An End to Suffering Page 8

  Jacquemont was lucky, in death as in life. Moorcroft suffered a grimmer fate. He had set off for Bukhara via Afghanistan in 1824, shortly after setting de Körös off in the direction of the Buddhist Himalayas. He was arrested in Kunduz by the local chieftain and spent six uncomfortable months in prison and had to bribe his way out of an even longer confinement. He finally reached Bukhara, where he was the first European visitor in two hundred years. He even reportedly procured the high quality horses he had originally set out for. But on the way back to India later that year, he disappeared. There were rumours of death by fever and poisoning. Later travellers following the route of this greatest early explorer of the Himalayas encountered many different stories. But no one ever saw Moorcroft again. His prescient plans of opening up new trade routes through Ladakh and thwarting the Russians remained unfulfilled for decades.

  His protégé, de Körös, lived longer. When Jacquemont saw him in Kanum, de Körös was at the end of his long penitence in the Himalayas. A few months later, he left Kanum, carrying with him boxes of manuscripts and printed Tibetan texts. He went directly to Calcutta, where for the next eleven years he supervised the production of a new grammar and dictionary of the Tibetan language, learnt new languages, and catalogued Tibetan and Sanskrit texts that arrived from the British representative, Hodgson, in Kathmandu, Nepal.

  He lived in Calcutta as he had in the Himalayas: like a hermit, subsisting on tea and boiled rice. In 1842, when he was fifty-eight, he finally set out again on his original quest, which Moorcroft had interrupted two decades earlier. He wanted now to get to Lhasa where he thought all would be made clear about the origins of the Hungarian peoples. But he caught malarial fever a few hundred miles out of Calcutta and died in the hill resort of Darjeeling.

  De Körös is unlikely to have found much trace of Hungary in Lhasa or Yarkand. European scholars were saying even when he was alive – and they turned out to be right – that the Hungarians were closer linguistically and ethnically to the Finns than to the Central Asians. He wasn’t even the first European to learn Tibetan or to travel in the Tibetan Himalayas. The Jesuits had established a mission in Tibet as early as 1628. And when in 1904 the memoirs of a Jesuit from Tuscany called Ippolito Desideri were published in Italy, it became clear that he had visited Lhasa in 1716, more than a century before de Körös managed to get to the borderlands of Kinnaur and Ladakh. Desideri spent five years in Tibet, studying Tibetan texts and what he called the ‘false religion’ of ‘Bod’, particularly the key Buddhist doctrine of emptiness.

  At around the same time, an emissary of Peter the Great, who had been sent east to discover gold, came across bronze statues of the Buddha, and loose-leaf pages in Tibetan, in a Buddhist temple in Siberia. The pages in Tibetan made their way to St Petersburg from where a baffled Peter forwarded one of them to a German scholar for translation. The pages finally reached a scholar in Paris, who was then busy cataloguing thousands of Chinese texts sent by Jesuit missionaries. The page was translated into Latin with the help of a Tibetan-Latin dictionary compiled by a Capuchin missionary in Tibet and sent back in 1724 to Peter. The page was then forwarded to Siberia where it was translated into Mongolian. On its return to St Petersburg, it was translated into Russian, and then back into Latin. In 1767, it was translated again by a Catholic priest in Rome who included it in his Alphabetum Tibetanum: the book Moorcroft was carrying when he met de Körös, which became the latter’s introduction to Tibet.

  Such was the wide, complicated web of learning described by the books I read during my first autumn in Mashobra, books written out of Europe’s new thirst for knowledge and conquest. This scholarly work had not only touched but had been spun around my own world. A Hungarian searching for the intellectual basis of a hopeful nationalism; an English veterinarian looking for horses and seeking also to advance British imperialist aims; a French botanist collecting specimens on behalf of a prestigious European institution – a few unlikely men with diverse, not very Buddhistic, motives had once met and played themselves out in the mountains I saw from my balcony, and helped create the first western views of the Buddha.

  The World of the Buddha

  THE WESTERN IDEA OF history can be so seductive, with its promise of adding an extra emotional and spiritual dimension and validation to our limited life; with its ability to brighten the future and the past. It is especially attractive when you imagine yourself to be on its right side, and see yourself, in the way Jacquemont, Moorcroft and de Körös did, as part of an onward march of progress. To have faith in one’s history is to infuse hope into the most inert landscape and a glimmer of possibility into even the most adverse circumstances.

  Reading about these European travellers, I envied their ability to insert their personal being into the impersonal flow of events. Many years later, I would stand on a hill in civil-war-ravaged Afghanistan, where modern-day fundamentalists of the Taliban had vented their political rage on statues of the Buddha. I tried to imagine the Greek colony of Bactria, as this place had once been called, where Buddhist monks had set up their monasteries and universities, from where the Buddha’s ideas of detachment and compassion had travelled westwards.

  I thought then that one needed only the right historical information in order to see both forwards and backwards in time. But there are places on which history has worked for too long, and neither the future nor the past can be seen clearly in their ruins or emptiness.

  Returning from Lumbini that evening, from my first, brief and almost inadvertent visit to the Buddha’s birthplace, the bus broke down, in the irreparable way it had always threatened to, just a few miles from the town where the baseball caps, along with smuggled goods from China, were sold. Vinod was among the passengers who got out and stood watching the driver tinker under the bonnet. Some of the male passengers waded into the roadside sugarcane field, driven to theft by boredom; others began to walk more purposefully towards what seemed, from the smoke rising above the land, a small village in a grove of banyan trees beyond the rice fields to the north.

  A bullock cart passed us slowly, driven by an old man in a white turban, with women in short veils squatting at the back in a silent semi-circle. The road remained deserted after that. The sun declined quietly in the clear sky and then very quickly night fell over the flat land.

  We had to wait beside the road for a couple of hours before a truck came by and took us to the next township. Untouched by these distractions, my mind remained struck on Ashoka’s pillar, the temple and the big tree in Lumbini. Silently, it kept repeating, ‘The Buddha was born here, and Ashoka came visiting once’. But the empty dark land seemed to have absorbed into itself these famous men as placidly as it had the villages and the fields.

  It was hard to imagine that dense forests once grew where the rice fields and a few trees now stood; that these forests guarded the banks of the small rivers that emerged from Himalayan glaciers and travelled across the plains before joining either the Ganges or the Yamuna.

  Yet the histories of ancient India state that much of the Indo-Gangetic plain was covered with monsoon forests, and the image they bring to mind is of the Amazonian rain forests. It is not clear who lived in these forests. India then contained a number of ethnic and linguistic groups, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, etc. The people in the forest were probably hunters and gatherers, unable to move or see a way forward, until they encountered the nomads and pastoralists from the west who settled the Indo-Gangetic plains in the first millennium BC.

  The new arrivals are supposed to have come from the steppes to the north and east of the Caspian Sea, from where they also fanned out to Persia and even further west. They spoke an earlier form of Sanskrit, which has been identified as one among the Indo-Aryan family that includes languages spoken in India, Iran and Europe. The name, Aryan, is derived from the Sanskrit word Arya (noble), and came to be used for them.

  They were going beyond the simple life of food gathering and domesticating livestock and learning to use iron
and bronze when, in the second millennium BC, they began to move in large numbers into parts of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. They probably encountered in those parts, alongside the river Indus, the traces or ruins of a civilization which flourished in the third millennium BC and then became extinct, in ways still unknown, by the beginning of the second millennium.

  The surviving architecture and art reveals the Indus civilization to have been as sophisticated as the nearly contemporaneous civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Perhaps, the Aryan migrants interacted with these people of the Indus plains. Armed with horses, bows and arrows and chariots, they might even have conquered their well-planned cities and enslaved them. The Aryans certainly appear to have been involved in conflicts with the indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Whatever the case, their own distinctive civilization – cities, political and economic systems, art and literature – came much later, long after they had penetrated eastwards into the Indo-Gangetic plains.

  Most of our knowledge of these Aryans comes from the earliest of Indian scriptures, the Vedas, which consist of hymns, spells, liturgical formulae and theological argument. First composed around 1500 BC, they reached their final form a millennium later, around the time of the Buddha’s birth.1

  The word ‘veda’ refers to sacred knowledge – the knowledge of ultimate reality, which is not revealed, as in Islam or Christianity, but has always been. It is supposedly eternal and has been heard by great sages, mostly Brahmins, who first emerged as the privileged class of men dedicated to memorizing the Vedas and transmitting them orally, and who later became the ultimate authority on spiritual and religious matters.

  The earliest of the Vedas was the Rig Veda. It hints that the early Aryans may have settled first in a region spanned by eastern Afghanistan and the Indo-Gangetic watershed, and that they may have been both pastoralists and agriculturalists. Their deities were natural phenomena personified, such as Agni (the god of fire), Varun (water), Vayu (wind), Surya (sun) and Yama (death). Their chief god and hero seems to have been Indra, a rowdy lecherous warlord, who corresponds to the Greek god Zeus. Indra is described as using a thunderbolt to kill the demons and releasing the waters they had imprisoned – this is perhaps an account of a conflict that occurred between the Aryans and the local inhabitants in the drought-stricken lands of north-west India. Indra may also have led the Vedic Aryans in the destruction of the walled cities and citadels of the remaining higher cultures they encountered at the sites of the Indus civilization. Later Rigvedic hymns speak of the Aryans winning battles against, and also mingling with, darker-skinned indigenous people called Dasyus.

  These early Indians slaughtered cattle both for food and the elaborate sacrificial rituals prescribed by the Vedas. They also ate beef on special occasions. The cow, which is now considered holy in India, couldn’t have been so to nomads and pastoralists. It is only after they settled down and turned to agriculture that they began to put a slightly higher value upon the cow, which produced milk, ghee, yoghurt and manure and could be used for ploughing and transport as well.

  The hymns of the later Vedas also stress how metals and agriculture, particularly rice cultivation, became increasingly important: in the prayers contained in the Yajurveda, the Aryans asked the gods for milk, sap, butter, honey, rice, barley, sesame, kidney beans, vetches, wheat, lentils, bronze, lead, tin, iron and copper; above all, they prayed for freedom from hunger.

  Much of Vedic religion was about sacrifice and magic. It was built around the simple idea of appeasement: the ritual giving of things – mostly food – in expectation of greater gifts. But it was also based on a profound assumption of interdependence, of a cosmos where life circulates in ever-renewed forms – what the Vedas called rta, the course of nature, the basis of all life and the world.

  For the Aryans, the rivers flowed and the sun, the moon and the stars followed their course due to the principle of rta – the concept similar to the one implied by Pythagoras when he called the world a kosmos – and sacrifice to the gods was meant to affirm the unity and consistency of this cosmic order.

  There were domestic rituals – most houses had a hearth or a small altar – but also big public events. The intermediaries were Brahmins, who alone possessed the correct verbal formulas with which to petition the gods for more cattle, food and prosperity – the early Indians, faced with problems of subsistence, couldn’t but be materialists. Their specialized knowledge gave the Brahmins their power as an indispensable priestly class – a power that was to survive for centuries, and give to Indian society its most influential and enduring class and ideology.

  Agni, or fire, was as crucial in the ritual sacrifice as the correct recital of mantras. It was the mediator between the beseecher and the beseeched, carrying the sacrificed things to the gods above.2 The veneration for Agni also symbolized the Aryan ability to destroy and settle forests, and their evolution from the primitive existence they had led in their Central Asian homelands.

  When the Vedic Aryans pushed eastwards at around 850 BC to the rain-fed regions of the Indo-Gangetic plain, they faced new challenges. The forests could be burnt down and the animals which inhabited them slaughtered – the repeated triumphs of human needs over ecology are celebrated in the epic Mahabharata. But the social organization needed to settle the land cleared of forests was as yet unavailable to a tribal people.

  The origin of the caste system has been attributed to this period.3 It may have begun as a simple division of labour, necessitated by the complex needs of a tribal people during their transition from nomadism and pastoralism to a settled life. But the Brahmins, while trying to secure for themselves a permanently high status, sought to create a strict social hierarchy, and even contrived divine sanction for it in the sacred texts they controlled. The Rig Veda spoke of the four-fold division of society: the four estates (varnas) had apparently originated from the four limbs of the divine primordial body.

  Birth determined one’s place in the ideal society of the Brahmins – a self-serving, if powerful, vision which over centuries was partly realized by the Indian reality of caste (jati) and may have gained strength during the Buddha’s time. The lowest social group was of the shudras, the darker-skinned aborigines or mixed breed, who belonged to the tribal system but were little better than helots without the membership rights of the three higher castes: the kshatriyas, who provided the rulers and warriors, the brahmins, who were priests, thinkers and law-givers, and the vaishyas, who were landowners, merchants, money-lenders and who later produced the food surplus that enabled Aryan society to move away from its tribal origins.

  The system naturally benefited the three upper varnas, particularly the Brahmins, who guarded their specialist profession zealously. For centuries they did not write down the hymns of the Veda but transmitted them orally only to other Brahmins in order to prevent non-Brahmins from learning them. They also gained in wealth and power from the increasingly elaborate nature of their ceremonies and rituals.

  The longer a nomadic people stayed in one place the greater the need they felt for new and stable relationships among themselves. One of the earliest political systems in India can be seen in the new arrangements the sedentary Aryans arrived at as they attempted to govern and defend themselves. A ruling family or a confederacy of ruling families belonging to the same clan sought new forms of stability and identity after prolonged presence in a particular region; they formalized their possession of territory by naming it after themselves, and they set up basic administrative structures of tax collection and social welfare. This was how the small Gana Sangha, tribal republics, and the first large kingdoms of North India came into being.

  This still wasn’t a particularly complex or layered world, and it remained at an unvarying level for hundreds of years until new towns and cities began to develop around the sixth century. In contrast to the Vedas, which describe a primarily rural society, the Buddhist texts reveal that it was an urban civilization that the Buddha was born in. By the time of h
is birth in the sixth century, many of the forests that had covered the plain had been cleared and replaced with farms and lands for pasture. Some of the settlements had grown into large towns and even cities, for whose inhabitants the nomadic life of their Aryan ancestors must already have been the stuff of legend and myth.

  This second wave of urbanization in North India after the Indus civilization was confined mostly to the territories east of the Indus, and close to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their tributaries. The reasons that it came about are common to the rise of urban civilization everywhere else: the growth of agricultural surplus.

  At some point, the agricultural yield of the rich plain watered by the Ganges and the Yamuna began to be greater than what was needed by the local population, much in excess of what the primitive life of the past had required. Iron deposits were probably discovered in eastern parts of the Indo-Gangetic plains. The surplus produced with the help of such innovations as iron ploughshares and irrigation techniques could be invested in trade and commerce.

  Large urban centres emerged initially as market towns. They were where money was first used as a unit of exchange in North India. Some places seem to have acquired size and importance by virtue of being sacred sites. Cities such as Benares may have owed their rise to their position on the river route through North India. Many of these cities, such as Hastinapur, the site of present-day Delhi, were villages that expanded after becoming political or administrative centres.

  People in these towns had different backgrounds and followed diverse occupations. The later Vedas refer to jewellers, goldsmiths, metalworkers, basket makers, weavers, dyers, carpenters and potters. The Buddhist texts, which are our main source of information about the urbanization of the Indo-Gangetic plain, list about twenty-five skills.