The Mythologies of India
Siddharta Gautama Buddha. Wikimedia Commons
Buddhist India
The New city States: 800 - 500 B.C.
The Age of the Great Classics: 500 B.C. - 500 A.D.
The Occidental and the Oriental Hero
The ultimate background of both the Oriental and the Occidental storied heavens and pits of hell, with the world mountain between, is the Mesopotamian concept of the architecture of the universe. As we can see in Dante’s Divina Commedia, there are widespread cross-cultural influences in the different religious descriptions of heaven and hell. A differentiating process over time has transformed and separated the visions in the Occident and the Orient, from the common Mesopotamian source. In the West, in conformity with the west’s stress on the individual life, for each soul one birth, one death, one destiny, one maturation of the personality – whether in heaven, purgatory, or hell, the visiting visionary readily recognizes the deceased. In the Orient, there is no such continuity of the personality. The focus of concern is not the individual, but the monad, the reincarnating jiva, to which no individuality whatsoever pertains, but which passes on, like a ship through waves, from one personality to the next: now a meal-worm, now a god, demon, king or tailor.
Whereas the typical Occidental hero is a personality, and therefore necessarily tragic, doomed to be implicated seriously in the agony and mystery of temporality, the Oriental hero is the monad: in essence without character but an image of eternity, untouched by, or else casting off successfully, the delusory involvements of the mortal sphere. In the history of the parting of the two worlds, the figure of the Persian Zoroaster seems important. The doctrine of Zoroaster contains elements that sets it distinctly apart from Oriental thought. Firstly, for the first time in the history of mythology, the Zoroastrian version of the world course is a progressive, not deteriorating world cycle. There is a cosmic battle going on between the forces of the light (Ahura Mazda) and the forces of the darkness (Angra Mainyu). This battle is not envisaged to go on forever. It will terminate in a total victory of the light, upon which the process will lead to the Kingdom of Righteousness on Earth. Secondly, it places a responsibility upon the individual to choose, of his own free will, whether and how he shall stand for the Light, in thought, word and deed. Thirdly, it embodies the principle of engagement, not disengagement, as the way to the ultimate goal.
Zoroaster’s dates are unknown, and it is unclear whether he was a man converted into a god or a god converted into a man. We know, however, that Darius I (reigned 521 – 486 B.C.) proclaimed himself as a dedicated Zoroastrian, when he wrote: “By the grace of Ahura Mazda I am king.” Darius was the contemporary of Mahavira (died about 485 B.C.), Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.), Aeschylus (525 – 456 B.C.) and Confucius (551 – 478 B.C.).
At this time the Persian empire reached from the Greek Ionian isles (Satrapy I) to the Punjab and the Indus (Satrapy XX). All the ancient worlds of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, the Asiatic Greeks, and the Indus Valley, had been absorbed into one progressively and aggressively inspired, international nation: the first of its kind in the history of the world. The Persian answer to sorrow - contemporary with the tragic of Aeschylus, ascetic of Mahavira, and prudent of Confucius – was the building of a soundly governed, progressive world empire under God. Viable roads and a lively commerce ran from India to Greece. A general policy of tolerance fostered the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, which the Chaldeans had destroyed. The gods of many broken peoples were restored. The arts flourished. New cities and courts arose throughout the realm. And for a time it looked as though the Universal Monarch had, in the Persian King of Kings, indeed come into being.
The New City States: 800 – 500 B.C.
The Aryan warrior herdsmen whose covered wagons rumbled into India during the second millennium B.C. were matched in Greece by the numerous and various hunting and herding warrior groups devastating the Aegean in the long period from 1900 B.C. to 1100 B.C. Whereas the invaders of the Aegean were entering a world of still powerful archaic empires, those of India – having passed and left behind the two crumbling citadels (Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro) of an already worn out colonial establishment of some kind – saw before them only comparatively rude jungle planters, hunters, and collectors.
The old world of the hieratic city states now was a memory, and for the most part very dim. Though many cities had fallen, many also remained in the West. In India, on the other hand, there were none. Hence, the Greeks soon were rebuilding on the ruins of the past - building in brick, plaster, and stone – while the Vedic Aryans of the Punjab and Gangetic plain were building in no material permanent enough to have left to us any physical remains. Their period, to about 800 B.C., is an archeological blank. From the Iliad and the Odyssey we can draw an image of the Greek heroic age, supported also by archeological evidence. From the Indian epics of the Vedic age, we have little except visions and images. For the period immediately following the Vedic Aryan, however, archeological finds have been made in the upper Ganges area. These earliest finds are from the period of about 1000 B.C. and leading up to the period from the Buddha to the Emperor Ashoka (reigned about 268 – 232 B.C.). The rise of cities in the Ganges area came towards the latter half of that period.
Across the whole domain from Athens to Bengal, literally hundreds of tiny sovereign powers gradually rose and flowered. At a certain time, wandering teaching sages appeared in the villages and cities that arose in this period. Each of them had their followers, and each supposed to have solved – once and for all – the mystery of sorrow: Kapila (about 600 B.C.), Gosala (flourished about 535 B.C.), Mahavira (died about 485 B.C.), Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.), Pythagoras (about 582 – 500 B.C.), Xenophanes (about 570 – 475 B.C.), Parmenides (flourished about 500 B.C.), and Empedocles (about 500 – 430 B.C.).
In the teachings of these sages, in both India and Greece, a number of characteristic themes appear that were unknown to the myths of the early Aryans. Examples are: the idea of the wheel of rebirth, which is fundamental to Orphism as well as to India; the idea of the soul in bondage to the body (“the body a tomb”, said the Orphics) and deliverance through asceticism; sin leading to the punishment of hells, virtue to ecstasy and then to absolute knowledge and release. Heracleitus (flourished 500 B.C.) spoke of life as an ever-living fire, as did the Buddha in his Fire Sermon. The doctrine of elements is common to the two traditions: fire, air, water, earth among the Greeks; ether, air, fire, water and earth in the Indian context. A turbulent millennium had intervened. The old, largely rural Bronze Age situation had given place, over a broad domain of maturing civilization, to a galaxy of cities governed by secular, not divine kings.
A broad zone of readiness had therefore been established for the reception of a new approach to the problem of man’s highest good. Dislodged from the soil as well as from the old necessities of the hunt, a rather sophisticated urban population had appeared. Now, the chief concern was no longer magical (the weather, crops, abundance of goods, and long years), but psychological (the détente and harmonization of the psyche) and sociological (the integration of the individual with a new society based on a secular instead of hieratic tradition). In such a zone of readiness ideas and practices may appear spontaneously in more than one place at a time and spread as quickly as a flash fire. In both India and Greece, as well as in Persia between, the basic motifs of an early dualistic mythological philosophy abruptly appeared in new forms, about simultaneously, and immediately spread.
The Legend of the World Savior
It is not possible to reconstruct the character, life, and actual teaching of the man who became the Buddha. He is supposed to have lived about 563 – 483 B.C. However, his earliest biography, that of the Pali Canon, was set down in writing about 80 B.C. in Sri Lanka, five centuries and fifteen hundred miles removed from the actual historic scene. By then his life had become mythology, according to a pattern characteristic of World Saviors of the period from about 500 B.C. to about 500 A.D.
Schematically summarized, this archetypical Savior Biography tells of:
1. The scion of a royal line
2. Miraculously born
3. Amid supernatural phenomena
4. Of whom an aged holy man, shortly following the birth, prophesies a world-saving message, and
5. Whose childhood deeds proclaim his divine character.
In the Indian series, the world hero then:
6. Marries and begets an heir
7. Is awakened to his proper task
8. Departs, either with the consent of his elders (Jain series) or else secretly (the Buddha)
9. To engage in arduous forest disciplines
10. Which confront him, finally, with a supernatural adversary, over whom
11. Victory is achieved.
Following his face-to-face encounter with, and conquest of, the Antagonist, the World Savior:
12. Performs miracles
13. Becomes a wandering teacher
14. Preaching a doctrine of salvation
15. To a company of disciples, and
16. A smaller elite circle of initiates
17. One of whom, less quick to learn than the rest, is given charge and becomes the model of the lay community, while
18. Another, dark and treacherous, is bent on the master’s death.
The main point for the Buddhist is not the physical immolation of the Savior, but his awakening (bodhi) to the Truth of truths and therewith release (moksa) from illusion (maya). It is the inspiration and guiding it gives him towards his own enlightenment that counts, not the historical anecdotes.
Mythic Eternalization
There was, once upon a time, a good king Suddhodana, of the Dynasty of the Sun, who ruled in the city of Kapilavastu, where the sage Kapila once had taught. The Dynasty of the Sun stands for the principle of sheer light. The light of the sun is pure. The light of the moon partakes of darkness, waning and waxing, at once mortal and immortal. The gods Tammuz and Osiris and, in the Vedic system, Soma, were manifestations of the lunar mystery – as was Shiva. Shiva’s animal is the bull, his iconography is linked to that of the yogi of the Indus seals. The mythology of the Buddha, on the other hand, is of the sun. He is termed the Lion of the Shakya Clan, who sits upon the Lion Throne. The symbol of his teaching is the Sun Wheel, and the appropriate image is light.
In Egypt, with the rise of Dynasty V, about 2480 B.C., the mythology of the sun superseded the lunar system of Osiris, and the pharaoh, in the lunar role, was called the son of the sun-god Re. Thrones and couches with the legs of bulls were superseded by those with the legs of lions. Among the Semites, the sun-god Shamash (Sumerian Utu) was a deity of supreme power, and among the Aryans everywhere the sun has been a mighty force. In the brilliant city of Persepolis of the Persian King of Kings – built by Darius I (522 B.C.), and destroyed 330 B.C. by Alexander – the solar principle of the Lord of light of the Aryan prophet Zoroaster shone with the radiance of the sun itself on earth. In the early bull-to-lion sequence of Egypt, three significant stages were noted: 1.Mythic Identification (Pre-dynastic Ritual Regicide), 2.Mythic Inflation (in the Pharaonic cult of Dynasties I – IV), 3.Mythic Subordination (in the Re Mythology of Dynasty V). In connection with the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila and earlier cruder mythology and yoga of the Jains, one can speak of a fourth stage or stance; namely: 4.Mythic Eternalization (in yoga), where, by a shift of association, the subject learns to identify himself, not with the son of the sun but with the sun itself. “As serenely as light itself would shine if all that it illuminates – Heaven, Earth, and Air – were not: just so is the isolated state of the seeing subject, the pure Self, when the world threefold, you and I, in short everything visible is gone.”
Just as in stage 1, so here a mythic identification has been achieved. It is not, however, with any object perceived, whether mortal or immortal, but with the perceiving subject; not the field but the perceiver of the field: consciousness – of nothing – in and of itself.
The Middle Way
Those whose being (sattva) is illuminated (bodhi), Bodhisattvas, the Future Buddhas, after knowing the flavor of the world, have always, following the birth of a son, departed to the forest. In his search for the pass beyond sorrow Buddha had already marked out the Middle Way between devotion to pleasure (kama), and to pain (mara), and now, as the first fruit of his passage between the clashing rocks of those two extremes, he was experiencing a further reach of the Middle Way; namely, on the one hand, a realization that all beings are without a self (anatman), and yet, simultaneously, a compassion for all beings (karuna). This may be termed the fundamental posture of the Buddhist mind. The serious commitment of the Occidental mind to the concerns and value of the living person is fundamentally dismissed, as it is in Jainism as well,, and in the Sankhya too. However, the usual Oriental concern for monad also is dismissed. There is no reincarnating hero-monad, to be saved, released, or found. All life is sorrowful, and yet, there is no self, no being, no entity, in sorrow. There is no reason, consequently, to feel loathing, shock, or nausea, before the spectacle of the world; but on the contrary, the only feeling is appropriate is compassion.
The ultimate background of both the Oriental and the Occidental storied heavens and pits of hell, with the world mountain between, is the Mesopotamian concept of the architecture of the universe. As we can see in Dante’s Divina Commedia, there are widespread cross-cultural influences in the different religious descriptions of heaven and hell. A differentiating process over time has transformed and separated the visions in the Occident and the Orient, from the common Mesopotamian source. In the West, in conformity with the west’s stress on the individual life, for each soul one birth, one death, one destiny, one maturation of the personality – whether in heaven, purgatory, or hell, the visiting visionary readily recognizes the deceased. In the Orient, there is no such continuity of the personality. The focus of concern is not the individual, but the monad, the reincarnating jiva, to which no individuality whatsoever pertains, but which passes on, like a ship through waves, from one personality to the next: now a meal-worm, now a god, demon, king or tailor.
Whereas the typical Occidental hero is a personality, and therefore necessarily tragic, doomed to be implicated seriously in the agony and mystery of temporality, the Oriental hero is the monad: in essence without character but an image of eternity, untouched by, or else casting off successfully, the delusory involvements of the mortal sphere. In the history of the parting of the two worlds, the figure of the Persian Zoroaster seems important. The doctrine of Zoroaster contains elements that sets it distinctly apart from Oriental thought. Firstly, for the first time in the history of mythology, the Zoroastrian version of the world course is a progressive, not deteriorating world cycle. There is a cosmic battle going on between the forces of the light (Ahura Mazda) and the forces of the darkness (Angra Mainyu). This battle is not envisaged to go on forever. It will terminate in a total victory of the light, upon which the process will lead to the Kingdom of Righteousness on Earth. Secondly, it places a responsibility upon the individual to choose, of his own free will, whether and how he shall stand for the Light, in thought, word and deed. Thirdly, it embodies the principle of engagement, not disengagement, as the way to the ultimate goal.
Zoroaster’s dates are unknown, and it is unclear whether he was a man converted into a god or a god converted into a man. We know, however, that Darius I (reigned 521 – 486 B.C.) proclaimed himself as a dedicated Zoroastrian, when he wrote: “By the grace of Ahura Mazda I am king.” Darius was the contemporary of Mahavira (died about 485 B.C.), Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.), Aeschylus (525 – 456 B.C.) and Confucius (551 – 478 B.C.).
At this time the Persian empire reached from the Greek Ionian isles (Satrapy I) to the Punjab and the Indus (Satrapy XX). All the ancient worlds of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, the Asiatic Greeks, and the Indus Valley, had been absorbed into one progressively and aggressively inspired, international nation: the first of its kind in the history of the world. The Persian answer to sorrow - contemporary with the tragic of Aeschylus, ascetic of Mahavira, and prudent of Confucius – was the building of a soundly governed, progressive world empire under God. Viable roads and a lively commerce ran from India to Greece. A general policy of tolerance fostered the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, which the Chaldeans had destroyed. The gods of many broken peoples were restored. The arts flourished. New cities and courts arose throughout the realm. And for a time it looked as though the Universal Monarch had, in the Persian King of Kings, indeed come into being.
The New City States: 800 – 500 B.C.
The Aryan warrior herdsmen whose covered wagons rumbled into India during the second millennium B.C. were matched in Greece by the numerous and various hunting and herding warrior groups devastating the Aegean in the long period from 1900 B.C. to 1100 B.C. Whereas the invaders of the Aegean were entering a world of still powerful archaic empires, those of India – having passed and left behind the two crumbling citadels (Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro) of an already worn out colonial establishment of some kind – saw before them only comparatively rude jungle planters, hunters, and collectors.
The old world of the hieratic city states now was a memory, and for the most part very dim. Though many cities had fallen, many also remained in the West. In India, on the other hand, there were none. Hence, the Greeks soon were rebuilding on the ruins of the past - building in brick, plaster, and stone – while the Vedic Aryans of the Punjab and Gangetic plain were building in no material permanent enough to have left to us any physical remains. Their period, to about 800 B.C., is an archeological blank. From the Iliad and the Odyssey we can draw an image of the Greek heroic age, supported also by archeological evidence. From the Indian epics of the Vedic age, we have little except visions and images. For the period immediately following the Vedic Aryan, however, archeological finds have been made in the upper Ganges area. These earliest finds are from the period of about 1000 B.C. and leading up to the period from the Buddha to the Emperor Ashoka (reigned about 268 – 232 B.C.). The rise of cities in the Ganges area came towards the latter half of that period.
Across the whole domain from Athens to Bengal, literally hundreds of tiny sovereign powers gradually rose and flowered. At a certain time, wandering teaching sages appeared in the villages and cities that arose in this period. Each of them had their followers, and each supposed to have solved – once and for all – the mystery of sorrow: Kapila (about 600 B.C.), Gosala (flourished about 535 B.C.), Mahavira (died about 485 B.C.), Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.), Pythagoras (about 582 – 500 B.C.), Xenophanes (about 570 – 475 B.C.), Parmenides (flourished about 500 B.C.), and Empedocles (about 500 – 430 B.C.).
In the teachings of these sages, in both India and Greece, a number of characteristic themes appear that were unknown to the myths of the early Aryans. Examples are: the idea of the wheel of rebirth, which is fundamental to Orphism as well as to India; the idea of the soul in bondage to the body (“the body a tomb”, said the Orphics) and deliverance through asceticism; sin leading to the punishment of hells, virtue to ecstasy and then to absolute knowledge and release. Heracleitus (flourished 500 B.C.) spoke of life as an ever-living fire, as did the Buddha in his Fire Sermon. The doctrine of elements is common to the two traditions: fire, air, water, earth among the Greeks; ether, air, fire, water and earth in the Indian context. A turbulent millennium had intervened. The old, largely rural Bronze Age situation had given place, over a broad domain of maturing civilization, to a galaxy of cities governed by secular, not divine kings.
A broad zone of readiness had therefore been established for the reception of a new approach to the problem of man’s highest good. Dislodged from the soil as well as from the old necessities of the hunt, a rather sophisticated urban population had appeared. Now, the chief concern was no longer magical (the weather, crops, abundance of goods, and long years), but psychological (the détente and harmonization of the psyche) and sociological (the integration of the individual with a new society based on a secular instead of hieratic tradition). In such a zone of readiness ideas and practices may appear spontaneously in more than one place at a time and spread as quickly as a flash fire. In both India and Greece, as well as in Persia between, the basic motifs of an early dualistic mythological philosophy abruptly appeared in new forms, about simultaneously, and immediately spread.
The Legend of the World Savior
It is not possible to reconstruct the character, life, and actual teaching of the man who became the Buddha. He is supposed to have lived about 563 – 483 B.C. However, his earliest biography, that of the Pali Canon, was set down in writing about 80 B.C. in Sri Lanka, five centuries and fifteen hundred miles removed from the actual historic scene. By then his life had become mythology, according to a pattern characteristic of World Saviors of the period from about 500 B.C. to about 500 A.D.
Schematically summarized, this archetypical Savior Biography tells of:
1. The scion of a royal line
2. Miraculously born
3. Amid supernatural phenomena
4. Of whom an aged holy man, shortly following the birth, prophesies a world-saving message, and
5. Whose childhood deeds proclaim his divine character.
In the Indian series, the world hero then:
6. Marries and begets an heir
7. Is awakened to his proper task
8. Departs, either with the consent of his elders (Jain series) or else secretly (the Buddha)
9. To engage in arduous forest disciplines
10. Which confront him, finally, with a supernatural adversary, over whom
11. Victory is achieved.
Following his face-to-face encounter with, and conquest of, the Antagonist, the World Savior:
12. Performs miracles
13. Becomes a wandering teacher
14. Preaching a doctrine of salvation
15. To a company of disciples, and
16. A smaller elite circle of initiates
17. One of whom, less quick to learn than the rest, is given charge and becomes the model of the lay community, while
18. Another, dark and treacherous, is bent on the master’s death.
The main point for the Buddhist is not the physical immolation of the Savior, but his awakening (bodhi) to the Truth of truths and therewith release (moksa) from illusion (maya). It is the inspiration and guiding it gives him towards his own enlightenment that counts, not the historical anecdotes.
Mythic Eternalization
There was, once upon a time, a good king Suddhodana, of the Dynasty of the Sun, who ruled in the city of Kapilavastu, where the sage Kapila once had taught. The Dynasty of the Sun stands for the principle of sheer light. The light of the sun is pure. The light of the moon partakes of darkness, waning and waxing, at once mortal and immortal. The gods Tammuz and Osiris and, in the Vedic system, Soma, were manifestations of the lunar mystery – as was Shiva. Shiva’s animal is the bull, his iconography is linked to that of the yogi of the Indus seals. The mythology of the Buddha, on the other hand, is of the sun. He is termed the Lion of the Shakya Clan, who sits upon the Lion Throne. The symbol of his teaching is the Sun Wheel, and the appropriate image is light.
In Egypt, with the rise of Dynasty V, about 2480 B.C., the mythology of the sun superseded the lunar system of Osiris, and the pharaoh, in the lunar role, was called the son of the sun-god Re. Thrones and couches with the legs of bulls were superseded by those with the legs of lions. Among the Semites, the sun-god Shamash (Sumerian Utu) was a deity of supreme power, and among the Aryans everywhere the sun has been a mighty force. In the brilliant city of Persepolis of the Persian King of Kings – built by Darius I (522 B.C.), and destroyed 330 B.C. by Alexander – the solar principle of the Lord of light of the Aryan prophet Zoroaster shone with the radiance of the sun itself on earth. In the early bull-to-lion sequence of Egypt, three significant stages were noted: 1.Mythic Identification (Pre-dynastic Ritual Regicide), 2.Mythic Inflation (in the Pharaonic cult of Dynasties I – IV), 3.Mythic Subordination (in the Re Mythology of Dynasty V). In connection with the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila and earlier cruder mythology and yoga of the Jains, one can speak of a fourth stage or stance; namely: 4.Mythic Eternalization (in yoga), where, by a shift of association, the subject learns to identify himself, not with the son of the sun but with the sun itself. “As serenely as light itself would shine if all that it illuminates – Heaven, Earth, and Air – were not: just so is the isolated state of the seeing subject, the pure Self, when the world threefold, you and I, in short everything visible is gone.”
Just as in stage 1, so here a mythic identification has been achieved. It is not, however, with any object perceived, whether mortal or immortal, but with the perceiving subject; not the field but the perceiver of the field: consciousness – of nothing – in and of itself.
The Middle Way
Those whose being (sattva) is illuminated (bodhi), Bodhisattvas, the Future Buddhas, after knowing the flavor of the world, have always, following the birth of a son, departed to the forest. In his search for the pass beyond sorrow Buddha had already marked out the Middle Way between devotion to pleasure (kama), and to pain (mara), and now, as the first fruit of his passage between the clashing rocks of those two extremes, he was experiencing a further reach of the Middle Way; namely, on the one hand, a realization that all beings are without a self (anatman), and yet, simultaneously, a compassion for all beings (karuna). This may be termed the fundamental posture of the Buddhist mind. The serious commitment of the Occidental mind to the concerns and value of the living person is fundamentally dismissed, as it is in Jainism as well,, and in the Sankhya too. However, the usual Oriental concern for monad also is dismissed. There is no reincarnating hero-monad, to be saved, released, or found. All life is sorrowful, and yet, there is no self, no being, no entity, in sorrow. There is no reason, consequently, to feel loathing, shock, or nausea, before the spectacle of the world; but on the contrary, the only feeling is appropriate is compassion.
Seated Buddha at Gandhara. Wikimedia Commons
Nirvana
It is difficult for an Occidental mind to realize how deep the impersonality of the Oriental lies. The earliest significant meeting of East and West on the level of an attempt at philosophical exchange occurred when that first and most vivid Westerner of all arrived: the young Alexander the Great. Having smashed the whole Persian empire with a single mighty blow, he came crashing through and appeared in the Indus Valley 327 B.C., to engage immediately in philosophical as well as political, economic, and geographical observations. We are told that in Taxila, the first Indian capital that he entered, Alexander and his officers learned of a set of philosophers sitting in session outside the city. Imagining counterparts of their own teachers and models (Alexander’s tutor, Aristotle, or Plato and Socrates), they sent an embassy to invite the learned circle to Alexander’s table. What they found were fifteen stark-naked persons sitting motionless on a sun-baked stretch of rock so hot that no one could step in without shoes.
The captain Alexander had sent, Onesicritus, told them through a series of interpreters that he and his king wished to be taught something of their wisdom. The reply was that no one arriving in the bravery of top boots, a broadbrimmed hat, and flashing cavalry coat, such as the Macedonian was wearing, could be taught philosophy. The candidate – did he come from God himself – should first be naked and have learned to sit peacefully on broiling rock. Two of the company, an elder and a younger, were finally persuaded by the raja of Taxila to Alexander’s board, but as they left the rock they were followed by the round abuse of their fellows and, when they returned, retired to a place apart.
This Greek report is the earliest known tangible evidence of the practice of yoga in Aryan India. There is not a single piece either of writing or of chiseled stone to mark the whole stretch of time from the ruin of the Indus cities to the year of Alexander’s coming. This demonstrates nevertheless that by 327 B.C., at the latest, the fundamental Indian notion of the goal of human life was already developed that inspires to this day all typically Indian thought and is the inspiration of the distinction between the Indian being “spiritual” and the Westerner “materialistic”.
However, in the earliest Buddhist monuments of stone, namely those of the first great layman of the faith, King Ashoka, who reigned about 268 – 232 B.C. (two centuries earlier than the Pali canon of 80 B.C.), it appears that a contrary ideal and mythology were already beginning to develop around the figure of the man living in the world as the Buddha lived for innumerable lifetimes – and is living now in each one of us – gaining nirvana not by the cessation, but by the performance, of acts. In the course of the following centuries, culminating in the period of the reign of King Kanishka (about 78 – 123 A.D.), this secular theme was developed to such a point that the earlier, monastic, world-negating view was fundamentally challenged as an archaic misinterpretation of the Middle Way.
We may speak of five central components of the primary Indian mythic complex:
The first was laid down in the Indus Valley system; a vegetal-lunar mythology of wonder and submission before destiny, in two aspects: a) the proto-Australoid, of a burgeoning tropical plant world, and b) the Hig-Bronze Age, hieratic derived from the Near East, of a cosmic order manifest in the planetary cycles.
The second was the leonine Aryan power system of the Vedas, which is also in two aspects: a) an earlier, in which deities were the final terms of reference, and b) a later, in which the power of the Brahminic liturgy itself was the final term. In the course of time in India the Vedic freely willing gods lost command, and the earlier Bronze Age principle of order (maat, me, rta, dharma) returned ineluctably – under priestly command.
The third component of the Indian mythic complex was yoga, defined as a technique for achieving mythic identification. A number of its disciplines appear to have been derived from shamanism, but in the Indus Valley context we have seen figures in classic yoga posture resembling, on the one hand, Shiva as lord of Beasts and, on the other, Gautama Buddha in the Deer Park of Benares and the Lord Parshva between serpents.
The fourth essential component of the Indian mythic complex, the mood of absolute world loathing of the Great Reversal, appears to have been known to the kings of the Upanishads; they refer to an illustration of the solar way, the Way of Flame, to those who have quit the world for the forest. We know that in both Egypt and Mesopotamia a lamentation literature had developed as early as about 1750 B.C. It can be supposed that in the Indus Valley as well, a mood of world- and life-negation overcame many of the native non-Aryan population in their period of collapse, when the Vedic warrior folk arrived, about 1500 – 1200 B.C. Whereas in neither Egypt nor Mesopotamia does anyone seem to have found a practical answer to the problem of escape from sorrow, in India yoga supplied the means. Instead of striving for mythic identity with any being or principle of the object world – the meditating world-deniers now began perhaps already about 1000 B.C. – the great and unique Indian adventure of the negative way: “not that, not that (neti, neti). Three stages of this path of exit from the field are seen: a) the Jains, who strove for the physical separation of jiva from non-jiva through progressive vows of life-renunciation; b) the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila and the yoga system of Patanjali, where the subject of knowledge was conceived to rest forever apart from the object world of matter – with “the energy of intellect grounded in itself”; c) with the advent of the Buddha, even that subject was erased, and the sole term became the void.
At this juncture, a fifth and final factor entered the field of Indian thought. Canceling identification both with object and with subject, there came a return to life without commitment to anything at all, but with compassion equally for all. For all things are void.
How these elements have evolved further on, will be seen under the theme of “The Age of the Great Classics (500 B.C. – 500 A.D.).
The Age of the Great Classics (500 B.C. – 500 A.D.)
The epoch from the century of the Buddha to the middle of the Gupta period (about 500 B.C. – 500 A.D.) may be termed the age of the Great Classics, not for India alone but for the civilized world as a whole. In Europe, between the time of Aeschylus (525 – 456 B.C.) and that of Boethius (about 480 – 524 A.D.), the Greco-Roman heritage was shaped and terminated. In the Levant, between the reigns of Darius I (reigned 521 – 486 B.C.) and Justinian (527 – 565 A.D.), the Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Christian, various Gnostic and Manichean canons were defined. In the Far East, between the lifetime of Confucius (551 – 478 B.C.) and the legendary date of the coming to China of the Indian Buddhist sage Bodhidharma (520 A.D.), the basic texts and principles of Confucian, Taoist, and Chinese Buddhist thought were established. And in fact, even the civilizations of pre-Columbian America came to flower in this millennium of their so-called Classic Horizon: about 500 B.C. – 500 A.D.
Both overland and by sea, the ways between Rome, Persia, India, and China were opened in this period to an ever-increasing commerce, and to such a degree that nowhere in the hemisphere was there any longer the possibility of a local mythological development in isolation. Local forces shaped the thoughts as they were imported: in Europe the force of the rational, innovating individual; in the Levant, the idea of the one true community realizing God’s aim; in China the old Bronze Age thought of an accord between heaven, earth, and man; and throughout the history of later India, the sense of an immanent ground into which all things dissolve and out of which, simultaneously, they continually pour.
During the course of this millennium there flowed from the West into India four increasingly massive tides:
a) from Achaemenian Persia after 600 B.C.; b) Hellenistic, following Alexander’s raid of 327 B.C., supported by a powerful Greek community in the northwestern province of Bactria, which for a time regained control of the entire Indus Valley (about 200 – 25 B.C.); c) Rome, flowing to India largely by way of sea trade developing in the first centuries A.D. along the west coast of India down past the Cape and up along the eastern coast of India; d) following the victory of the Christian cult in Rome and the subsequent closing of the universities and extirpation of pagans throughout the empire, there turned up in India, about 400 A.D., a tide of learned refugees, bearing a rich treasure of late Roman, Greek, and Syro-egyptian civilization – inspiring many aspects of the subsequent Indian golden age.
A sudden blossoming of elegant stone monuments brought the glory of India out of the dark into the full dress of a documented civilization, in the period of the following Maurya Dynasty (about 322 – 185 B.C.) – founded by Chandragupta Maurya.
Three Buddhist Kings
Ashoka Maurya, Chandragupta’s grandson, reigned 268 – 232 B.C. Seeing the havoc of sorrow, misery, and death that was brought about by wars he joined the Buddhist Order as a lay disciple and became the first Buddhist king. He built monasteries and shrines in great numbers. With the fall of the Persian empire and the burning of the palace city of Persepolis, the accumulated artistry of Persia was out of work, and, moving eastward to the nearest successor empire, had reached Chandragupta’s India. In the Buddhist art of Ashoka’s time, a colonial flowering of the Achaemenid style produced the first stone monuments of what presently became one of the greatest sculptural traditions in the history of the world. As the forms of Indian art progress from this date, the evidences increase of an organic interplay between traits of the deepest Indian past and arrivals from the West.
In this largely Buddhist world a combination of Egypto-Assyro-Persian, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and Greek elements can be readily discerned. The whole superintended by a monarch – the greatest in the world in his day - of a tolerance and gentleness seldom matched in the history of states, protecting the myriads of lion-roraring monks of the numerous life-renouncing nirvana cults of his time, yet equally fostering and developing, with the wisdom of a great patriarch, the well-being, both on earth and in heaven, of his children of the world. It actually seemed that something like the golden age of the lion lying with the lamb was about to be realized.
However, the laws of history – which in the view of his grandfather had been defined as the “law of fishes” (the big ones eat the little ones, and the little ones have to be fast) – had not been undone in this period. The empire disintegrated some fifty years after Ashoka’s death, when the last of his successors, Brihadratha, was murdered by his own commander-in-chief.
In Hellenistic Bactria a Greek tyrant, Euthydemus, had in 212 B.C. established a Greek military state independent of the Seleucids, and his son Demetrius reconquered the entire Indus Valley for the Greeks in 197 B.C. In this area, Hindu and Buddhist, as well as Classical mythologies and beliefs were in play. The Greeks themselves identified Indra with Zeus, Shiva with Dionysus, Krishna with Herakles, and the goddess Lakshmi with Artemis. One of the greatest of the Greeks kings, Menander (about 125 – 95 B.C.), appears to have been, if not himself a Buddhist, then at least a lavish patron of the faith. The Buddhist Wheel of the Law appears on his coins. Plutarch states that the cities of his realm contended for the honor of his ashes and agreed on a division among themselves in order that the memory of his reign should not be lost.
The days of the Greeks on this threshold of nirvana were numbered by the approach of a somewhat enigmatic horde of nomads from the vicinity of the Chinese Wall. By the Indians they were called the Kushanas, classified by some as Mongols, by others as Turkomen of a sort, and by still others as some kind of Scythian-like Aryan folk. They had been dislodged and set in motion by a group of Huns ranging the country between the southern reaches of the Wall and the mountains of Nan Shan. Their migration across the wastes of Kuku Nor and Sinkiang lasted about forty years (about 165 – 125 B.C.), causing major displacements of population in the areas traversed, and therewith new pressures on the borders of Bactria. The Greek defences broke. First Scythians, then Kushanas, poured through and crossed the mountains into India, taking possession of the greater part of the Gangetic plain.
Kanishka, whose dates are variously reckoned as 78 – 123 or 120 – 162 A.D., was the greatest of the Kushana kings. Like Ashoka and Menander, Kanishka was a convert to Buddhism and, as such, a lavish patron both of monks and of the arts of the lay community. The cultivation of Sanskrit as an elite literary tongue, and of the classic Kavya (“poetic”) style, commenced, apparently, in the Kushana courts. Numerous immense reliquary mounds were built in his day; those from Ashoka’s time were enlarged – great silent mounds symbolic of nirvana. In earlier times, monuments never showed the Buddha in human form. However, in the period and reign of Kanishka a new development took place. The Buddha himself was now represented – everywhere – and in two contrasting styles: the Greco-Roman of Gandhara, where he is shown as a kind of semi-divine Greek teacher, and a powerful native style developed by the stone craftsmen of the city of Mathura, where he is rendered, vigorously and realistically, as an archetypal Indian sage.
The most prominent single figure in the ornamentation of all the early Buddhist monuments, is the lotus-goddess, Shri Lakshmi. In the course of the following centuries, whether in Buddhist, Hindu or Jain art and literature, this accent on the female, and specifically as an erotic object, steadily increases, until by the twelfth and thirteen centuries it seems very dominant. This happened in spite of the religious attitudes and admonitions of restraint towards women. This reappearance in the midst of meditating monks of the goddess symbolic of the universe represents a development which we will come back to.
The Way of Vision
We are told that Han Ming Ti of China dreamed of a golden man in the west. Although he knew that only demons and barbarians dwelt beyond the celestial bounds of his empire, he nevertheless sent forth an embassy. This passed into the wilderness along the Old Silk Road, which had been opened between Rome and the Far East about 100 B.C. And there, indeed, they met two Buddhist monks coming eastward conducting a white horse that bore an image of the Buddha on its back, together with a packet of Mahayana texts. In the capital Lo Yang a monastery was built to receive them, and it was named White Horse Monastery. It was here that the long task of rendering Sanskrit into Chinese began.
The Far Eastern Buddhas are of purely visionary apparitions, without attempt at historical reference whatsoever. Of these, the most popular and important is Amitabha, the Buddha of “immeasurable (a-mita) light (abha)” – known also as Amitayus, the Buddha of “immeasurable (a-mita) life duration (ayus) – who is a product of purely Buddhist thought, yet bears the mark of derivation from Iran. Amida, as this solar Buddha is termed in the Far East, was known in China by the middle of the second century A.D. and is today in Japan the focus of devotion of the Jobo and Shinsu sects.
The “Buddha Realm” is an invention of the Mahayana of great interest to comparative mythology. It shows many points of resemblance to the Western idea of paradise, yet it is not conceived to be the ultimate goal of the spiritual life. It is the penultimate – a port of departure for nirvana. As numerous ports are to be found along the shoreline of a great sea, so likewise along that of the ocean of the Buddhist void there may be many Buddha Realms. We hear of those of Maitreya, Vairochana, and Gautama, as well as that of Amida. Conceivably, Buddha Realms may in the eyes of the Mahayana mission exist in any religious field, which makes it possible for them to enter any faith and not destroy, but augment and supplement the local forms. The Buddha Realm of Amitabha came into being by virtue of the vow that he made when he was still a Bodhisattva : he would refuse enlightenment for himself unless by his Buddhahood he might bring to nirvana anyone who appealed to his name.
The World Regained – as Dream
The use of visions to lead the mind and sentiments beyond themselves, over thresholds to new realms of realization, has been developed in the Orient over centuries. A first point to be noted is the break away from actuality, professed by the Jains. The individual is psychologically dissociated from the field of life normal to his kind. External stimuli are cut off. Next, with the normal system of sign stimuli (the reality system) cut off, a supernormal order is developed (the mythic system) to which the sentiments are adessed.
From this, two alternatives arise: the negative method of the Jains, Sankhya, and Hinayana required the extinction of the system of supernormal stimuli and a realization thereby of trance rapture – with or without a sense of unqualified being. The positive method of the Buddha Realm, on the other hand, retains the supernormal image and develops it in two directions: 1. Toward the void of non-being (the Buddha Realm is a mere vision of the mind), and 2. Toward actuality (the world of normal life is itself a Buddha Realm).