The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  We are used to our heroes in history being warriors or men of action, which usually means men of violence, for good or ill. That, after all, is what we teach our children at school. These are the makers of history. But here the hero sat under a tree and simply thought. During the course of the night he came up with an idea, a technique for self-knowledge. It was an idea so powerful that it would transform half the world and be spread not by war, violence and coercion, but by curiosity, dialogue and a thirst for knowledge.

  The key idea is deceptively simple. The human condition, by its very nature, entails suffering; suffering is caused by the human ego, by desire, clinging, attachment and greed. Humanity can find tranquillity only by removing attachments that are at the root of all human unhappiness, anxiety and aggression. The way to liberation is not through worship of a god (or anything else), but by becoming a fully autonomous and compassionate human being. Those, in a nutshell, are the noble truths, and the Buddha called the way to them the eightfold path – one of right conduct and truthfulness. To expound his system further would need far more space than this book allows, and more conversance with the subtleties of Buddhist thought than I possess. But to this definition one might add a further observation – that the implication of the Buddha’s logic is that even belief in god is itself a form of human desire and clinging, a product of the ego and another cause of suffering in that it prevents a person from becoming an autonomous and free human being. This was nothing less than a rebellion against history.

  THE PATHTOVULTURE PEAK

  About 35 miles from Gaya an austere, rocky brown range rises from the green wheatfields of northern Bihar. This is ancient countryside, with poor villages of domed huts, thatched haystacks and mud houses. In the fields, ribby cattle with long horns, lines of egrets along the irrigation dykes, and creaking wooden shadoofs at the wells. All these the Buddha must have witnessed, along with the feudal order of landlords and the impoverished peasantry. The road climbs into the hills and enters the perimeter of Rajgir through Cyclopean walls that snake over bare rugged crags for a staggering 48 miles. These huge, drystone defences with their square towers formed the outer protection of the city in the Buddha’s day. By the gate is a gaudily painted Kali shrine above a steep natural pool where women are washing bright cotton sheets and laying them on the rocks to dry.

  Rajgir at that time was the capital of the kingdom of Maghada, one of half a dozen increasingly prosperous kingdoms that spread down the Ganges plain, and to judge by the vast circuit of its defences it was a populous place. Today it’s a dusty little country town, with a clutch of hotels for the Japanese, Koreans and Burmese (not to mention Westerners) who come through on the Buddhist pilgrim trail. In the centre of town, by the tourist-bus stand and the chai stalls, is a bamboo grove. Local tradition says that this was gifted to the Buddha early on by his first important patron, the king of Maghada, and despite all the ups and downs of history, it has remained an atmospheric, overgrown piece of wilderness right in the centre of Rajgir. This was the Buddha’s refuge during his forty-five years of walking and teaching, crisscrossing the Ganges plain from one monsoon to the next.

  Down the main street you go through a car park on the outskirts, dotted with drink stalls and souvenir shops, to reach the beginning of the path up to Vulture Peak. It’s now a well-trodden pilgrim route, a sacred way, with bearers to carry the sick and old on palanquins. At the top is the cave where the Buddha stayed during the rainy seasons over many years, its entrance hung with prayer flags. You have to stoop to go in, but inside there is enough space to walk about. At the back of the cave there is a makeshift shrine with votive gifts and smoking incense sticks. From the terrace outside is a magnificent vista of the ring of hills within which Rajgir nestles. At dusk, when the sun has disappeared behind the hills and long streamers of prayer flags flap across a sky of ultramarine, Vulture Peak is a magical place. Shantam Seth, a Buddhist teacher, tells me: ‘The Buddha loved this place. Here you can see him as a man like us. On an evening like this you can feel his breath.’

  The story, as we have it, has all the magic of a fairy tale, which is what it became over the centuries as the myth grew. What we can recover in terms of real events comes from the traditions assembled after the Buddha’s death. These speak of wanderings, mainly confined to the Ganges plain, and of rainy season hideaways like Rajgir.

  So the Buddha walked and talked for forty-five years, speaking to princes and ordinary folk. In terms of eschatology, he seems never to have discarded the idea of reincarnation; in everything he said, he accepts the cycle of rebirths as a given. The goal is to escape it. His ideas were an assault on the beliefs of the Brahmins, and there were even attempts to kill him, but over time he won powerful supporters – merchants, land-owners, even rulers such as the king of Maghada. Towards the end he made his way up to Nepal, near his old homeland in the terai. His journey ended at Kushinagar, now a busy little country town on the main truck route to Gorakhpur.

  ‘This is a two-bit place, a nowhere town stuck in the jungle,’ said his disciples. ‘Can’t you hang on and die in a famous place?’

  ‘A small place is fitting,’ the Buddha replied.

  When British explorers came here in the eighteenth century, trying to find the lost landmarks of the Buddha’s life, the place had been long forgotten. The ruins were hidden, covered by tangled bushes. The stupa (the domed relic shrine) erected by the emperor Ashoka long ago, had been plundered by the locals for its bricks and was covered with trees. Clearing the jungle, excavators discovered the remains of conventual buildings, hostels and a small shrine. To their amazement, buried inside the ruined shrine there was an exquisite, larger than life statue of the Buddha reclining in the state of paranirvana – the moment of death. It was a 15-foot masterpiece of the Gupta age (fifth century BC) by a great artist called Dinna, several more of whose works have since been identified. The shrine has since been rebuilt and a tranquil garden laid out around it. There are few more atmospheric places than this chapel at sunrise, with the chanting of the Burmese monks, the candles and oil lamps casting their soft light, and the quiet fervour of the pilgrims tenderly wrapping the statue in golden silks as if it were the Buddha’s real body.

  We return to the main street with its chai houses, Internet cafés and phone booths. The poster stalls display their brightly coloured icons of modern India – big laminated images of the Buddha, Vishnu and Lakshmi, alongside ‘Pandit’ Nehru, the nationalist ‘Netaji’ Bhose and B.R. Ambedkar, hero of the lower castes. And, of course, there are the Bollywood stars: Aishwarya, the former Miss World, like a living goddess, perennial image of desire, devotion and auspiciousness.

  ‘Across the world there is huge interest in the Buddha today,’ I say to the abbot of the Burmese monastery who looks after the shrine. ‘Why do you think that is?’

  He smiles. ‘You see,’ he says, ‘the Buddha’s message is true.’

  NIRVANA: THE END AND NEW BEGINNINGS

  The cremation place lies just out of town, down by the river, close to a copse and a Hanuman temple. There’s a little cemetery and a cluster of thatched houses where women crush sugar cane on an old wheel press. The stupa, a great eroded red-brown dome of burnt bricks, is set in a verdant lawn behind a screen of ashok trees.

  The last scene of the Buddha’s life is idealized in all the later narratives and depictions as a cosmic event. In reality, he was old and had been violently ill with dysentery after eating pork (like most ancient Indians, the Buddha was not vegetarian). He knew he was about to die. None of his utterances was recorded at any point near his own time; when there was no writing. They were set down in Pali four centuries later. But there is an utterly convincing realism in the old man’s urgent, exasperated response as his disciples – devastated at the prospect of losing him – continue to ask for his guidance: ‘What about the sangam, the community?’ He had, after all, always told them that his teaching was only like a boat or a raft, to get across the river: ‘Once you get to the other
side, you don’t try to pick the boat up and carry on walking with it; you leave it by the water and push on.’

  His life ebbing away, he said: ‘What do you expect of me? I have taught the truth. I have held nothing back … You are the community now. Be a lamp to yourselves. Be your own refuge. Seek for no other.’ His final words were these: ‘All things must pass. Strive on. Don’t give up.’

  In hindsight, the Buddha was not setting out to found a new religion – indeed, one may well question whether that’s what Buddhism actually is. Certainly, it is not a religion in the way that the devotees of Christianity and Islam regard their beliefs. Nor was he claiming to be divine. He was adamant with his followers that they should not deify him. Indeed, Buddhism might have remained a local teaching, one of many in the Ganges plain that arose from the thinkers of the fifth century, many of whom knew each other, crossed paths and debated together. (Among these were the Jains, who still survive as an Indian phenomenon and have had a profound influence on Indian civilization.)

  Today we see the Buddha’s message as so compelling, and its worldwide influence as being so great, that its historical trajectory was inevitable, but Buddhism could have faded away like other Axis age cults, such as Ajivikism. We know his teachings were assembled soon after his death by his immediate followers, at a council held at Rajgir. But it was as much as 200 years later that the message began to go out to a wider world. At that time this regional sect was taken up as an official ideology by a powerful local dynasty that had turned itself into the first empire of India. So the next phase of the story is tied up with great historical events. And the catalyst, as so often in history, was war.

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND THE COMING OF THE GREEKS

  Back in 500 BC – perhaps during the Buddha’s lifetime – the Persian king Darius the Great invaded the Indus region and exacted tribute from its peoples. On his inscriptions the people of Gandhara (around Peshawar in Pakistan) are listed among his subject peoples, and on the walls of the great palace at Persepolis the ambassadors of ‘Hindush’ (the Indus valley) are shown paying tribute with (among other things) what look like bales of fine Indian textiles. The Persian attempt to go west ended with their decisive defeat by the Greeks in 480 BC. The Greeks, however, never forgot about the Persian desecration of their temples, and in 334 BC Alexander the Great invaded Asia in a war of conquest and belated retribution. Indian elephants and soldiers were among the terrified ranks in the dust storm at Arbela in October 331 BC, when Alexander overcame the great king’s army and destroyed the Persian monarchy. Four years later the Macedonians burst into the plains of India. In 327 BC the army crossed the Khyber Pass, bridged the Indus, and occupied the Indian city of Taxila in the Punjab. That May, as the monsoon rains fell, Alexander forced a crossing of the Jhehum river and won a savage battle against the local raja in the Punjab, whose name the Greeks report as Porus, perhaps one of the ancient Aryan clan of the Purus. Fragments in later Greek sources show the reactions of Alexander’s army to India – to its climate and monsoons, its flora and fauna. Greek botanists and philosophers offered the first observations on the country, even the connections between the languages (Greek is affiliated with the eastern Indo-European linguistic group, which includes Old Iranian and Sanskrit). It was the beginning of a long and fruitful interaction.

  Believing India to be a narrow peninsula whose eastern borders bounded the shore of the ‘Great Ocean’, Alexander moved east through the Punjab during the monsoon season of 327. He crossed the Chenab and Ravi rivers in early September, and stopped at the Beas river in the pleasant countryside outside Amritsar. This was a strategic tract of land, where battles have been fought since the days of the Rig-Veda right up to the Sikh wars against the British. What intelligence the Greeks had about the road ahead is unclear, and they seem to have known that there were powerful kingdoms down the Ganges, but after a debate among the leadership, the weary army turned back. They fought bitter battles and sieges along the rivers south of today’s Lahore, where the ancient cities around Harappa were sacked, but the Greeks suffered heavy losses, from fighting and sickness, and Alexander himself nearly died from his wounds. Eventually he made his exit from the Indus delta via the inhospitable wastes of the Makran desert. However the Greeks dressed it up, the Indian campaign ended in anticlimax. Despite his ambition to rule India and to see the ends of the Earth, Alexander never stepped on Indian soil again.

  THE FIRST INDIAN EMPIRE

  So Alexander came and saw, but India was not conquered. For all his glamour in Western history, Alexander is mentioned in no early Indian source. Nonetheless, the Greek– Indian contact would prove fantastically enriching. In culture and politics, particularly in the northwest, the synthesis would have a lasting impact. The world had opened up. His expedition, together with the political upheavals it set in motion between Iraq and the Indus, were to be the catalyst for the first great Indian empire. It was led by Chandragupta Maurya, one of the greatest leaders and organizers in Indian history. An adventurer from the land of Magadha, around Rajgir, the young Chandragupta – so the Greeks later reported – had met Alexander, and been inspired by his power, charisma and the glamour of his violence. The tale of his rise from nowhere, complete with divinely inspired omens, survives in Greek sources.

  Having been driven into exile by the Nanda king in Maghada, Chandragupta led a revolt to expel the Greek garrisons from the Punjab, and after a series of battles, he overthrew the king himself and seized power in Maghada. This bitter warfare left grim memories in the Buddhist tradition of ‘eighty corpse dances’, of gibbets and impalings. Chandragupta then extended his power over northern India from the Indus to the Ganges. The Greek king Seleucus Nicator, Alexander’s successor in the eastern Hellenistic empire, now moved against him with a great army, and fought in the Indus valley, but was unable to defeat him. By 302 BC Chandragupta found himself ruler of the first great Indian state – a state that can be fairly described as the first predecessor of today’s India.

  Wary, suspicious, masterful and surrounded by a personal guard of female warriors – Indian Amazons – Chandragupta understood the nature of power with a cool-eyed clarity, and ruthlessly deployed spies and assassins in a surveillance state. The chief surviving testimony to his rule is the famous Arthashastra. This is India’s first great text on statecraft, which tradition says was composed by his wily chief minister Kautilya, who masterminded Chandragupta’s triumph over the Nanda king. Although the text as we have it has many accretions (it proved useful to a number of later emperors), that tradition may well be true. Written long before Machiavelli, the book’s psychological insight into human nature and its weak points has impressed all who encounter it, and is even now used as a model by modern Indian business schools and military analysts.

  The central idea of the work is the artha (prosperity) of a kingdom – how to get it and how to keep it. Kautilya advocates the application of agents, surveillance and diplomacy beyond the frontiers to ensure the maintenance of power (‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ is one of the Arthashastra’s many memorable sayings). The state is not seen as a moral order, but purely as a system of power relations defined by the limits of what is practically feasible. At the centre is the king, whose natural enemies are his immediate neighbours; his enemies’ further neighbours are his natural friends. The ruler’s ability to hold power, says Kautilya, depends on the seven pillars of power. These were: the king’s personal quality and that of his ministers, the wealth of his provinces and of his chief city, his treasury, his army and, last but not least, the success of his diplomacy in the cultivation of allies. In all this Chandragupta proved as adept as any ruler in history.

  Around the year 300 BC Chandragupta cemented his power by diplomatic exchanges with Seleucus Nicator. This provided him with 300 war elephants (‘and certain powerful aphrodisiacs’!) in exchange for an agreement defining India’s ‘natural frontier’ – a goal sought after by all imperialists in India, right down to the British. India would no
w be bounded by the Hindu Kush, the Afghan mountains and the Baluchi desert. As part of the deal, he married a Greek princess, so his grandson Ashoka, perhaps the greatest ruler in Indian history, may have had Greek blood, and perhaps even spoke a little of the language.

  It was in the aftermath of these events that the first Westerners, so far as we know, reached the heart of India. In about 302 BC a Greek embassy, led by ambassador Megasthenes, visited the Ganges plain. Megasthenes wrote a book about his time in India, which is now lost, but it survives in fragments quoted by other writers. It is the first foreign description of India, and the first datable account of its social order, customs, caste system and kingship. Its anecdotes provide a fascinating window on the world of early India.

  After their long journey from Babylon, the Greeks made their way through the Khyber Pass and down the old highway across the Punjab from Taxila (the ancestor of the Grand Trunk Road). En route they passed Alexander’s altars on the Beas river, where a Greek source, Plutarch, says Chandragupta was later accustomed to do puja, a prayer ritual, in memory of the Macedonian king. Then they made their way by boat down the Jumna and the Ganges past the cities of Kausambi and Benares, no doubt remarking, as all later travellers would, on the fertility and beauty of the countryside. Surviving fragments of Megasthenes’ book give us a vivid sense of the Greeks’ open-mouthed entry into an alien world that Alexander had only ever encountered at its fringes, and then with violence. Sailing down the Ganges, they saw at first hand ‘the greatest river in India, worshipped by all Indians, which is all of a hundred stadia [11 miles] wide, sometimes so that one cannot see the far shore’.