An End to Suffering Page 6

  Jacquemont, whose father was a philosopher in the mould freshly created by the French Enlightenment, could not but be different from Bernier and other previous travellers. The Orient Jacquemont travelled to may have been ageless or torpid, but the Europe he was travelling from had changed after its political and industrial revolutions, and was changing more radically and speedily than at any other time in the past two millennia.

  In less than a century, France had experienced the Enlightenment, the Revolution and then Napoleon’s empire. It had seen the rise of a bourgeois class whose aspirations for social and intellectual mobility were suddenly no longer restrained by religion, ancestry or any other traditional force. Members of this ambitious class wished to throw off the yoke of the clergy, nobility and monarchy. Their great thinkers and ideologues spoke of the rights of man; they asserted that man, far from being sinful, as Christianity had supposed, was essentially good; and that he no longer needed to believe in, or aspire towards, a transcendent order. For, with reason and science on his side, he had the capacity to change the world he lived in.

  It was this new religion of rationality and progress – the belief in the human potential to work the kind of wonders which once only God could have performed – that the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte rapidly exported across Europe and, later, to many other parts of the world, making the French Revolution the first truly universal event in history. Three decades before Jacquemont arrived in India, Napoleon had invaded Egypt along with a team of scientists and commissioned a gigantic research project, which resulted in the twenty-four-volume Description de l’Egypte. Jacquemont himself was one of the men in the early nineteenth century sent around the world by the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to collect samples of flora and fauna then unknown to western science.

  This energetic European engagement with the world, for which Descartes had provided the intellectual scaffolding, produced knowledge and buttressed European power. It eventually led Western Europe in the nineteenth century to the conquest of Asia and Africa and to empires much greater than those the Romans could conceive of. Even Marx was moved to describe rhapsodically the accomplishments of the European bourgeoisie while prophesying – wrongly – its overthrow. In a small but important way, Jacquemont embodied the swiftly growing confidence of the European bourgeoisie that the future of the world belonged to them.

  Jacquemont seemed to represent the strong-willed young men of French literature that I tried to identify with – the Nietzschean characters who always managed, against all odds, to seize the day and control their destiny. In his twenties, he had already had an affair with a famous opera singer, and had travelled to both Haiti and North America. He was not yet thirty when early in 1828 he set off for India, the country that France’s traditional rivals, the British, had just managed to subjugate politically. Arriving in Calcutta, the chief city of British-ruled India, he found elegant riverside mansions full of bored British colonials.

  Many of these men had left Britain in order to make a career or easy fortune in India. Before trade came under government control in the nineteenth century, British commerce in India had been much like robbery. Most of the colonizers were anxious to make their pile and return, as quickly as possible, before the onset of tropical disease, to a comfortable house in the British countryside. Yet Jacquemont found on the whole that ‘perfidious Albion’ was better behaved in India than in Europe. ‘I certainly see,’ he reported to Prosper Mérimée, another of his literary friends, ‘the English, for the most part, in a more advantageous light than they exhibited themselves to you’.11

  In Calcutta he learnt Hindustani from a Benares Brahmin and befriended Lord Bentinck, the reform-minded Governor-General of India, whose piety and rectitude reminded Jacquemont of Pennsylvanian Quakers, and to whom he talked of religion with his usual ‘scepticism and incredulity’. In the late autumn of 1829, he left Calcutta with a retinue of servants and a sheaf of introductions to various British officials across India. He travelled through the North Indian plains, passing through the cities of Benares, Agra, Delhi and Dehradun, on his way to the Himalayas, where he told his father he hoped to live for four months, at the ‘height of nine or ten thousand feet above the level of the sea, in a country where the summers are like those of Hungary, and the winters like those of Lapland’.12

  In June 1830, Jacquemont reached Simla. ‘Do you not see Semla on your map?’ he wrote to his father. ‘A little to the north of the 31 degree of latitude, a little to the east of the 77 degree of longitude, some leagues from the Sutlej. Is it not curious to dine in silk stockings at such a place, and to drink a bottle of hock and another of champagne every evening – delicious Mocha coffee – and to receive the Calcutta journals every morning?’13

  It was curious: the appearance of what Jacquemont called the ‘abundance, luxury, and riches of European civilization’ at more than two thousand metres in the Himalayas. Arriving in Simla almost two centuries after Jacquemont, and almost fifty years after the departure of the British from India, I saw only traces of Europe. The takeover by the erstwhile natives, the Indian middle class, appeared complete. There remained something piquantly incongruous in the toy-like shops with Tudor fronts, the theatre called ‘Gaiety’, the hotels called Chapslee and Sherwood, and the promenade on the Mall that warned of steep fines for Indians spitting betel-juice on the cleanest road in the city.

  Much of Simla’s fairyland appearance owed its origin to Jacquemont’s host C. P. Kennedy, an artillery captain, who then guarded British strategic interests in a region at the extremity of British territory in India.14 As Jacquemont described him to Prosper Mérimée, Kennedy enjoyed unlimited power over a vast region and was ‘more of a king of kings than Agamemnon himself, without any Achilles to oppose him among the petty mountain-rajahs, his vassals’.

  Kennedy had chanced upon the site of Simla soon after the British wrested the region from the Gurkhas of Nepal in the Anglo-Nepalese war of 1814–1816. He immediately saw its possibilities. The views were wonderful, the summer months pleasant and the autumn cool. In 1822, Kennedy enlisted hundreds of coolies who felled the cedars and oaks and built a gabled cottage on a wide ridge facing the snowy peaks: it was the first house in Simla. Other British officers quickly emulated him. In 1827, Lord Bentinck became the first of the many British rulers of India to spend a summer in Simla. With him came the official machinery of British India. The town of Simla arose, ‘as it were,’ Jacquemont wrote, ‘by enchantment’.

  Jacquemont did not fail to enjoy its rare pleasures to the full. There were other British officials with Captain Kennedy, lonely bachelors, pleased to have a new and friendly European with them. Attended by his generous hosts, Jacquemont busily consumed ‘elegant and recherché breakfasts’, Périgord truffles and Rhine wine and champagne while claiming in letters to France that he was only relaxing for a bit before throwing himself into months of hard lonely work in the inner Himalayas.

  Jacquemont left Simla ‘restored’, he wrote to his father, to his ‘accustomed vigour’, and planning to go up to the borders of Tibet. A cook, a steward and scores of Gurkha soldiers accompanied him. At Sarahan, he was received in the middle of a hurricane by the King of Bushair and presented with a bag of musk. A few days later, he crossed the Sutlej, on his way to the less inhabited, Buddhist parts of Kinnaur, and to one of the more improbable encounters in which the nineteenth century – the age of European exploration – abounded.

  ‘Buddha, here,’ Jacquemont reported to his father from Kinnaur, ‘begins to steal the clouds of incense of which Brahma has the exclusive right on the Indian side of the Himalaya.’15 Jacquemont did not say what made him think so. Things have changed so little in Kinnaur that he may have seen what I saw more than a hundred and fifty years later: an old lama stooped over an old manuscript in a temple that seemed Hindu but was in fact Buddhist. Or, he may have spent a night in a dark mountain-top monastery and awakened the next morning to the echoes of a gong and gone down to low-roofed halls filled with ince
nse smoke and the soft chanting of the monks.

  Jacquemont’s casual reference to the Buddhist Himalayas almost obscures the fact that in 1830 the Buddha was still one of the many mysteries of India. In the early nineteenth century much of India’s pre-Islamic past – the stone pillars and Buddhist stupas of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, the Indo-Greek sculpture of Afghanistan, the erotic temples at Khajuraho – still lay buried deep in jungles or in the earth. There were only a few clues to their existence. Jacquemont told his father that he had ‘no doubt in my own mind that the Brahmins possessed much information to which they are now strangers’, and that, ‘in this respect India resembles Egypt’.

  He wasn’t alone in thinking this. A country out of touch with its past: that’s how India was also seen by its British conquerors, who took it upon themselves to repossess its religions and cultures, and whose achievements were commemorated in the books I found in Simla. In 1784, a judge called William Jones had set up the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. Jones, who learnt a total of twenty-eight languages, confirmed the similarity between Sanskrit and Greek. James Prinsep, an architect, deciphered the ancient Indian script of Brahmi, the ancestor of most Indian scripts, that the British had found on pillars and rock faces across South Asia, and threw the first clear light on Ashoka, the first great patron of Buddhism; and later in the nineteenth century Alexander Cunningham, an army officer, excavated the site near Benares where the Buddha had preached his first sermon.

  Most of the explorers worked for the British administration in India and weren’t usually trained scholars. Some of them were philistines and vandals, who did more damage to existing or recently dug-up monuments than had been done by centuries of decay and neglect. The best among them, such as Jones and Prinsep, were motivated by the possibility that the strange country they had come to rule might once have had a civilization as distinguished as those of Greece and Rome.

  They worked with intuition and premises that were often shaky. Very little was known about ancient India; even when they chanced upon monuments and texts they often lacked the experience or knowledge to make the right connections. When in 1820 a British army captain called E. Fell discovered the great Buddhist stupa of Sanchi in the jungles of central India, he wasn’t at first sure which religion it belonged to. It was too old to be Muslim. His suspicion that it was Buddhist was not helped by the fact there were no Buddhists to be seen in India. It wasn’t even clear then that the faiths followed in Thailand, Burma and Ceylon were versions of the same religion. The British scholars at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta still thought that the Buddha had been Egyptian or Ethiopian, or perhaps was another name for the Norse god Woden.

  The clues to an Indian origin of the Buddha were many but confusing. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, a British naturalist and surveyor called Francis Buchanan had visited Burma where he met Buddhists who told him that the Buddha was from India. He found evidence for this a few years later, when his work took him to the ancient town of Bodh Gaya in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Buddhists no longer lived among the centuries-old ruins he saw. Hindus worshipped the statues of the Buddha, who by then had long been part of the Hindu pantheon, but Brahmins were in charge of prayers at the pyramidal temple that looked to him Buddhist in origin and inspiration.

  The locals told Buchanan of strange pilgrims to the ruins from far-off lands who revered a god called Gautama. Buchanan realized that Gautama was the Buddha, and recognized that the pilgrims were from Burma. But he still didn’t know that Bodh Gaya was where the Buddha had achieved enlightenment while sitting under a pipal (Indian fig) tree.

  Buchanan probably would not have used the word ‘enlightenment’ to define the Buddha’s revelation: the word by then had different connotations for Europeans, and was associated not so much with religion as with its rejection in favour of a rational, materialist outlook. The growing British interest in Buddhism was very rarely fed by a feeling for religion, or by the discontent with existing conditions and desire for salvation that had set ancient peoples on their philosophical and spiritual quests. Brian Houghton Hodgson, the British official who contributed more than anyone else to the western discovery of Buddhism, ended his days in Britain, as a country gentleman, riding to hounds.

  Hodgson was barely eighteen when he arrived in India in 1818 to serve as an administrator. Ill-health forced him to spend much of his time in the cool climate of the Himalayas. As the sole British representative in Nepal, which was partly Buddhist, Hodgson turned, perhaps out of boredom, to collecting Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscripts and interpreting them with the help of a local Buddhist he met in Kathmandu. He was struck by the fact that Buddhism still existed as a religion and culture; also by the fact that all the place names in the accounts of the Buddha’s life appeared to be Indian. But he couldn’t take his researches very far, partly because he was not supported by British institutions of learning, and partly because he felt contempt for what he found in the texts: what he called the ‘interminable sheer absurdities of the Bauddha religion or philosophy’.

  This is why Hodgson’s importance today lies not in the essays he wrote in the 1820s on Buddhist doctrine, but in the manuscripts he collected and sent by the truckload to Europe, where they formed, particularly at the Collège de France in Paris, the first scholarly source of western knowledge about Buddhism. A scholar at the Collège de France called Eugène Burnouf received most of Hodgson’s largesse, which he used in his book, Introduction à l’histoire du bouddhisme indien.16

  Hodgson’s solitary scholarship, the general British indifference and his own complacent attitude towards the subject of his researches contrast sharply with the great intellectual energy that marked the early transmission of Buddhism to peoples outside India. When in the first century AD the first Buddhist scholars from India reached China, they were soon met by translation teams. With its literary and philosophical traditions, China was well equipped to absorb and disseminate Buddhism. The Chinese eagerness to distribute Buddhist texts was what gave birth to both paper and printing. Not surprisingly, it was a particularly Chinese form of Buddhism, nourished by contact with India, which travelled to Korea and Japan in the fourth and sixth centuries respectively.

  Unlike Hodgson, the first scholars of Buddhism weren’t dilettantes. Nagarjuna, the South Indian thinker, whose many philosophical works in Sanskrit led to the rise of the Mahayana movement in the second century AD, was also a monk. So were the philosophers Asanga and Vasubhandhu, who lived near what is now the city of Peshawar in Pakistan, and Dignaga, who is considered the founder of the Indian system of logic. The Buddha had rejected the notion of a divinely inspired or sacred language; and so, unlike the Bible, which was not fully translated into European vernaculars until the sixteenth century, Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, particularly from the Mahayana tradition, attracted translators from the time they were first compiled.

  In the fourth century AD, Kumarajiva, a central Asian monk, was invited by the Chinese emperor to translate Sanskrit texts into Chinese; he translated, among others, the Lotus Sutra, of which as we have seen Thoreau in nineteenth-century America produced an English version. Around the same time, the Indian scholar Buddhaghosa travelled to Sri Lanka and put together a compendium of the Buddha’s teachings called Vishuddhimagga (Path of Purification). The western Indian monk Paramartha, travelled to China by sea in AD 546 and spent the rest of his life producing translations of Mahayana texts. The eighth-century monk Santarakhshita from north-western India became a major figure in Tibetan Buddhism through his translations into Tibetan. Hiuen Tsang was only one of the Chinese and Korean travellers during the seventh and eighth centuries AD who spent many years in Indian monasteries and universities, studying Buddhists texts and translating them.17

  Hodgson seems to have been like Jacquemont, who distrusted traditional religion and worshipped the nineteenth-century god of reason and science. These attitudes were fairly conventional then. Many utilitarian thinkers and rational philosophers in Bri
tain scorned Indian religion and philosophy and demanded that India’s British rulers force the natives to embrace European ways. The most famous among these was the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who argued decisively during a crucial British debate on education in India that Indian civilization and culture were barbaric, and the best way forward for Indians was to abandon them and to adopt English civilization, whose superiority was self-evident.18

  Jacquemont grew contemptuous of the fading British attempt to understand India through learning its classical languages. ‘The Sanskrit will lead to nothing but Sanskrit,’ he kept insisting in his letters to France. ‘It has served only for the manufacture of theology, metaphysics, history intermixed with theology and other stuff of the same kind: triple nonsense for the makers and the consumers; and for foreign consumers especially.’19

  Jacquemont had a low opinion of Oriental philosophy and literature in general. In a letter to his father, he mocked the ‘insipid and tiresome poems’ of the Persians Hafiz and Saadi, which had greatly inspired Goethe, and judged futile the efforts of August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the German philosopher and critic, who at the very time Jacquemont was collecting natural history specimens in India was setting up a Sanskrit printing press in Bonn and publishing translations of the Bhagavadagita and the Ramayana. Schlegel’s efforts in Bonn greatly encouraged Sanskrit studies in Europe. He followed his brother, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis among the German Romantics who looked towards India for spiritual relief from a Europe that by adopting the bourgeois religion of progress was losing its soul.20 He hoped that the study of classical India would bring about a new Renaissance on the same scale as the one based on Greek and Roman antiquity that had apparently lifted much of Western Europe out of the Middle Ages.