In 326 BCE, Alexander penetrated into India, using a military strategy developed by his father, that is to say, a tight phalanx with soldiers carrying sarissas (long heavy pikes), with cavalry support for their flanks. The soldiers of Alexander worked as one unit, emphasizing correct positioning and the strength of the erect body. The sarissa was held in both hands; therefore the soldier could only strike using the power of his waist and legs. This technique has obvious correlation with the techniques of classical karate and classical jujutsu. This makes it easy to fall into the trap of thinking that karate is the same art used by Alexander, and that the Greeks had created it.
Although we knew that all the peoples in the world had developed martial arts since the Bronze Age, we had hoped that the techniques of fighting while wearing heavy armor would provide some means for tracking the spread of Greek martial arts. Unfortunately, this does not apply. The Chinese had also developed the use of heavy armor as early as the Zhou dynasty, in the eleventh century BCE. Their armor consisted of hundreds of bronze plates, sewn onto a leather gown, so as not to restrict the movement of the warrior. The evolution of this bronze armor was brought to light by the archaeological discovery of armor dated to 154 BCE from the Chu kingdom, consisting of 2,000 pieces of steel with six eyes on each piece, so that they could be linked together, like “fish scales.” This armor, in spite of its flexibility, together with a shield and helmet, was extremely heavy, so that the soldier wearing it needed to know the right technique in order to move freely when engaged in combat.
In other words, the existence of similarities in kinesiology in the ancient West and the ancient East does not necessarily mean anything, because: 1) the kinesiology of the human body is a given and nothing has changed in the past 40,000 years, as far as we know; 2) the spread of martial arts, as we have seen elsewhere in this book, must be placed during the Neolithic Age; and 3) all these arts are based on the movement of a warrior while wearing heavy armor. Consequentially, they would of necessity be similar to each other—any nation that developed combat techniques based on heavy armor had to consider the same principles. So any link that could exist between the ancient Greek martial arts and those of the East must be looked for elsewhere.
THE BUDDHIST CONNECTION
It is still possible that the Greeks did have an influence on the martial arts of the East; it is just that the right path has to be established. We believe that this path may be through the Buddhist religion. Historical events and archaeological archives may offer a clue regarding cultural exchange between Greece and China concerning the martial arts. Those readers who are strict rationalists could accuse us of searching for a correlating link for personal reasons, given that we are Greek. And they would not be wrong. In spite of this, let us proceed, making clear that we shall base our conclusions on six specific, related assumptions:
1. As we have seen repeatedly so far, the development of the martial arts was a universal phenomenon during the Bronze Age, and a characteristic trait of warriors, devotees of the sacred duel.
The first archaeological evidence of martial arts comes from Egypt and Mesopotamia. We have already presented and examined the wall drawings at the Egyptian tombs of Beni Hasan dating from 2000 BCE, which depict refined techniques of combat sports, mainly submission wrestling. There are also depictions from Mesopotamia, from the same time period, which depict a middle block to a punch, a move that many karate athletes would recognize today. The fact is that up to the year 2000 BCE, both martial arts and combat sports were spread throughout the world, from China to England. From that period on, they developed according to their particular cultural, climatological, and environmental conditions, as well as the military needs and particularities of each nation.
In China they evolved into the Taoist martial arts by around 800 B.C.E. In India they took the form of the martial art of kalari payat, the sacred duel and martial art of vajramushti, and the folk dances of nata dance. In the Middle East we can say with certainty that in the year 1000 BCE there was no difference between the martial arts of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, and the Greeks. The martial art of the Greeks started to differentiate from the rest circa the eighth century BCE, which, as we have seen, was due to the adoption of heavy armor and particular tactics.
2. The martial arts (pammachon) of the Greeks during the classical age were undoubtedly and definitively connected to the worship of the Olympian Gods.
The fact that the Parthenon sculptures and those of the temple of Apollo in Bassai represent scenes of the martial arts is the best proof for this statement. Besides, it is quite obvious. The ancient Greeks were warriors. It is not accidental that their martial art had theological connotations. Think again of the heavily armed Athena, a goddess who combined martial arts with wisdom and virtue. And remember, too, that all the wrestling, boxing, and pankration contests took place in honor of the gods (Olympia, Nemea, Isthmia) at religious festivals, while all classical competitions in general (track athletics, discus, and the javelin throw) were products of training for battle. The relation between gods and heroes is obvious in all myths, as well as in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The connection between pammachon and worship of the gods is significant because, as we shall see below, this had a specific influence on Buddhism.
3. The main contribution of Alexander the Great can be summarized in one phrase: he tore down the walls between nations and forced the citizens of various states to talk to each other face to face. The Persians started to get along with the Greeks, the Indians began talking to the Romans, the Parthians found they had things in common with the Egyptians. With the end of the Hellenistic age and the emergence of the Roman domination, the Silk Road was created, through which products were transferred from Luoyang in China to far away England and vice versa. Greek sailors of the age were sailing from the Red Sea through Indonesia to coastal Canton! Alexander was the Internet of his era. No nation remained uninfluenced by the intense changes and interactions during the Hellenistic era. Not even the Greeks. Along with various other cultural influences, there was a broad exchange of religious and spiritual beliefs. The Greeks were fascinated by the mysticism and the bioenergy exercises of the Hindus. An example is Alexander himself and his relationship with the Hindu gymnosophist guru Kalanos. Many Greeks became Buddhists, and this is the main point of our theme.
The first Greek Buddhist was a monk in 240 BCE. One hundred years later, when Menander was the king, Buddhist documents refer to 10,000 Greek Buddhist monks. In the years 160–145 BCE, Menander reigned in Sakala of Bactria. His kingdom covered south Afghanistan and the entire Punjab up to the Ganges, including the Rajasthan desert. A loyal Buddhist, he filled India with Buddhist monuments and generally supported their philosophy. When he died, he was pronounced a saint of Buddhism, and his ashes were considered sacred treasures. During his reign the ksatriya warriors of India became friendly with the Greek soldiers and even enrolled the Greeks in their caste. It is no coincidence that the god of Hindu warriors, Indra vajrahasta (“he who holds the thunder”) resembles Zeus, and that this association is primal, going back to the overthrow of the Earth Mother by the sky gods mentioned in previous chapters.
The last Hellenistic kingdoms of Bactria expired in 30 BCE, but the cultural influence of Alexander’s conquering expedition went on for almost 1,000 years. In the first century CE, the Kusans, a Mongolian tribe from Turkestan in China, conquered Bactria. The Parthians and the Sakkas were expelled. For some reason, the Greeks remained. (This would demonstrate Greek-Turkish friendship circa the first century CE? Amusing.) An amazing civilization was created, where the Greek alphabet was adopted for the Kusan language and deities had common Greek and Kusan characteristics. In 40 CE, King Kanishka of the Kusans became the next Dharmaraja after Asoka and Menander, protecting and spreading Buddhism.
There was a great transfer of ideas as well as merchandise along the Silk Road. In the first century, the Greek Apollonius of Tyana traveled to India where he studied the secrets of Tantric yo
ga. It is recorded that the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus sent an ambassador to China during his reign. And, in 353 CE, despite the grow- ing enforcement of Christianity by the Roman conquerors, the most popular religions in Greece were, in addition to the worship of the Olympian Gods, the worship of the Persian god Mithra and Egyptian goddess Isis.
There was as much Greek influence in the East as there was Eastern influence in the West. Gandhara, a Bactrian town, produced the first Buddhist sculptures in the Greek manner. In the Gandhara sculptures that survive today, the Bodhisattva Vajrapani (“thunder in hand”) is presented in Zeus’s form. Many historians maintain that the Greeks of Bactria are responsible for the development of Mahayana Buddhism— significantly, Athena, holding lightning in her hand as an upraised spear, was the main deity in Bactria. We must not underestimate Persia’s importance as a mediator between these two poles. For example, when the seventh century CE Buddhist king of Tibet, Srongtsan Gampo, challenged doctors from all over the world to a “duel,” the Persian doctor Galenos (Galen) practicing Greek medicine emerged as the victor (and he was obviously a Greek from Persia). Persian influence was particularly important between the first and the seventh century CE. When the conquering Roman emperor Justinian, who spoke only Latin and not Greek, closed Plato’s Academy for good, in 529, the “seven wise men of Athens” found refuge in the court of the Persian king Khosroe. There are also clear indications that the Tibetan Bön religion, which influenced Tibetan Buddhism as well, is most likely of Persian origin.3
Another Persian religion, Manichaeism, is significant in this respect. In 216 CE, Manichaeus was born in Persia. Half Parthian, he created a new dogma in the gnostic model, which borrowed elements from all existing religions of the time. This new religion, which promoted the chance of spontaneous individual enlightenment (just like Zen), spread worldwide with such passion that Manichaeus was captured, tortured, and killed in Persia in his old age. There is evidence that Manichaeism had a deep influence on Mahayana Buddhism (after having absorbed elements from it), and contributed to the creation of the method of “sudden enlightenment” attributed to Bodhidharma, which is called dhyana in Sanskrit, ch’an in Chinese, dzogcen in Tibetan, and zen in Japanese. It would take too long to theologically examine the how’s and why’s of this statement in this brief appendix. Suffice it to say that Manichaeism connected Gnostic Christianity with Zoroastrianism and Buddhism and that it spread worldwide very quickly. In the West, for example, it created the heresies of the “Cathars” and the “Bogomiles,” which the respective “Orthodox” Christian emperors were only able to wipe out after bloody campaigns. The Manichaeist religion, with its flexible belief system and its elimination of the clergy, spread easily among warriors, which is a significant observation for our study.
4. Since its first appearance in history, Buddhism has been connected with the martial arts. Sakyamuni Buddha, as a prince and member of the Hindu ksatriya warrior caste, was trained in the martial arts, including vajramushti, from a young age. The art of vajramushti (“thunder in the hand”) is very interesting for two reasons:
a) It has been preserved until recently (the 1950s) as an annual “non-fatal” duel (it is hardly bloodless, however) at certain Hindu religious festivities, where two opponents fight wearing iron fists with pointed ends on their right hands, just like the Roman cestus. The purpose of this duel, in which all types of fighting are allowed, is the submission of the opponent and the control of his weapon, but not his injury. It is a dangerous form of submission fighting, perhaps in a more primitive form than pankration. The vajramushti ritual is reminiscent of the 2000 BCE Egyptian stick fights in honor of god Horus, indicating that vajramushti is probably ancient. Most likely, vajramushti is a ritual that has remained intact in India from the Bronze Age due to the caste system and the general emphasis of the East on maintaining the rituals of the past. It is obvious that vajramushti is an archaic form of close-quarter combat and its ritual confrontation undoubtedly symbolizes the clash between two men armed with knives.
b) Due to its connection with religious festivals it is obvious that it is a ritualistic combative art whose origins are related to ancient spiritual beliefs.
All martial arts, at their higher level, are characterized by breathing and kinesiological particularities, which aim at the distribution of bioenergy. For example, the Taoist martial arts, Indian kalari payat, and Japanese jujutsu are each individually characterized by specific types of breathing and styles of movement. As we have seen, it is likely that pammachon had a similar set of breathing exercises aimed at controlling and using bioenergy, which the Greeks called pneuma.
In the third century BCE, the Greeks went to India. The Hindus respected them for their culture as well as for their fighting spirit. One proof of this is that among all other “barbarians,” only the Greeks were considered “humans” by the orthodox Hindus, who classified the Javanas (their name for the Greeks) in the ksatriya warrior caste. The interaction between Greek religion and philosophy and Buddhism created the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara and Mahayana Buddhism. We remind the reader that Greek pammachon was intimately tied to the old Olympian religion.
All of these factors lead us to this daring conclusion: along with Greek sculpture and philosophy, Buddhists absorbed pammachon, as the Greeks of that area became Buddhists, offering to their new religion, together with their sculpture and architecture, their martial art.
One of the basic changes that Buddhism imposed on the breathing-bioenergetical exercises of Hindu yoga was the transfer of emphasis from the gradual opening of the seventy-two chakras of the human entity to the exclusive preoccupation with the seven basic chakras on the central energy channel. (This approach has been extensively developed in books on Tantric Buddhism in the English language, so there is no reason to delve deeply into this subject here, as a brief reference should suffice.) Pammachon, due to its kinesiology, fit perfectly with the requirements of the breathing exercises of Buddhism in that era. (The center of gravity of a person wearing heavy armor is transferred higher, which calls for a special manner of moving and a special kind of abdominal breathing—especially when that person is wearing an inflexible breastplate, as the Greeks did.)
In this book then, we will support the premise that the Greek emphasis on upright close-quarter combat tactics, deriving from the phalanx and heavy armor, as well as the necessity of abdominal breathing while wearing such armor, clearly influenced the martial arts of the Indian warrior caste, as the techniques of pammachon were adopted by the aristocrats of India, who had become Buddhists. The ksatriya caste incorporated the methods of pammachon into their own art of vajramushti.4 Together with Greek sculpture and architecture, in other words, Buddhists also absorbed pammachon, modifying and refining their own martial art in turn, as more and more Greeks became Buddhists.
5. We must point out the crucial importance of the Silk Road once again, which, based on the impetus of the Roman empire, connected the Mediterranean with China, beginning in the first century BCE. There are even indications that there was a Roman populace in China back in 50 BCE! To point out the complexity of that time, it is useful to refer to the possibility of the existence of this settlement, even though there is little concrete evidence for it, as we are more interested in it as an example than as an established fact.
In 1955 an American scholar from Oxford, Homer Hasenpflug Dubs, expressed the theory that there was a Roman town in China in the first century BCE. He found, in a cadastre of that time, a reference to a town called Liqian in west China. In the Chinese language of that era, Liqian was the name used for Rome. Furthermore, the Chinese of the Han dynasty used to name cities in their territory after the state the foreign inhabitants came from, whether these were prisoners or colonists. The problem is how the Romans in question could have gotten to China, since between Rome and China were the Parthians, fanatic enemies of both.
In searching for an answer Dubs turned to the ancient texts of both China and Rome. Plutarch
reports that in 53 BCE, 42,000 Roman legionaries under the command of general Marcus Licinius Crassus left Rome to go to Asia and fight against the Parthians, whose kingdom then extended from today’s Syria to Pakistan, with Iraq and Iran included. The Roman legion was decimated by the Parthians in the battle of Carrhae, by the border of today’s Turkey and Syria. Crassus was beheaded and, according to Plinius, 10,000 Roman soldiers were captured and transferred to central Asia.
Dubs believed that an unknown number of Roman soldiers managed to escape from the Parthians and traverse the three hundred some miles from their prison to the border of the Huns in central Asia, given that the Huns were also enemies of the Parthians. There, they became mercenaries in the service of Jzh-Jzh, the chief of the Huns, who ruled over all of what today is Mongolia. Jzh-Jzh attempted many invasions against China, until he was finally defeated in Taskende in 36 BCE. In this battle, however, one unit of mercenaries in the service of Jzh-Jzh fought “with their shields in line like fish scales” (as a Chinese historical document of the time mentions), a tactic which, according to Dubs, refers to the Roman formation testudo, which has never appeared historically anywhere else but in the Roman army.
Furthermore, Jzh-Jzh’s fort was encircled by a double protective fortification of wooden posts, a method used only by the Romans at the time. The Roman mercenaries were defeated again,5 and 145 of the survivors were transferred to an area in west China, where they were offered their freedom in exchange for residing there as border guards in Gansu territory.
The Martial Arts of Ancient Greece Page 15
