It seems likely that the tribes of the gana-sanghas were not primarily of Aryan descent, but rather had their roots in the inhabitants of the Ganga valley who had been there before the warrior clans arrived. Intermarriage between the newcomers and the tribes (as illustrated by the alliance of the Pandava clan with the Pancala, back in the story of the Bharata War) had probably broken down any hard and fast racial divisions. But there is one strong proof that the gana-sanghas were, overwhelmingly, non-Aryan: they did not share the ritual practices so central to the lives of the Indians in the mahajanapada.
There were only two kinds of people in the gana-sanghas: the ruling families who claimed most of the land, and the hired servants and slaves who worked on it. The decisions (to go to war, to trade with another clan, to divert water from irrigation systems over particular fields) were made by the heads of the ruling families, and in these decisions, the laborers had no voice at all.5
The mahajanapada too had voiceless servants. They were a fourth kind of people: not ruling kshatriyas, or priestly brahmans, nor even common vaishyas who worked as farmers, potters, carpenters, and bricklayers. A late song of the Rig Veda, describing the mythical origin of each order, assigns pride of place to the brahman, who were born from the mouth of the huge, preexisting cosmic giant Purusha, whose death gave rise to the entire universe:
The brahman was his mouth,
his two arms became the kshatriya
his two thighs are the vaishya
and from his two feet the shudra was produced.6
The shudra were slaves and servants, the fourth and subordinate class of people. They were voiceless and powerless, unable to free themselves from servitude, allowed by law to be killed or exiled at any whim of their masters, barred from even hearing the sacred vedas read (the penalty was to have boiling lead poured into the offending ears).167 They were not part of the society of the mahajanapada; they were other, something else. Their origin is not clear, but perhaps the shudra were originally a conquered people.168 7
In such highly stratified societies, someone was bound to be discontent.
The first objections to all of this hierarchy came from the gana-sanghas. Around 599 BC, the reformer Nataputta Vardhamana was born into a gana-sangha in the northeast of the Ganga valley: a confederacy of tribes known as the Vrijji.8 His own particular tribe was the Jnatrika, and he was a prince and rich man, the son of a ruler.
According to his followers, his reforms began in 569, when he was thirty years old. At first he rejected the wealth and privilege of his birth, divested himself of all possessions except for a single garment, and spent twelve years in silence and meditation. At the end of this period, he had reached a vision of a life free from any priests: there were no brahmans in his universe. The goal of human existence was not to communicate with the gods through the agency of the priests. Nor was it to please gods by carrying out the duties to which one was born, as the Hindu scriptures taught.169 Rather, man should free himself from the chains of the material universe by rejecting the passions (greed, lust, appetite) that chain him to the material world.
Around 567, he began to walk barefoot through India, teaching five principles: ahisma, nonviolence against all living things (the first systematic explanation of why animals have rights); satya, truthfulness; asteya, refraining from theft of any kind; brahmacharya, the rejection of sexual pleasure; and aparigraha, detachment from all material things (a commitment which the Mahavira illustrated by doing away with his single garment and going naked instead). Followers gathered behind him, and as a great teacher, Nataputta Vardhamana became known as the “Mahavira” (the Great Hero).9
None of these were brand new ideas. Mainstream Hinduism also taught the freeing of the self from the material world in various ways. The Mahavira was less an innovator than a reformer of already existing practices. But his explanations of the need for extreme self-denial, and the obligation to respect all life, were compelling enough to gather a following. His doctrines became known as Jainism, his followers as Jains.170
A few years later, another innovator appeared from outside the mahajanapadas, also born into a gana-sangha. Like Nataputta Vardhamana, he was born to power and money. He too rejected the privileges of his life around the age of thirty and walked away into a self-imposed exile. He too came to the conclusion that freedom could only be found by those who were able to reject their passions and desires.
This innovator was Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Shakya clan, which lay north of the Mahavira’s native Vrijji alliance. According to the traditional tales of his enlightenment, he lived his earlier years surrounded by family and by comfort: he had a wife and a young daughter, and his father the king kept him in luxury within the walls of a huge palace, cut off from the lives of ordinary men.
But one day Siddhartha ordered his charioteer to take him for a drive in the park. There he saw an ancient man, “broken-toothed, gray-haired, crooked and bent of body, leaning on a staff, and trembling.” Shocked by this extreme old age, he returned to his palace: “Shame on birth,” he thought to himself, “since to everyone that is born, old age must come.” He pushed the thought away, but on his next journey to the park, he saw a man riddled with disease, and after that a corpse. This cast him into even greater trouble of mind.
But the crowning revelation happened at a party some time later. He was entertained by the dancing and singing of beautiful women, but as the evening wore on, they grew weary, sat down, and fell asleep. The prince, looking around the room,
perceived these women lying asleep, with their musical instruments scattered about them on the floor—some with their bodies wet with trickling phlegm and spittle; some grinding their teeth, and muttering and talking in their sleep; some with their mouths open; and some with their dress fallen apart so as plainly to disclose their loathsome nakedness. This great alteration in their appearance still further increased his aversion for sensual pleasures. To him that magnificent apartment…began to seem like a cemetery filled with dead bodies impaled and left to rot.10
It was in response to this that he set out on his own self-imposed exile. The year, according to tradition, was 534 BC.171
Siddhartha spent years wandering, trying to come to peace with the inevitability of decay and corruption. He tried meditation, but when his period of meditation was done, he was still faced with the reality of approaching suffering and death. He tried the Jain method of asceticism, starving himself to weaken his ties with the earth until, as a later text tells us, his “spine stood out like a corded rope,” his ribs like “the jutting rafters of an old roofless cowshed,” and his eyes were so sunken into their sockets that they seemed “like the gleam of water sunk in a deep well.”11 Yet this self-denial did not move him an inch beyond the common human condition.
Finally, he came to the answer that he had been searching for. It is not just desires that trap men and women, but existence itself, which is “bound up with impassioned appetite,” and which always desires: “thirst for sensual pleasures, thirst for existence, thirst for non-existence.”12 The only freedom from desire was a freedom from existence itself.
The realization of this truth was Siddhartha’s enlightenment, and from this point on he was known not as Siddhartha Gautama, but as a Buddha: an enlightened one who has achieved nirvana, the knowledge of a truth which is caused by nothing, dependent on nothing, and leads to nothing, a way of existence impossible to define in words.172
This was not merely a spiritual discovery, but (despite claims of detachment) a political position. It was both anti-brahman and anti-caste. The emphasis in brahmanical Hinduism on rebirth meant that most Indians faced a future of weary life after weary life after weary life, with no hope of leaving their strictly circumscribed lives except through rebirth, which might face them with yet another long lifetime of similar or worse suffering. It was an existence which, in Karen Armstrong’s phrase, did not so much promise the hope of rebirth as threaten with “the horror of redeath…[B]ad enough to ha
ve to endure the process of becoming senile or chronically sick and undergoing a frightening, painful death once, but to be forced to go through all this again and again seemed intolerable and utterly pointless.”13 In a world where death was no release, another kind of escape must be found.
Equally anti-brahman (and anti-kshatriya) was the Buddha’s teaching that each man must rely on himself, not on the power of a single strong leader who will solve all of his problems. Much later, a ninth-century Buddhist master coined the command “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!” in order to emphasize to his students just how important it was not to submit to a single authority figure—even one who claims a divine mandate, whether king or priest.14
Soon the Buddha too had his followers, disciples drawn from all castes.
While Mahavira and the Buddha preached the relinquishment of material possessions, the kings of the mahajanapadas were fighting to gain as much territory as possible. Kashi and Kosal, just north of the Ganga, and Magadha to the south were prime enemies in the wars for land. They fought over the Ganga valley, and were joined in this competition by the gana-sangha Vrijji, home confederacy of the Mahavira.
Kashi and Kosal traded off power with each other, neither keeping dominance for long. But Magadha, below the Ganges, grew steadily stronger. The king Bimbisara came to the throne of Magadha in 544 BC, and became the first Indian empire-builder, albeit in a minor way. As the Buddha was reaching enlightenment, Bimbisara was rallying his armies against the delta kingdom of Anga, which controlled the river’s access to the ocean (by way of the Bay of Bengal), and which contained the important city of Campa, the primary port from which ships sailed out for trade and down the coast to the south.15 He marched against it, conquered it, and kept it.
This was not a huge conquest. But Anga was the first of the sixteen kingdoms to be permanently absorbed into another, which was a portent of things to come. And military campaigns were not Bimbisara’s only victory. He treatied his way, by marriage, into control over part of Kosol, and by another marriage into friendship with the gana-sangha on his western border.16 He built roads all across his kingdom, so that he could easily travel around it and call its village leaders together into conference. These roads also made it possible for him to collect (and police) the payment of taxes. He welcomed the Buddha, who had wandered down from the north; any doctrine which reduced the power of the brahmans was bound to increase the power of the king. He was well on his way to making Magadha not a set of warrior clans that held uncomfortably together, but a little empire. India, so long on an entirely different path of development than the empires to the west, was drawing closer to them.
Chapter Sixty-Two
The Power of Duty and the Art of War
In China, between 551 and 475 BC,
a philosopher and a general try to make sense
of chaotic times
AS THE EASTERN ZHOU RULE BEGAN, a square of powerful states—Jin, Qi, Chu, Ch’in—surrounded the Zhou land. A fifth state was rising in power to join them: Yueh, on the southeast coast. Later histories call this the time of the Five Hegemonies, but in fact there were four more states that had swept enough smaller territories into their borders to tower as major powers: Lu and Wu, both with borders on the coast; Cheng, bordering the Zhou land; and the Sung on their eastern side.1
The Zhou sat in the middle, clinging onto a power which had become almost entirely ceremonial. The states were ruled by their own dukes, and their armies fought off the enemies at the borders. The Jin in particular were in a constant battle against the northern barbarian tribes known, collectively, as the Ti. The war went on for decades, and gradually extended the Jin border farther and farther to the north.
For some time, this patchwork country held an uneasy internal peace. King Hsiang died, after a long spell on the ceremonial throne, and was succeeded by his son (who ruled for six years) and then by his grandson (who ruled for seven). The grandson, too young for sons of his own, was succeeded by his younger brother, Ting, in 606 BC.
These clipped reigns seem to indicate some sort of trouble in the capital, and the lord to take advantage of it was the Duke of Chu.
The southern state of the Chu was not part of the original “central China,” and it was still regarded as semibarbaric by the states of Jin and Cheng. Barbaric or not, Chu was strong. In the two and half centuries since the Zhou move, Chu soldiers had marched steadily to the north and east, invading and enfolding state after state. “In the ancient generations,” wrote the eighteenth-century historian Gai Shiqi, “there were many enfeoffed states, which were densely distributed like chess pieces or stars.” He lists a few of these, now disappeared forever from the map, which had once lain between the Chu and the Zhou border. “After the fall of Deng,” he explains, “Chu troops made their presence felt by Shen and Xi, and after the fall of Shen and Xi the Chu troops made their presence felt by Jiang and Huang, and after the fall of Jiang and Huang, Chu soldiers made their presence felt by Chen and Cai. When Chen and Cai could no longer hold out, Chu soldiers reached the court directly.”2
62.1 The Five Hegemonies
This Chu invasion of the Zhou land took place as soon as King Ting took the Zhou throne. It was not a direct attack on the palace; Chu’s putative target was a band of the Jung, the northern barbarians who had allied themselves with King Hsiang’s half-brother against the throne, eighty years earlier. They had been ricocheting around in China ever since. The Jin armies had shoved them over into the land of the Ch’in, the Ch’in army had shortly driven them farther south, and now they were on the western border of the Zhou.
The Chu did not attack these barbarians for the sake of protecting the sovereign; when the Duke of Chu marched against them, the Jung were not threatening the Zhou. And there is a hint in Sima Qian’s records that the Duke of Chu did not have the good of the monarch in mind: “In the first year of King Ting,” he writes, “the King of Chu attacked the Jung.”3 Never before had a duke been given the royal title. In fact, it was probably illegal for the Chu lord to call himself “king,” but the Zhou ruler seems to have been in no position to object.
The King of Chu’s campaign against the barbarians was halfhearted at best. As soon as he reached the north, he sent a messenger, not to the Jung with a demand for surrender, but rather to the Zhou palace with a somewhat ominous request: “He sent someone to inquire of Zhou about the Nine Tripods,” writes Sima Qian—the Nine Cauldrons of the Zhou, which had served for half a millennium as the symbol of kingly power.173
We don’t know why the King of Chu was inquiring after the Nine Tripods, but he probably wasn’t motivated by idle curiosity. According to Sima Qian, King Ting sent a court official to talk his way out of actually answering the question; and the King of Chu, after a brief time, moved back to the south. What staved off the growing crisis is unclear. Perhaps the Zhou king agreed not to object to the Duke’s use of “king,” as the King of Chu went right on styling himself by the royal title.
Chu itself continued to grow. The Tso chuan (the additional notes to the Spring and Autumn Annals of Confucius) remarks that when the Chu overran the little state of Ts’ai, the King of Chu had the crown prince burned alive. Ten years after the attack on the Zhou, the King of Chu also invaded Cheng. Probably anxious to avoid being burned as well, the Duke of Cheng offered to become a faithful vassal: “Do not extinguish our altars,” he begs, in the Tso chuan, “but let me change my course so that I may serve your lordship.”4
The King of Chu agreed. Now his domain surrounded the Zhou by a large and threatening presence on two sides.
MEANWHILE, KING TING was succeeded by his son, grandson, and great-grandson. The great-grandson, King Ching, took the throne in 544 and had a more or less uneventful twenty-year reign. But although he intended to appoint his favorite son (a younger prince) as his successor, he died before he made the appointment formal. The year was 521.
Immediately Ching’s oldest son seized the throne. The younger prince, incensed, attack
ed and killed his older brother and took the throne himself, becoming King Tao. The other brothers fled the capital.
One of them, Prince Kai, made his way up into the Jin state of the north and appealed for help. The Duke of Jin agreed to throw the weight of the large and experienced Jin army behind Kai. He put together a coronation ceremony and proclaimed Kai to be the rightful king in exile; Kai took the name Ching II (as if to insist on his rightful claim to the throne, which seems to have been very shaky indeed). And then, with a Jin army behind him, Ching II marched back towards the walled Zhou city.
King Tao barricaded himself in. For three years, the brothers fought a civil war; in the fourth year, Ching II broke into the capital and reduced King Tao to a vassal, forced to swear allegiance to him.
By the time all this was over, the Eastern Zhou authority had almost completely broken down into anarchy and bloodshed. The Mandate of Heaven had splintered, and an even greater war between the surrounding states seemed likely to follow, as they jostled to take up the dropped Zhou authority.
In answer to the disorderly times, a reformer appeared in the state of Lu. His name was Kong Fuzi, and as a teacher he gained a following that lasted for millennia. Jesuit missionaries, arriving in China two thousand years later, spelled Kong Fuzi as Confucius, a Latinized version of his name by which he became known all over the world.
Like the Indian philosophers who were his contemporaries, Confucius was from a vaguely aristocratic family; he was the indirect descendent of an older half-brother of the last Shang king. Unlike those philosophers, he was raised in respectable poverty.
By the time he was twenty-one, he had married, fathered a son, and landed a job keeping track of state-owned grain shipments.5 It was a job which required precision, attention to detail, and perfect record-keeping, all of which the young Confucius found himself naturally suited for. From his childhood, he had been a precise and orderly boy; as he grew, he was increasingly fascinated by the rituals performed to honor ancestors and divine beings, the rites that surrounded births and deaths and marriages, the ceremonies carried out in the courts of the state rulers and the court of the Zhou king himself.
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