The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6)

The kings of Magadha resided at Rajagriha, i. e. the king's house, a city which lay to the south of the Ganges and the east of the Çona. The sutras mention Prasenajit, king of the Koçalas, who, as already remarked, lay on the Sarayu, and Vatsa, the son of Çatanika, king of the Bharatas, as contemporaries of Bimbisara, king of Magadha, and his son Ajataçatru. Hence the reigns of Prasenajit and Vatsa may be placed in the first half and about the middle of the sixth century B.C. Both princes are mentioned in the tradition of the Brahmans. In the Vishnu-Purana, Prasenajit is the twenty-third ruler of the Koçalas after the great war. Vatsa is the twenty-fifth successor of Parikshit, who is said to have ascended the throne of Hastinapura after the victory and abdication of the sons of Pandu.401 The kings of the Koçalas had built a new city, Çravasti, to the north of their ancient capital Ayodhya; the kings of the Bharatas resided at Kauçambi on the Ganges. To the north of the kingdom of Magadha, on the other bank of the Ganges, lay the commonwealth of the Vrijis on the Gogari, and the kingdom of Mithila; to the east on both shores of the Ganges were the Angas, whose capital appears to have been Champa (in the neighbourhood of the modern Bhagalpur); to the west of Magadha on the Ganges were the Kaçis, whose capital was Varanasi (Benares). The colonies of the Arians had advanced and their territory had been extended to the south both on the east and west. This is not merely proved by the mention of Çurparaka, for the sutras of the Buddhists tell us of a great Arian kingdom on the northern spur of the Vindhyas, the metropolis of which was Ujjayini (Ozene in western writers) on the Sipra, and adjoining this on the coast was the kingdom of Surashtra (Guzerat).402

The life of the kings on the Ganges is described by our authorities in glowing colours. Their palaces are spacious, provided with gardens and terraces for promenading. Besides the women and servants, the bodyguard and the executioners clothed in blue are domiciled in the royal citadels. The princes eat off silver and gold, and are clothed in silk of Varanasi. Friendly princes make handsome presents to each other, e. g. suits of armour adorned with precious stones.403 Their edicts and commands are composed in writing and stamped with the seal of ivory.404 The labours of government are relieved by the pleasures of the chase. In sickness the princes are served with the most select remedies. When Bimbisari's son and successor fell down one day in a swoon, he was placed in six tubs full of fresh butter, and afterwards in a seventh filled with the most costly sandal-wood.405 The harem of the king was numerous, and the women had great influence; the children which they bore were suckled by nurses, of whom one child had at times eight.406 Any one who ventured to cast a look upon one of the wives of the king forfeited his life. When one of the wives of Prasenajit, king of the Koçalas, was walking in the evening on the terrace of the palace she saw the handsome brother of the king, and threw him a bouquet; when this came to the ears of Prasenajit, he caused the feet and hands of his brother to be cut off.407 The same cruel and barbarous character marks all the punishments inflicted by the king. On the order of a king whose mildness and justice are commended, all the inhabitants of the city are said to have been put to death on account of an error committed by one of them.408 If any one had to make a communication to the king, or lay any matter before him, he first besought that he might not be punished for his words. No one approached the king without a present; least of all merchants. Happy events were announced by princes to their cities by the sound of bells. Stones, gravel, and dirt were then removed from the streets, which were sprinkled with sandal-water and strewed with flowers and garlands, and silken stuffs were hung along them. At certain distances jars filled with frankincense were placed; and if a guest of distinction was to be received the ways were cleansed for a considerable space before the gates, smoothed, and perfumed, and furnished with standards, parasols, and resting-places of flowers.409

We have already remarked how unfamiliar the abstract god which the Brahmans had placed at the head of their theory remained to the people, both in his impersonal and personal form. They had been more deeply influenced by the degradation of the old gods, introduced by the Brahmans in consequence of their religious system (p. 287). Yet it was not so much these doctrines which caused the old gods to lose their primitive power, and complete charm over the hearts of men, as the fact that the motives which now governed the life of the Aryas were wholly different from those which had filled them in old days on the Indus. Indra, the hurler of the thunder-bolt, had fought with the tribes whose offering of Soma he had drunk. The storm of the elements characteristic of the Panjab was unknown on the Ganges; and in the civilised conditions of a peaceful, obedient, quiet life the old slayer of the demons could no longer excite the lively feelings of the people. The Brahmans might recede ever further from nature; the people, the peasants and herdmen, remained in constant contact with her, and with the phenomena of the sky and the vegetative life of the earth; they felt themselves continually surrounded by the mighty operations of nature. The feeling and faith of the people required a more personal, present, living power, which assured them of help and protection. While the Brahmans wearied themselves with abstractions and philosophic systems, the needs of the multitude, the poetical vein of the Indian nation, its realism as opposed to the spiritualism of the priests and Brahmans, struck out new paths. So it came about that as the supreme deities of the most ancient and the early periods faded away more and more, as Mitra and Varuna, Indra and Ushas passed into the background, forms hitherto little regarded rose up out of the circle of these spirits, which were akin to the present instincts and needs of the nation, the immediate modes of feeling, and in closer relation to them. This movement was not confined to the people; within the circles of the Brahmans, who were not wholly given up to abstractions, the want of a living power, governing the world, could not but be felt.410

In the hymns of the Rigveda a god Vishnu is invoked, though but little prominence is given to him. He is called a friend and comrade of Indra; it said of him that he walks over the seven parts of the earth; that he plants his foot in three places. The "far-stepping" Vishnu is invited with Mitra, Varuna, and Aryaman to give salvation. He dwells in the height; his exalted habitation, where honey flows, beams with clear light. He sustains trebly the sky, the earth, and all worlds; he walks with three steps through the wide firmament. He walks through the worlds to secure long life for men. Not even the soaring winged birds could reach up to his third step. He hastens on to ally himself with the beneficent Indra; he favours and protects the Aryas. Fired by hymns of praise Vishnu himself yokes the mighty mares, and dashes into the battle in his youth and strength, accompanied by the Maruts. "Friend Vishnu," said Indra, when planning the death of Vritra, "step out wide; thou heaven, give room, that the thunder-club may descend; let us smite Vritra and set the waters free. O strong god (Indra), in concert with Vishnu thou hast smitten Vritra; thou hast smitten Ahi who held back the waters." "Ye two heroes, who bring to nought the magic powers of the hostile spirits, to you I bring songs of praise and sacrifice. Ye have always conquered, ye have never been overcome. Come ye, Indra and Vishnu, to the draught of Soma, bring treasures with you; may your mares, which overpower the foe, sharing in your victories, bring you hither; may our songs anoint you with the ointment of prayer. Rejoiced by the draught of Soma, take ye your wide steps; make wide the atmosphere and spread out the earth. Grant us rich sustenance in our houses." "No mortal, O Vishnu, knows the uttermost limits of thy greatness; thou hast surrounded the earth on both sides with beams of light. Never does the man repent it, who serves the far-stepping Vishnu with all his heart, and makes the mighty one favourable. Grant us, O swift god, thy favour graciously, which includes all men; thy favouring glance, that abundance, treasures, and horses may be ours. Thrice the swift god stepped through the earth that he might make it to be a dwelling for men."411

Hence we must regard Vishnu, whose dwelling is in the height of heaven, as a swift spirit of light. Invoked in the hymns of the Veda beside the Adityas or spirits of light, he is not definitely named as such, though we cannot refuse to him a close connection with the sun when we consider the further development of the conception formed of him. As he supports Indra in the battle against the demons, he must be regarded, like him, as a protector against the evil ones, a giver of water and wealth. His kindly feeling towards men, his beneficent acts are brought into prominence. Hence from the early point of view he was a god bringing blessing and help. The three steps are explained by the Mahabharata as the earth, the air, and the heavens;412 other explanations refer them to the light of the sun at morning, noon, and evening. The Brahmanas reckon Vishnu among their twelve Adityas (instead of the seven or eight of the Rigveda), and give a myth of Vishnu. The Aitareya-Brahmana calls him the gate-keeper, but also the highest deity, as Agni is the lowest; the rest of the gods are between them. Leaning on his bow Vishnu stood, as the Çatapatha-Brahmana relates, while the rest of the gods sacrificed to Kurukshetra; the ants ate through the string, the bow sprung back and tore off Vishnu's head, which now flew through heaven and earth. The body was divided by the gods into three parts; Agni took the morning sacrifice, Indra that at mid-day, and all the rest the third sacrifice. But they received no blessing from their headless sacrifice, till the Açvins, who were skilled in the art of healing, put back the head on the sacrifice. Further, by sacrifice and penance Vishnu became the first of the gods; in order to wrest this place from him the other gods caused the ants to eat through the string and then divided Vishnu, the sacrifice, into three parts.413 Here the gods are found sacrificing a god, but the self-sacrifice of the gods is common in the Brahmanas. Mystical conceptions of this kind naturally remained outside the national religion. The view of the Aitareya-Brahmana is nearer the popular mind – that Vishnu took away from the Asuras the world of which they had possessed themselves, and gave it back to the gods. This idea is carried out in the Epos: Bali, a great Asura, had gained the dominion over the earth, and conquered the gods; in order to help the gods out of their distress Vishnu assumes the form of a dwarf, and entreats Bali to allow him space for three steps of his dwarfish feet. Having obtained his request he takes possession of earth, air, and heaven in three great steps, hurls the Asura into hell, and thus, by the liberation of the world and the gods, he became the younger brother of Indra.414

This mighty god, the ruler of earth and heaven, this swift, bright, friendly helper of gods and men, was invoked by the nation on the Ganges as their best protecting deity. It was no doubt the helpful nature of Vishnu, the characteristic celebrated in the songs of the Veda and in the legends, which permitted this change. In the plains of the Ganges fruit and increase naturally depended on the period of rain, on the regular rise and overflow of the river, not on violent crises in the sky, or the tempestuous storm in which Indra was still the ruling deity; in this district the blessing of the land, the life-giving, fructifying power of nature, could be ascribed to a deity who worked his beneficial will in a ceaseless persistent course. In the book of the law Vishnu is hardly mentioned; only once, in the addition at the close, is reference made to his swift approach;415 on the other hand, in the ancient sutras of the Buddhists, Vishnu appears under the names Hari and Janardana as a widely-honoured deity.416

Rudra, the god of the storm, is repeatedly invoked in the Rigveda. Derived from the tumult of the tempest, the name signifies "the roarer," "the howler." He is the father of the Maruts, or winds, the god whom no other surpasses in strength, terrible as a wild beast, as the boar of the sky. Red or brown in colour, he wears his hair closely braided (an idea no doubt taken from the clouds gathered together by the storm-wind); the swift strong arrows from his mighty bow force their way from heaven to earth; he is the lord of the heroes, the slayer of men. "Bring to the venerable Rudra the draught of the Soma; I have praised him with the heroes of the sky," – so we are told in some prayers of the Rigveda. "Submissively we call on the red boar of the sky; be gracious to us, to our children and descendants! Smite neither the great nor the small among us, neither father nor mother, neither our cattle nor our horses. Listen to our prayers, father of the Maruts." "May Rudra's arrow pass by us; may the spear which travels over the earth touch us not. May the weapons which slay men and cows remain far from us! Grant us refuge and protection; take thou our side. Remove from us sickness and want, thou who art easily entreated. Thou bearest in thy hand a thousand remedies; these I desire with the favour of Rudra. Be gracious to the wandering sources of our nourishment; let our cows eat strengthening plants, and drink abundant life-giving water. For our men and women, for our horses, rams, sheep and cows, Rudra secures health and prosperity".417 It is the wild injurious force of the storm, the force that carries off men and animals, which these prayers would avert, and the beneficial consequences of this storm, the filling of springs and streams, the refreshment of the meadows, the cooling and purification of the air, are the blessings which these prayers would win from the double nature of the easily entreated god. By the remedies which Rudra carries in his hand along with the mighty bow the beneficial consequences of the storm are no doubt to be understood. In the Atharvaveda, Rudra with Bhava is invoked under the name of Çarva as a mighty, darkly-glancing archer, with black hair, a thrower of the spear, who dashes on with a thousand eyes, and slays the Andhakas. Here also he is entreated not to be angry, not to smite men nor cattle, to hurl his heavenly weapons against others and not against his suppliant.418 He is more highly exalted still in the Çatapatha-Brahmana, which unites in him the attributes and functions of various gods, of Vayu, Chandra, Bhava, Parjanya, i. e. the rain-god, and of Agni, represents the gods as afraid of his power, and denotes him by the name Mahadeva (great god). A long and extraordinary prayer which this Brahmana prescribes for appeasing him, ascribes to him the most extensive power: it calls him the inhabitant, the lord of the mountains, forests, and fields, of the wild beasts, of the streets and hosts, who slays from before and from behind, red in colour, with a blue neck. If the anger of the mighty deity is appeased, he brings rain and blessing, and then he is the gracious one, Çiva. The fruitfulness of this deity and the necessity of propitiating him appear to have brought it about that this name, which is found as an epithet of other gods, became his peculiar title. In the old sutras of the Buddhists he is thus called, though he more frequently bears the name Çankara, i. e. bringer of happiness.

We see that the deity whose strong power drove up the rain-clouds to the coast of Surashtra (Guzerat) and the heights of the Himalayas was victorious over the ancient god of tempest. In this god there was a destroying power, but his anger and rage were followed by the fructifying showers of rain, causing vegetation to revive and the springs to flow, cooling the air and refreshing man and beast. So the nation looked up with thankful eyes to the god of storm who had now, in reality, become a god of increase and prosperity, a healer of wounds and sickness, as was already indicated in the poems of the Rigveda. Among his retinue is a being of the name of Nandin, who appears later as a bull, and is without doubt nothing more than an indication of the wild force of the storm, and its fruitful operation.419 As he is more especially a lord of the mountains, and is said to be throned on Kailasa, and the Ganges flows down over his head, as the Epos represents the heroes as going to the Himalayas to worship Çiva, and the storm rages fiercest in the hills, we may assume that it was the inhabitants of the Western Himalayas who elevated Rudra-Çiva to be their protecting deity, just as Vishnu became the god of the nations on the Ganges.420

CHAPTER II.

BUDDHA'S LIFE AND TEACHING

So far as we can ascertain the conditions of the states on the Ganges in the sixth century B.C. the population suffered under grievous oppression. To the capricious nature of the sentences pronounced by the kings and the cruelty of their punishments were added taxes and exactions, which must have been severely felt over wide circles. The sutras tell us that a king who required money received this answer from his two first ministers: "It is with the land as with grains of sesame; it produces no oil unless it is pressed, cut, burnt, or pounded."421 The arrangement of castes now stamped in all its completeness on the population of the Ganges; the irrevocable mission apportioned to each person at his birth; the regulations for expiation and penance, which the Brahmans had introduced; the enormous amount of daily offerings and duties; the laws of purification and food, the neglect or breach of which involved the most serious consequences, unless averted by the most painful expiations, were serious burdens in addition to the oppression exercised by the state. If the expiation of offences often unavoidable was difficult, the most carefully-regulated life, the most pious fulfilment of all offerings and penances, did not protect men from evil regenerations. For time consumed the merit of good works, and man was born again to a new life, i. e. to new misery. Thus not even death brought the end of sorrow; it was not enough to bring to a close a laborious life; even if after this life a man were not tormented in hell for unexpiated transgressions, he was born again to ever new sorrows and pains. One way only was known to the Brahmans by which a man might possibly escape this fate; – flight from the world; the voluntary acceptance of the most severe unbroken torture imposed upon the body; the annihilation of the body and finally of the soul by absorption through meditation into Brahman. Did a man really arrive at the goal by this rough way? – did he by inexorable persecution of himself to the extremest limits become elevated above a new birth, and so above a new torture of life?

The conception of such endless torment must have pressed the more heavily upon the people as the hot climate in which they lived naturally awaked in them the desire for repose, a desire which increased with the increasing oppression of the state and religious duties, and was strengthened by the fact that these causes at the same time allowed the resistance which every healthy and strong nation can make to such oppressions and demands to slumber. But complaint was inadmissible. All the misfortune which a man had to bear now and expect in the future was not an unmerited disaster, but a just ordinance of the righteous arrangement of the world, the verdict and expression of divine justice itself. Whether any one was born as a man or an animal, his position and caste, and the conditions of his birth, the fortune he experienced, were consequences, the reward or punishment, of actions done in a previous state of existence; they were the sentences of a justice which none could escape, of the divine order of the world, to which a man must submit without murmurs. The Brahmans were right, the world was full of evils; life was a chain of miseries, and the earth a vale of misery. Pity and grace were nowhere to be found, only justice and punishment, only righteous retribution. In past days, indeed, the Aryas had cried to Varuna to be gracious, to pardon and blot out the offences which men had committed against the gods, intentionally or involuntarily, from an evil heart or from weakness and seduction (p. 53). But the theory which the Brahmans had subsequently elevated to be the highest duty was without sympathy or pity; it could only allot to every man, in the alternation of birth and decay, the fruits of his deeds. No doubt the people, impelled by the necessity to have above them conceivable, comprehensible, helpful spirits, elevated Vishnu and Çiva from among the faded and dishonoured forms of the ancient deities to be the protecting powers of their life in opposition to the god of the Brahmans; but though these gave rain and increase to the pastures and the fields, though they cherished kindly feelings towards men, they were powerless against the punishments after death, against regenerations, or the existing order of the world, against the merciless justice of the gods, which recompensed every one inexorably according to his works, and caused every one to be born again without end to new torments. The old healthy pleasure in life which would live for a hundred autumns, and then looked forward to an entrance into the heaven of Yama, and participation in the joys of that heaven with the company of the fathers, was past. While all other nations almost without exception regarded death as the worst of evils, and painfully sought to secure continuance after death, the Indians were now tortured by the apprehension that they could not die, that they must live for ever, they filled with terrors their conception of life after death, of the endless series of regenerations to a perpetually new life.

Was there really no mercy on earth or in heaven, no grace, no means of release from these never-ending torments? Was the long series of sacrifices with their endless prescripts for every step, the multitude of rules of purification, the performance of penance for every stain, absolutely indispensable if the Brahmans themselves allowed that this whole sanctity of works merely bestowed merits of a second rank, and that the treasure even of good works could be exhausted by time? Was this arrangement of castes and the observance of their duties absolutely irrevocable? The Brahmans required the study of the Veda not only from their own order but also from the Kshatriyas and the Vaiçyas. Did not the book of the law contain the requirement (p. 184) that every Dvija, after satisfying the duties of his order, and of the father of a family (Grihastha) should become an eremite (Vanaprastha) and penitent (Sannyasin)? Had not the Sankhya, the doctrine of Kapila, called in question the merit of the sacrifice and the customs of purification? Asceticism, it is true, again removed the distinctions of the orders; the power of penance, the mortification of the pleasures of sense and the body, carried back the members of the three upper orders in a similar way by sanctification, through a greater or less application of penance, into Brahman; the legends and the Epos showed by the example of Viçvamitra that a man could rise by the power of penance from a Kshatriya to a Brahman. Hence all Dvijas, in strictly logical sequence, could reach supreme salvation by mortification of the body; and it was easy from these premisses to draw the conclusion that little or nothing depended on descent; that the degree of asceticism and the depth of meditation was everything. If this was the case with sanctification by works; if birth in any one of the three higher orders did not prevent a man from attaining the highest sanctification by asceticism, could the castes be really different races, different emanations from Brahman, and distinct forms of his being? Was the nucleus of the system, the doctrine of the world-soul, so firmly established as the Brahmans maintained? Had not the philosophy of the Brahmans already passed from scholasticism to heterodoxy? Did it not deny, in the Sankhya doctrine, the authority of the Veda, the existence of the gods, and the Brahmanic world-soul? As we have seen, the teaching of Kapila left only two existences; nature and the individual spirit.

In the north-east of the land of the Koçalas, on the spurs of the Himalayas, by the river Rohini, which falls into the Çaravati (Rapti), a tributary of the Sarayu, in the neighbourhood of the modern Gorakhpur, lay a small principality named Kapilavastu, after the metropolis.422 It was the kingdom of the race of the Çakyas, who are said to have migrated from Potala in the delta of the Indus into the land of the Koçalas. Like the kings of the Koçalas the race traced its descent to Ikshvaku, the son of Manu. And just as great priests of the ancient times were woven into the list of the ancestors of the kings of the Bharatas, so the Çakyas of Kapilavastu are said to have reckoned Gautama, one of the great saints (p. 28), among their forefathers; they called themselves Gautamas after the family derived from this priest. At the present time a Rajaputra family in the district, in which the Çakyas reigned, call themselves Gautamiyas.423 To the house of the Çakyas belonged king Çuddhodana, who sat on the throne of Kapilavastu in the second half of the seventh century B.C.