An End to Suffering Page 10

  The theory of rebirth seeded that of karma (literally ‘action’), which the Buddha was to rework in radical ways.11 According to this, desire moves men to act. Their actions cannot but have certain results. But the results cannot all be apparent in one lifetime. They are revealed in the next life and others beyond, just as this life manifests the results of actions undertaken in previous lives.

  Initially, the theory claimed no more than that happiness and sorrow were caused by one’s conduct in previous lives. The earliest of the Upanishads, the Brhadaranyaka, asserts:

  What a man turns out to be depends on how he acts and on how he conducts himself. If his actions are good, he will turn into something good. If his actions are bad, he will turn into something bad…And so people say: ‘A person here consists simply of desire.’ A man resolves in accordance with his resolves, and turns out to be in accordance with his action.12

  The implications of this world view extended into every sphere of human activity in classical India. Sanskrit poetics assume that the individual reading and responding sensitively to a poem brings into play the experiences of his past lives, and that an unresponsive reading on his part can be put down to insufficiently refined previous experience.

  This law of karma may have been the first widely acceptable explanation for human suffering; it remains popular around the world. In India it was rarely detached from social and religious obligations. The Brahmins enjoined all men to follow their caste duties and obey social hierarchies. In this rigid world view, it was the carpenter’s job to work with wood and that of a Brahmin to officiate at sacrifices. The roles weren’t interchangeable, and only staying within the prescribed boundaries could bring promotion. As the Chandogya Upanishad put it,

  Now people here whose behaviour is pleasant can expect to enter a pleasant womb, like that of a woman of the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, or the Vaishya class. But people of foul behaviour can expect to enter a foul womb, like that of a dog, a pig, or an outcaste woman.13

  The Brahmins later proposed that life should be lived in four different phases, or asramas: the chaste student had to marry, become a householder, start a family, then gradually retire into religious contemplation before becoming a wandering ascetic. The Brahmins were especially keen on householders, for their own livelihood depended on men desiring and acting, producing and reproducing, within society.

  Once fortified with Brahminical ideology, the theory of karma not only offered men no escape from the world but also bound them more firmly to its never-ending cycle of action and consequences. It promised no clearer way to salvation than the realization of the essential unity of the universe. Not surprisingly, there were men who sought to reject altogether the idea of karma, along with the Brahmin-defined social order. These were the sramanas, the homeless wanderers and spiritual seekers produced by the new urban civilization. The Buddha was the greatest of these sramanas, who were to bring about something of a revolution of ideas in North India.

  Unlike the wandering Sophists of Greece, whom they resemble superficially, these seekers offered no practical guidance on how to live and succeed in the world. Rather, they stressed renunciation of the active life: it was the best way out of the trap of karma, of endless life and suffering. The basis of sacrificial religion had been desire for the world. But the world, with its social and economic upheavals, its wars and rivalries, had proved to be an unsettling place.

  The eighth-century Greek poet Hesiod evoked such a world full of two kinds of strife in his Works and Days:

  Strife is no only child. Upon the earth

  Two strifes exist; the one is praised by those

  Who come to know her, and the other blamed.

  Their natures differ; for the cruel one

  Makes battles thrive, and war; she wins no love

  But men are forced, by the immortal’s will,

  To pay the grievous goddess due respect.

  The other, first-born child of the blackest Night

  Was set by Zeus, who lives on high,

  Set in the roots of earth, an aid to men.

  She urges even lazy men to work;

  A man grows eager, seeing another rich

  From ploughing, planting, ordering his house;

  So neighbour vies with neighbour in the rush

  For wealth: this strife is good for mortal men –

  Potter hates potter; carpenters compete,

  And beggar strives with beggar, bard with bard.14

  Hesiod found desire, envy and conflict as part of the natural order of things. In the sixth century BC, the philosopher Heraclitus mocked those who looked for stability and permanence in the world. Everything, he claimed, was in constant flux. War was the father of all and strife was justice. Good and evil were one, and whatever lived did so by the destruction of something else.

  The Indian ascetic wanderers who saw their stable ritual-based society crack under the pressures of new ways of living were no less radical and comfortless. Many of them were solitaries, living deep in forests. Others were self-torturers – exhibitionists like those still seen in religious fairs in India, lying on a bed of nails, or walking barefoot on hot coals. Most of them sought power – the kind of magic power no longer available through sacrifices. But some also sought knowledge.15

  The Buddhist text Digha Nikaya mentions six of the post-Upanishad radical thinkers, who around the time of the Buddha’s birth wandered conspicuously through North India, inciting debate and discussion with their provocative views. The most radical among them was a materialist called Ajita Kesakambala, a contemporary of the Buddha, who denied even transmigration, declaring flatly:

  There is no [merit in] almsgiving, sacrifice, or offering, no result or ripening of good or evil deeds. There is no passing from this world to the next…There is no afterlife…Man is formed of four elements: when he dies earth returns to the aggregate of the earth, water to water, fire to fire, and air to air, while the senses vanish into space. Four men take up the corpse; they gossip [about the dead man] as far as the burning ground, where his bones turn the colour of a dove’s wing and his sacrifice ends in ashes.

  Makkhali Gosala, the leader of the sect of Ajivikas, which preceded the Buddha and survived for close to two thousand years, claimed that the niyati, or fate, controlled everything:

  All beings, all that have breath, all that are born, all that have life, are without power, strength, or virtue, but are developed by destiny, chance and nature…There is no question of bringing unripe karma to fruition, nor of exhausting karma already ripened, by virtuous conduct, by vows, by penitence, or by chastity…Just as a ball of thread will, when thrown, unwind to its full length, so fool and wise alike will take their course, and make an end of sorrow.

  There was even an atomist called Pakudha Kacchayana, a precursor of the Greek Democritus, who asserted that there were seven elementary categories, the bodies of earth, water, fire, air, joy, sorrow and life, which were ‘neither made nor ordered, neither caused nor constructed’ and were ‘eternal as a mountain peak, as stable as a stone pillar’. He went on to declare that even if ‘someone cuts off another’s head with a sharp sword, he does not deprive anyone of life. A sword just intervenes between the seven aggregates.’

  A more uncompromisingly anti-Brahmin teacher, Purana Kassapa, claimed that there was no such thing as sin or virtuous conduct. As he put it, ‘Even if with a razor-sharp discus a man were to reduce all the life on earth to a single heap of flesh he would commit no sin, neither would sin approach him.’

  The most famous among these men was Mahavira, also a contemporary of the Buddha, who also left his family at a young age to become a wandering ascetic. Mahavira rejected the authority of the Brahmins and stressed that a balanced life, based upon the principles of non-violence and frugality, was the only release from the cycle of rebirths. His followers, called Jains, came to be known for their large presence in trade and commerce; they remain among India’s most successful and philanthropic businessmen.

&nb
sp; These new spiritual teachers did not challenge Brahmin orthodoxy through abstract speculation alone. They formed sects, and prescribed their own mental and spiritual exercises. The Brahmins had made renunciation the last phase of their four-phase life, thinking it appropriate for the old and unproductive members of society. But the unorthodox thinkers stressed the importance of relinquishing home, family and possessions early in life, and embracing celibacy and poverty. They repeated that each individual had to realize the truth personally, through long practice of asceticism or meditation.16

  Many of those who followed the new gurus and left home and family became wandering sadhus, or mendicants, indifferent to weather, dirt or pain – they are the first known example of organized asceticism in history. Impressed by their renunciation and dedication, the general population fed and sheltered them. This tradition of hospitality to spiritual seekers continues in rural India today. In North India in 326 BC, Alexander the Great apparently met some of these ascetics, whom he called gymnosophists (naked men of knowledge). Millions of them can still be found at Hindu festivals and fairs in the cities of Hardwar, Allahabad and Ujjain. Their presence was large enough for a Greek emissary to India in the third century to note that the two important philosophical sects in India were of the Brahmins and the sramanas.

  These homeless philosophers travelled across North India, occasionally coming together in the groves and parks outside the big Indian cities of the time. Here, they debated with each other in a relaxed, democratic way that must have been a clear contrast to the sterile formality of a Brahmin-supervised ritual. Large audiences gathered around the sramanas. The young Siddhartha would often be among the crowds in the park outside Kapilavastu, receiving and absorbing the ideas he would later modify.

  The Death of God

  THIS WAS THE VIGOROUS counterculture that emerged in India in the sixth century BC – the troubled times in which the Buddha appeared. Like the Beats and hippies of a recent era, people left their homes and professions, dissatisfied with their regimented lives of work, and moved from one sramana sect to another, from one guru to the next. The men who led them were India’s first cosmopolitan thinkers, unhindered by caste boundaries or other parochial considerations, who became aware that human beings are united by certain shared dilemmas. These early dissenters both rejected and refined what we now know as the characteristic features of Indian religion: transmigration, non-violence, organized asceticism and mysticism. They began the process, which the Buddha advanced greatly, of taking Indian thought from the speculative – the Vedas and the Upanishads – to the ethical level.

  This was perhaps inevitable. The Vedic Aryans had lived in a simple world. Like all primitive peoples living off the land, they had known a special proximity to nature, in which they found their deities and laws. Sacrifice helped maintain their compact with nature, and guaranteed the preservation of rta, the cosmic order. But as they expanded into North India and incorporated the language and ways of life of the non-Aryan peoples they encountered, the magic charms and spells contained in the Vedas turned out to provide few answers to the new problems of living together. Sacrifice had worked for a static and homogeneous society; it couldn’t respond to change and diversity. It came to look redundant as the communal morality of the older closer-knit societies cracked. The Brahmins, who were thinkers as well as priests, responded to their changing condition by proposing karma as an explanation for social inequalities and the suffering they caused. Those people who found themselves gradually on their own in a hostile world and felt the first melancholy stirrings of individuality were offered the consolation of seeing themselves part of a larger reality, the brahman.

  But for many people this kind of salvation was clearly not enough. And karma seemed too much like a prop for a social structure that was supposedly part of the cosmic order but was actually an elite’s attempt to rationalize oppression and injustice.

  In the new urban centres, where the vaishyas, or merchants, seemed more powerful than the Brahmin or the kshatriyas, the old social structure itself was under threat. Here, the unity and morality of rural Aryan society could only be a memory. People were lonelier, and could not control their lives by following moral laws that appeared to be without divine sanction. In one of the Upanishads, a king speaks thus of the tumultuous changes: ‘[Great heroes and mighty kings] have had to give up their glory; we have seen the deaths of [demigods and demons]; the oceans have dried up; mountains have crumbled; the Pole Star is shaken; the Earth founders; the gods perish. I am like a frog in a dry well.’

  It was in this context of widespread insecurity that the radical thinkers, the sramanas, emerged, denying karma, denouncing ritual, breaking flamboyantly from tradition and preaching what the Brahmins at least might have perceived as dangerous nihilism:

  When, finally, all the observances and customs upon which the power of the gods and of the priests and redeemers depends will have been abolished, when, that is to say, morality in the old sense will have died, then there will come – well, what will come then?1

  Writing in 1881, Nietzsche claimed that Europe was, after its long history, only reaching the tragic lucidity about human affairs at which India had arrived before the Buddha. In his view of India’s spiritual history, the Brahmin priests who started out as mediators with the gods had ended up replacing them. But then the gods and the mediators themselves had been thrown aside, and the world of transcendent values abolished, by the time the Buddha arrived to preach a ‘religion of self-redemption’.

  Nietzsche treated the Buddha very sympathetically, in contrast to his brusque, even brutal, dismissal of some of the great figures of European philosophy: Socrates, Augustine, Kant and Hegel. He was particularly keen to distinguish Buddhism from Christianity:

  It is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity – it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems of its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives…it no longer speaks of the ‘struggle against sin; but quite in accordance with actuality, the struggle against suffering. It already has – and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity – the self-deception of moral concepts behind it – it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil.2

  Nietzsche saw his position in Europe as akin to that of the Buddha in India. He claimed to stand at the end of two millennia of European delusions, when philosophers, no less than ordinary people, had exalted an imaginary other world at the expense of their life on earth. As he saw it, Europeans had lost the art of living in the world without positing life in the eternal as good and life on earth as evil, without demonizing passions and instincts and exalting abstract knowledge, without, in fact, making any moral judgements at all. They were far from living as naturally as he thought the ancient Greeks had once lived, in the world of endless change and strife that Hesiod and Heraclitus had celebrated.

  Instead, for centuries men in Europe had tried to give meaning to their lives and the world they lived in by positing such concepts as God, soul, moral law, aim, being and unity. Christianity for Nietzsche was one of the greatest such man-made delusions:

  Nothing but imaginary causes (‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘ego,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘free will’ – or ‘unfree will’): nothing but imaginary effects (‘sin,’ ‘redemption,’ ‘grace,’ ‘punishment,’ ‘forgiveness of sins’).3

  Christianity had helped men place the good and real in another world and stigmatize their natural desires and passions on earth as unreal and evil. This error had finally been exposed, partly by men who through the course of centuries pursued truth into the real world and found, through their growing use of science and reason, that ‘the apparent world is the only one’ and that ‘the so-called “real” world has only been lyingly added’. As Nietzsche saw it, the self-deception could no longer be sustained in the political and social conditions of the nineteenth century, amid the prodigious advances of science and industr
y, of empires and nation states:

  Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god; interpreting history in honour of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purpose; interpreting one’s experiences as pious people have long interpreted theirs, as if everything were providential, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the soul – that is over now.4

  Here, Nietzsche spoke partly from his own experience. Born in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor, he had come into a world swiftly and ruthlessly transformed by the bourgeoisie of Western Europe under the aegis of science and reason. This was becoming a world marked by steam engines, factories, railroads, industrial zones, teeming cities with slums, newspapers, telegraphs, telephones, mass media, new nation states, multinational capital, mass social movement and a growing world market.

  Natural sciences were revealing the world in terms of laws of mechanics and energy. Men did not so much seek the meaning of the world as how it functioned so that they could turn it to their advantage. Charles Darwin had helped replace God with the ape as the subject of human enquiry. History offered its own secular explanation of how human societies had come into being.

  Amid these changes, Europeans found it hard to remain honest Christians – just as the Brahmins had once struggled to remain Brahmins in the new urban centres of North India:

  What is it that Christianity calls ‘the world’? To be a soldier, a judge, a patriot; to defend oneself; to look to one’s honour; to seek one’s advantage; to be proud: every practice of every moment, every instinct and every valuation translated into actions is today anti-Christian.