A cultural and intellecual history of Ancient India.
Sitting down with the Bhagavad Gita at the age of sixteen opened many new channels in my mind. Ever since, for the best part of thirty years, I have been searching for a book on Indian thought that ties it all up, coherently and succinctly.
Write the book you want to read, they say—and this, here, is it.
While covering all the important areas (see contents list below), you will learn:
How the Vedic gods are related to the Greek and Roman ones.
The secret of the self that even the gods were desperate to learn.
How to stop suffering, according to the Buddha.
How to achieve enlightenment, according to the Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains.
How the swastika came to be appropriated by the Nazis.
How Gandhi’s non-violence is rooted in Indian philosophy.
Why the Kama Sutra is about a lot more than sex.
What yoga’s actually about—not even my yoga teacher knew this.
How the Gupta Golden Age led to the invention of zero, chess, and nose jobs.
And much, much more.
Contents List
Preface Introduction: A Picture of India
1. The Indus Valley Civilization 2. The Aryans and their Vedas 3. Vedic Gods: Indra, Agni, Soma, and the Rest 4. Sanskrit and the Grammar of Panini 5. The Upanishads 6. Brahman and Brahma 7. Atman, or the Self 8. Karma, Samsara, Moksha, Yoga 9. Life of the Buddha 10. Buddhist Philosophy 11. The Jataka Tales 12. The Panchatantra 13. Jainism, Ahimsa, and Gandhi’s Satyagraha 14. The Mauryas: Chandragupta and Ashoka 15. Greek India 16. Dharma, the Laws of Manu, and the Caste System 17. The Arthashastra of Kautilya 18. The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana 19. The Ramayana of Valmiki 20. The Mahabharata of Vyasa 21. The Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God 22. The Puranas: Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi 23. The Guptas: The Golden Age of India 24. The Six Darshanas: Samkhya-Yoga 25. The Six Darshanas: Nyaya-Vaisheshika 26. The Six Darshanas: Mimamsa-Vedanta
The Middle Way, Four Noble Truths, and Eightfold Path.
Wheel of the chariot of the sun, Konark Sun Temple, Odisha. 1250 CE. The temple is designed as a chariot with 24 such wheels. As a symbol, the wheel of dharma features in several Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
Last time, I discussed the life of the Buddha. The Buddha was struck by human suffering and spent years trying to understand its causes and the means to overcome them.
After reaching enlightenment, the Buddha delivered his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, on the outskirts of Kashi (modern-day Varanasi). He preached the Middle Way between luxury and austerity, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path.
The Middle Way and Dependent Origination
Two early insights that led the Buddha to enlightenment are the Middle Way and Dependent Origination. According to the doctrine of the Middle Way, we are more likely to achieve insight and wisdom if we avoid extremes of self-gratification and self-mortification—in his case, as a prince and, later, as a mendicant.
According to the doctrine of Dependent Origination, or Interdependent Arising, life is a continuous process of change, and every instance of change has manifold causes and effects. This means that all things are conditioned by other things, so that all things are interconnected.
Suffering arises from a craving for permanence; but all permanence is an illusion that, in time, can only lead to pain and disappointment.
Although nothing exists permanently, it is equally wrong to say that nothing exists at all. This, too, is a middle way.
Does the self exist? In one sense, it does; in another, it does not—which is why, when asked the question, the Buddha, as was his way, simply remained silent.
The Four Noble Truths
If all things are conditional and subject to change, then so too is suffering.
It is said that, upon enlightenment, the Buddha understood the Four Noble Truths—more accurately translated as the “four truths for the noble of spirit”:
Suffering (dukkha) is inherent in all life.
The cause of all suffering is desire.
There is a natural way to eliminate all suffering.
The Noble Eightfold Path is that way.
The first truth, dukka, acknowledges the unsatisfactory nature of existence. The second truth, samudaya (origin), attributes a cause to this suffering. The third truth, nirodha (cessation), posits a state comparable to the Greek ataraxia (tranquillity) that is free from suffering. And the fourth truth, marga (path), points to the method for achieving that state.
Although translated as “suffering,” dukka refers more broadly to the inherently impermanent and unsatisfactory nature of all things, including the pleasant ones—for it is on account of them that we suffer most.
Nirodha is also referred to as nibbana (“blown out”, “extinguished”, as in a candle) in Pali or nirvana in Sanskrit, indicating that, rather than a positive state, nirvana is more of a negative state of absence of desire. Nirvana is the state of wishing for nothing, not even Nirvana.
If the cause of dukka is desire, the cause of desire is ignorance, pointing to knowledge or wisdom as the way forward. With proper perspective, there would be no desire, and so no suffering—and no (re)birth, which is the fruit of desire, and the source of all suffering.
Does this mean that people should not have children? No, insofar as being born is an opportunity to escape being born. The purpose of life is to provide us with an opportunity to escape it, by achieving wisdom. Otherwise, “we” shall have to try again.
The Eightfold Path
Unfortunately, wisdom is hard to attain because it runs counter to everything we have learned and everything we love, including the things we love most ourselves. On top of that, it skirts with everything we fear, not least death and impermanence. For these reasons and more, it takes long practice and training to attain wisdom, and even longer practice and training to hold on to it in the face of temptation, fragility, and adversity.
But even if we are unable to commit to becoming a monk or nun, we can still embark on the Noble Eightfold Path:
Right view (maintaining perspective on reality)
Right intention or resolve (renouncing the worldly life for the life of wisdom)
Right speech (e.g. no lies, slanders, or idle talk)
Right action or conduct (e.g. no killing, stealing, or sexual misconduct)
Right livelihood (earning a living through a profession that does not visit harm to others)
Right effort (preventing unwholesome mental states, and encouraging wholesome, productive ones)
Right mindfulness (paying due attention to thoughts, feelings, sensations, and external phenomena)
Right concentration or meditation (cultivating the highest states of mind)
The eight categories are overlapping and mutually reinforcing, and to be worked on simultaneously rather than successively. Indeed, the Noble Eightfold Path is often represented by a dharma wheel, or dharmachakra, with eight spokes, none of which is either first or last.
The dharmachakra can also stand for dependent origination, change, and the cycle of rebirth (samsara), all in one. It is said that, with his first sermon, the Buddha set the wheel of dharma (“law”, “rightfulness”) into motion.
With desire under control, everything becomes a lot better, and a lot easier. In an absence of desire, why lie or steal, or be envious or greedy? Or why be anxious, or angry, or depressed? The opposite of envy is not merely an absence of envy but shared joy and admiration. The opposite of greed is not merely an absence of greed, but decency and generosity. The opposite of anger is not merely an absence of anger but compassion. The opposite of anxiety is not merely an absence of anxiety but tranquillity. The opposite of depression is not merely an absence of depression, but wisdom.
Buddha’s life has the structure of a mythical hero’s journey.
Next, I will discuss Buddhist philosophy and the Buddhist solution to suffering. But before I do, I wanted to relate Buddha’s life—which, if nothing else, is a marvelous story.
The Buddha’s dates are uncertain and range from 624 BCE (earliest birth) to 368 BCE (latest death). Whatever his dates, he began as a wandering ascetic and lived for some 80 years. His movement, Buddhism, arose in reaction to the increasing remoteness and abstruseness of Vedic Brahmanism. His followers deified him and, accordingly, mythologized his life; and it would be profitless to try, if that were possible, to separate the mythology from the reality.
Birth
According to tradition, Siddharta Gautama, later known as the Buddha, was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, to King Shuddhodana of the Shakya clan. His mother, Mahamaya, dreamt of a white elephant with six tusks entering her right side. Ten lunar months later, while strolling in a garden in Lumbini, she grabbed onto the drooping branch of a sal tree, and Siddharta (“He who has achieved his aim”) emerged fully formed from under her right arm. Siddharta proceeded to take seven steps before announcing that this would be his last life.
Early Years
Seven days later, Mahamaya died. The court astrologers predicted that Siddharta would become either a chakravartin (universal monarch) or a buddha (enlightened one). Not wishing to lose his son and heir—and, at that, a future chakravartin—to a life of renunciation, Shuddhodana confined him to a life of luxury within the precinct of the palace, where he would not be exposed to religious teaching or human suffering. At the age of 16, Siddharta married the beautiful princess Yashodara, and everything seemed on track for Shuddhodana.
First Contact With Old Age, Infirmity, and Death
But at the age of 29, having tired of the delights of the royal kitchen and harem, Siddharta asked to make a chariot ride through the city. The king agreed but had all the old, infirm, and otherwise poor cleared from the route. Even so, Siddharta did, for the very first time, catch a glimpse of an old man. He asked Channa, his charioteer: “Am I also subject to this?”
With his curiosity piqued, Siddharta made three more outings, seeing, in turn, a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and, finally, a meditating mendicant, whose serene smile inspired him to join the path in search of freedom from suffering.
Renunciation and the Path to Enlightenment
Sandstone head of the fasting Buddha, whom Sujata mistook for a wish-granting tree spirit. Gandhara, second or third century CE. British Museum, London. The Greco-Buddhist Ghandara school produced the first representations of the Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.
Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain
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Siddharta renounced his position, wealth, and family to take up the life of a wandering ascetic. As night fell and he prepared to make his escape, he was told that a son had been born to him. He went into Yashodara’s chamber to look upon his sleeping wife and son and named the boy Rahula (“Fetter,” on the path to enlightenment). Having crossed the Anoma River into the forest, he sent back the faithful Channa along with his weapons, jewels, and hair. He even sent back his beloved horse, Kanthaka, who died from a broken heart.
In the forest, Siddharta adopted the life of a mendicant, or beggar. For the next six years, he practised successively under two meditation teachers. With five friends, he subjected himself to extreme forms of self-mortification, gradually reducing his daily meal to a single grain of rice.
One day, he accepted a bowl of kheera (milk-rice pudding) from a farmer’s wife called Sujata, who had mistaken the skeletal waif for a wish-granting tree spirit. With some food in the belly, he concluded that extreme asceticism would not advance him along the path to freedom from suffering, but serve only to cloud his mind.
Sandstone head of the fasting Buddha, whom Sujata mistook for a wish-granting tree spirit. Gandhara, second or third century CE. British Museum, London. The Greco-Buddhist Ghandara school produced the first representations of the Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.
Enlightenment
On the full moon of May, six years after having left the palace, the 35-year-old Siddharta sat in meditation under a peepul tree. The demon Mara tried to disrupt him, including by sending his daughters to seduce him.
When Mara challenged his right to occupy the ground on which he sat, he touched the earth with his right hand, and the goddess of the earth confirmed with a tremor that he had earned this right—on account of a great gift that he had made in his previous life as Prince Vessantara.
Through the night, he had visions of his past lives. Then, at dawn, he reached enlightenment and became a Buddha.
The peepul tree, Ficus religiosa, is now better known as the Bodhi tree, and the place where the Buddha sat in meditation as Bodh Gaya (“Place of Enlightenment”). Representations of the Buddha often include his earth-touching gesture, known as the bhumiparsha mudra.
First Sermons
Naga-enthroned Buddha, Angkor, twelfth century CE.
Source: Wikimedia Commons/Cleveland Museum of Art/Public domain
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The Buddha remained in the vicinity of the Bodhi tree to savour his enlightenment. When a seven-day storm blew up, the serpent king Mucalinda encircled him seven times with his coils and sheltered him with his seven-headed hood.
After seven weeks (note the preponderance of the number seven), the Buddha got up to teach. He delivered his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, on the outskirts of Kashi (modern-day Varanasi), preaching the Middle Way between luxury and austerity, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path.
In his second sermon, he presented his doctrine of anatman (no-self). So eloquently did he speak that, upon hearing him, his five ascetic friends rose up into arhats (those who have gained such insight as to escape the cycle of rebirth). They became the first members of the Buddhist monastic order known as the sangha.
Naga-enthroned Buddha, Angkor, twelfth century CE.
Later Life
For the next 45 years, the Buddha spread his teachings across northeast India, followed by wandering ascetics and laypersons who supported the ascetics. Although many of his followers imitated him in renouncing the life of the householder, most were not so ambitious.
Over the years, many of the renouncers settled into monasteries funded by prominent members of the laity. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, the capital of Kosala, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada.
When Mahamaya’s sister Mahapajapati, who had been his foster mother and became his stepmother, asked to be ordained, the Buddha refused her, perhaps owing to fears about the safety of nuns. But when pressed, he relented, and Mahapajapati became the first bhikkhuni (Buddhist nun). In time, Yashodhara, too, became a bhikkhuni. When Rahula asked for his patrimony, his father ordained him a monk.
However, the Buddha refused to appoint his radically austere cousin Devadatta as his successor. Bitterly aggrieved, Devadatta tried three times to kill him by means of assassins, a boulder, and an elephant, which arrested its charge to bow at his feet. The schism was repaired when the earth sucked Devadatta down into Naraka, or Hell.
Death
In Kushinagara, the Buddha, now around 80 years old, succumbed to a tainted piece of either mushroom or pork.
His chief disciple, Mahakashyapa, ignited the funeral pyre, after which his relics were distributed and enshrined in large mound-like structures called stupas.
According to Buddhist tradition, in the third century BCE, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka gathered the relics from seven of the eight stupas and erected 84,000 stupas to distribute them across India.
Some of Ashoka’s stupas, such as the Great Stupa at Sanchi and the Dhamek Stupa at Sarnath, remain important pilgrimage sites.
Karma, often misunderstood as fate or destiny, is conceptualized as a causal law by which our modes of engagement come to determine our station and situation. According to several Indian religions, karma is the law of cause and effect extended to human affairs; every instance of thought, speech, and action is a cause, and all our experiences are their effects.
Karma, good and bad, is often referred to as punya (“merit”) and paap (“demerit”). Even if punya does not immediately pay off, or seem to pay off, it does in the longer term, which is why karma is tied to samsara, the transmigration of life, with future births conditioned by the accumulated balance of paap and punya.
Greek Parallels
At the outset of Plato’s Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus argues that it is not the just but the unjust who flourish, and that the tyrant, being the most wicked of people, is also the happiest. At the end of the Republic, in the Myth of Er, Plato resorts to reincarnation to guarantee that the genuinely just always come out on top, with each soul choosing its next life according to its wisdom. In this and other things, Plato was influenced by Pythagoras (d. 495 BCE), who, like the Indians, came to believe in the transmigration of the soul.
The Transfer of Karma
Although karma is individual, it is believed that in certain circumstances it can be transferred—for example, from a dying father to his son, with the son being, essentially, the continuation of the father. This rite, in which the father places himself above his son, and touches his organs with his own, is laid out in the Kaushitaki Upanishad.
More ordinarily, the paap of a person, living or deceased, may be mitigated by the prayers and pilgrimages of others.
The Function of Karma and Christian Parallels
Karma serves the same purpose as Eden in providing the major motivation to lead a moral life. In the Christian tradition, it is believed that the soul of the newly deceased is judged and sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory. Then, there is also a Last Judgement that takes place after the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.
In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul warns: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” According to the Old Testament, punishment might even be extended to later generations, that is, to future selves:
The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.
Karma also serves other purposes, such as accounting for the existence of evil, rationalizing rebirth (which could also operate independently of karma), and providing a soteriological goal of final liberation.
In determining our circumstances and even our temperament, karma may constrict our options, but it does not deprive us of choice and deliberation, enabling it to condone social inequities and the caste system while at the same time affirming human freedom.
The Philosophy of Karma
The importance of karma, and the degree of freedom and determination within it, is a matter of debate between the Hindu schools.
But even if karma theory is not literally true, it is at least metaphorically true. Being good does pay off, if only in peace of mind and mental health.
In which case, is karma theory a firm basis for morality, or an appeal to naked self-interest?
One way around this problem, which has been taken, is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions, so that the system becomes impossible to game.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome. For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.
The Buddhist Solution
The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others so that helping others is the same as helping oneself.
Aristotle makes a similar move in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he says that there is no conflict between helping a friend and helping oneself insofar as a perfect friend is like another self.
When we are good to another, we are good to all, including ourself, because the distinction is an illusion, and karma travels.
If we have no self, why did the Buddhists not altogether give up on karma and samsara?
In part, because karma can still operate in the absence of a Self, or Atma, with future incarnations being conditioned by the sum of all the karmic actions that have been put into the world.
Every person—their parents, their teachers, and their parents and teachers—is the embodiment of every karmic action that has ever gone before. Our every action reverberates to the end of time.
There is much more to mental health than the mere absence of mental disorder. Today, I write about all the things that I was never taught. Click here to find out more.
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