhun (‘spring begins’) in February and ending with Da Han (‘severe cold’) in January. In China until Song times a ‘meal drum’ was sounded five times a day, signalling the three main meal times, the evening curfew and the morning lifting of the curfew. (This curfew was strictly enforced in every kingdom and especially in towns, where its aim was to prevent fire as much as crime.)99
By the time Buddhism arrived in China the Han dynasty was in decline and with it the philosophical system that had dominated there for so long. The underlying principle of traditional Chinese thought was to imagine a cosmological order to the universe, which was mirrored on earth by the ordered centralisation around the emperor. This idea of order governed everything from commerce to government to philosophy to religion. Trade in the great cities could be carried out only in government markets, where officials set the prices and the level of taxes. The government built and maintained the main roads, and charged for their use. The government also operated a monopoly over iron, metal money and salt (a daily requirement for a grain diet). In this way order was centrally generated and maintained.
