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Religious Revolutionaries

ON 14 OCTOBER 1956, B.R. AMBEDKAR(1891–1956) – the author of India’s Constitution and, importantly, the leader of the country’s Untouchables – stood before a crowd of almost half a million people in the city of Nagpur, renounced Hinduism, the religion of his birth, and converted to Buddhism. The majority of those in attendance followed Ambedkar’s example, making it the largest single religious conversion in history. Over the following months and years, more than three million Untouchables fast-tracked their escape from the caste-based order that placed them on the lowest rung of Hindu society by embracing Buddhism. When the 1961 census was counted, the number of Buddhists in India had risen by 1671 per cent in the space of a decade.

In the country that gave the world the Buddha (c. 563–483 BCE), his followers had almost become extinct by the mid-twentieth century, aside from the remote Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh and a smattering of communities in northeastern India. Ambedkar’s revival of Buddhism in India was as much a social phenomenon as a religious and ethical one. Before converting, he had developed a new doctrine called Navayana Buddhism that did away with concepts such as renunciation, rebirth and the monkhood, but retained notions of compassion and equality, which he harnessed into a form of social activism.

Ambedkar’s fine-tuning was not as radical as it sounds. When Buddhism first emerged in India, it was a reaction against the strict orthodoxy of Vedic Brahmanism. All creeds and social classes, men and women, were free to follow the Buddha.

Siddhārtha Gautama, as the Buddha was known, was born to royal parents in southern Nepal between 566 and 563 BCE and died some eighty years later. Buddhist lore ascribes the Buddha’s birth to divine intervention: his mother, Māhāmāya, dreamt of a great white elephant, the symbol of royal majesty and authority, entering her womb; Siddhārtha then emerged painlessly from her side and was caught in a golden net held by demigods known as devas. As he surveyed his surroundings, he proclaimed, ‘I am the chief of the world.’ Asked to interpret such a marvel, sages discovered the imprints of wheels on the child’s hands and feet and predicted he would grow up to be a mighty king or a great religious teacher.

The middle of the first millennium BCE was a period of ferment – not just in India, but also in other parts of the civilised world. In China, Confucius was articulating his teachings; early philosophers of Greece, such as Socrates, were exploring the notion of truth, and in the Near East, Hebrew prophets were spreading the word of the Old Testament.

In India, the mainly pastoral, semi-nomadic tribal culture of the Āryans was giving way to agricultural-based societies living in urban centres. Birth rates soared. Writing in the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus described India as the most populous country on earth. Republics built around tribal groupings began to appear, as well as regional kingdoms. The largest of these were Kosala, in the eastern part of the modern state of Uttar Pradesh, and Magadha, in what is now Bihar. By taxing their docile populations, the rulers of these kingdoms were able to amass huge armies and create efficient state structures. A ruler’s strength no longer relied on the supernatural aid of his Vedic Brahmin adviser but on his political skills and the strength of his military.

New forms of heterodoxy that rejected the Vedas and the Brahmanical social dominance were also taking root. For non-Brahmins, much of the Hindu religion was incomprehensible. The hymns of the Vedas were complex, and their teachings had little relevance to everyday life. Vedic gods could not compete with the local nature and fertility deities that had long been worshipped in small wayside shrines. Sacrificial rituals, particularly those involving animal slaughter, were being sidelined, and with them the basis of Brahmanical authority. The role of caste in spiritual life was being questioned, with the less privileged flocking to new sects that rejected the rigid hierarchy of the Vedic period.

The Upaniṣhads, a set of Vedic texts composed from around 800 to 300 BCE, introduced the concept of saṃsāra, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The Upaniṣhads preached that the form of the reincarnated soul depends upon the individual’s actions. Virtue is rewarded and evil punished. Salvation (nirvāṇa) enables a permanent release from the cycle of rebirth. Such ideas spawned the inevitable quest for a path to salvation. Renunciation would become the basis of a new set of religions that would have far-reaching implications for both India and much of Asia.

In the vast forests of the Gangetic Plains, the quest for salvation and resistance against Brahmin ritualism and exclusiveness manifested in the form of wandering ascetics and mendicants. Often naked and with matted hair, they tried to outdo one another with their feats of endurance, while disputing each other’s religious credentials in the quest for new converts. This metaphysical culture of protest and resistance would underpin the emergence of new faiths that cast aside Brahmanical teachings and claims to divine authority.

The stereotypical image of the near-naked ascetic reclining on a bed of nails probably has its origins during the period around 800 to 300 BCE, when renunciation became a central premise of the Upaniṣhads.

PATHS TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Siddhārtha Gautama’s father was the ruler of the Shakya tribe, which was under the hegemony of the Kosala kingdom. He was raised in his father’s palace in Kapilavastu, now the town of Lumbini in the lowland Terai region of Nepal. Siddhārtha’s life was one of privilege, sheltered from the realities of the outside world with ‘some new delight provided every hour’. One day, aged about eighteen and curious to see what lay beyond the palace walls, he entered a garden, where he confronted human suffering for the first time in the form of an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic. The first three sights – representing ageing, illness and death – brought home to Siddhārtha the inevitability of suffering and the transience of existence, regardless of one’s wealth or background. The ascetic offered a solution by revealing a way that transcended the temporal.

Vowing to follow the ascetic’s example, Siddhārtha renounced his wife and son, his palace, his wealth and royal robes, and withdrew from the world. For the next six years he joined the wandering mendicants of the Gangetic Plains, practising their severe austerities and experimenting with different paths to salvation.

In the end it was not austerity but meditation that revealed the path to enlightenment. As a child, Siddhārtha would free himself from sensual desires and evil thoughts by sitting in the shade of a rose-apple tree. Remembering these earlier revelations, he started meditating under a sacred peepal tree, vowing to remain there until he recreated that state of blissful peace. After several days of meditation, he finally realised the true nature of suffering and transience, formulated a scheme for overcoming it, and so became the Buddha – the Awakened One. Today, the place where the Buddha achieved enlightenment is known as Bodh Gayā.

In the legend of the Four Passing Sights, the Buddha recounts that he ate so little during one of his austerities – just six grains of rice a day – that ‘[m]y body became extremely lean … When I thought I would touch the skin of my stomach, I actually took hold of my spine.’

The Buddha then set out for a royal deer park at Sarnath, near the holy city of Kashi. Before a gathering of five of his former associates, he preached a sermon known as ‘Turning of the Wheel of the Law’. He began by advocating ‘the middle way’: both asceticism and worldly indulgence were to be avoided, as was hatred, envy and anger. He then announced the Four Noble Truths on the nature, origin and cessation of suffering. To end suffering, one had to embrace the Noble Eightfold Path, namely right views, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right meditation.

The sermon laid out the basis of the Buddhist worldview, a set of interlinked propositions that held that ignorance was the cause of human misery. This ignorance was born of our failure to understand the nature of the world, namely the inevitability that sorrow will permeate every aspect of life and that the universe is transient. Our ignorance of this lack of permanence leads to sorrow.

Finally, he preached that the universe was soulless. The essence of transmigration was that nothing passed over from one life to another. By curbing indulgence and mastering desire, the human condition could become bearable. If enough merit was accumulated in a person’s lifetime, he or she could achieve a state of nirvana or extinction and free oneself from the endless cycle of rebirth.

There was no mention of a creator or redeemer. The Buddha claimed no spiritual authority and forbade the worship of imagery. As such, Buddhism complemented existing religions rather than supplanted them. The debate over whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy is still ongoing.

The Buddha’s teachings became known as the dharma, a word that encompasses multiple related meanings such as law, duty, righteousness, morality, piety and so on. In Buddha’s teachings, dharma referred to a set of principles to be followed in conducting one’s life, rooted firmly in a philosophical plane. It was his followers who would later elevate the Buddha to the status of a deity.

Early representations of the Buddha were in the form of symbols such as the cakra or great wheel, the peepal tree, an upturned hand or a footprint.

The five disciples at Sarnath became the core of the Buddhist monastic community, the saṇgha. The monastic orders spread quickly throughout northern India and were open to everyone regardless of their sex or social standing. Because spiritual credit could be accrued by donating money and worldly goods, monasteries grew rich, enabling them to fund more missionary activity.

MAIN RELIGIONS OF INDIA, 2011 CENSUS

The Buddha was not the only spiritual teacher whose legacy would spawn religious revolution. Jainism’s principles of ahiṃsā (nonviolence) and satya (truth) were appropriated by Mahatma Gandhi during India’s struggle for independence. Like the Buddha, Jainism’s founder, Vardhamāna (c. 599–527 BCE), was a descendant of a kṣatriya martial clan. His period as a wandering mendicant started at the age of thirty, roughly the same time as Buddha’s, but lasted twelve years, or twice as long. His penances, which included a six-month-long fast, were also more severe, and when he found enlightenment it was not sitting comfortably under the shade of a tree but squatting on his heels for two and a half days in the blazing sun. He became a possessor of absolute knowledge (kevalin) and a conqueror (jina), the latter title being the derivative of the name for the Jain religion.

Mahāvīra, as he was now known, would spend the next three decades travelling in northern India with a band of followers. But Jainism spread more slowly than Buddhism due to its rigid ascetic practices and lesser emphasis on missionary activity. After his death in c. 527 BCE, Mahāvīra was followed by a series of eminent teachers who received patronage from royal emperors, such as Candragupta Maurya (r. 321–297 BCE).

Like Buddhism, Jainism was a protest against aspects of Brahmanism. The basis of Jainism is the belief that all forms of existence, from humans down to the tiniest insects, have a soul or life force. This life force, or jiva, was at the root of ahiṃsā, or non-injury to other beings. The Digambara sect of Jainism takes this to its extreme. Its monks go about naked with no possessions other than a water pot made of gourd, a bunch of peacock feathers to clean the ground and a gauze mask across their faces to prevent accidentally inhaling an insect. Candles cannot be burned at night in case a moth flies into the flame. According to the strictest Jaina traditions, it is only these ‘sky-clad’ monks who can attain enlightenment.

Because tilling the soil can kill insects, Jains eschewed farming in favour of commerce. Today they are one of India’s richest communities, playing leading roles in banking and the jewellery trade. One extended network of Jains from the small town of Palanpur, in Gujarat, controls around 90 per cent of the world’s diamond cutting and polishing trade.

As Buddhism and Jainism flourished, so did the states where they were first established. By the early part of the fifth century BCE, Magadha, under the rule of Ajātaśatru (r. 492–461 BCE), would emerge as the foremost kingdom on the subcontinent at the time. Ajātaśatru came to the throne after murdering his father, Bimbisara (r. 544–492), an enlightened leader and a fervent admirer of the Buddha. He vanquished the rival kingdoms of Kosala and Videha, subduing a vast swathe of territory from the Nepal Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. Most importantly, he shifted his capital to Pāṭaliputra, on the Ganges River, a hub for northern India’s lucrative riverine trade. Ajātaśatru’s successors, most of whom came to the throne by murdering their fathers, went on to establish the powerful Nanda dynasty in the early fourth century BCE.

INDIA’S ‘JULIUS CAESAR’

Though the extent of the Nanda territory was unprecedented in Indian history, it was dwarfed in size by the rapidly expanding empire of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE). Since setting out from Athens, his army had taken control of much of West Asia. In 331 BCE, he marched into Persia, defeating Darius III, the last of Achaemenids. His army then swept across the Hindu Kush and occupied the area around Kabul before crossing the Indus River in 326 BCE. But this was no longer an invincible conquering force. Years of forced marches and tough campaigning, coupled with the fears of what lay beyond, had broken his soldiers both physically and mentally. When he reached the Beas River, Alexander was forced to turn back on the advice of his generals, who feared their troops would mutiny.

Alexander the Great’s army advanced as far as the Beas River in the present-day Indian state of Punjab, before being forced to retreat.

The significance of Alexander’s conquest is debatable. As the first ‘Westerner’ to invade India, he was lionised by nineteenth-century British colonisers as a precursor – a grand imperial hero who opened up Asia to Western civilisation. Although his superior military tactics and sometimes reckless bravado were also an inspiration for later Indian rulers, Alexander lacked both a strategic plan and an effective administration. As the Irish Indologist Vincent Smith points out, ‘India was not Hellenised. She continued to live her life of “splendid isolation” and soon forgot the passing of the Macedonian storm.’

As Alexander retreated down the Indus, sailing past the mysterious remains of Harappān cities, he left behind a scattering of garrisons and appointed satraps to govern conquered territories. But for all the romance of Alexander’s advance, he left so little impression that there is no reference to him in surviving ancient Indian literature. Within a year of his death in Babylon in 323 BCE, local uprisings had snuffed out most of his remaining outposts.

One of those hoping that Alexander had continued his eastward march into India was an Indian general known in ancient Greek texts as Sandrokottos. The identity of this semi-mythical figure would remain a mystery until William Jones, translating a Sanskrit play from the first century CE, stumbled across references to an Indian ruler named Candragupta Maurya (r. c. 322–297 BCE), who seized a rival’s throne and made his capital at Pāṭaliputra, where he received envoys from distant lands. Sandrokottos and Candragupta, he concluded, were one and the same. The significance of Jones’s discovery went beyond connecting the two. By fixing the dates of Candragupta’s reign, the reconstruction of much of ancient India’s history was possible at last.

Candragupta was in his mid-twenties when he was sent into exile by the ruler of Magadha. Stories of the strength of the Magadhan army was one of the reasons why Alexander halted his march into India. Candragupta, however, urged Alexander to cross the Beas, insisting that conquering Magadha would be easy because the people would rise up against its king, ‘hated and despised on account of his baseness and low birth’.

Snubbed by Alexander, Candragupta started to amass his own army, composed primarily of soldiers from disparate tribes from the northwest frontier of India. His forces made short work of the remaining Greek garrisons and defeated Nanda, the Magadhan ruler, in 321 BCE, occupying his capital, Pāṭaliputra, and taking control of his army, which consisted of 80,000 horses, 200,000 infantry and 6000 war elephants.

In his drive westwards, Candragupta also inflicted a humiliating defeat on one of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus Nicator (c. 358–281 BCE), who was attempting to recover his leader’s lost territories. The Greek general was forced to trade a large chunk of what is now southern and eastern Afghanistan in exchange for a mere 500 elephants. The two leaders then arrived at some sort of accommodation, possibly sealed by a matrimonial alliance.

As a goodwill gesture, Seleucus sent his ambassador, Megasthenes (c. 350–290 BCE), to Pāṭaliputra. As he journeyed across India, Megasthenes compiled the first detailed description of the country written by a foreign traveller. The original of his Indica has been lost, but fragments were preserved in the writings of Strabo, Pliny, Arrian and others. His descriptions of ‘this mystical and magical land’, were not always accurate. What Megasthenes didn’t observe first-hand he borrowed from earlier legends, which described men without mouths who could survive on nothing but the smell of roasted meat and the perfume of fruit and flowers, of Hyperboreans who lived for a thousand years, and of races with ears so large they wrapped themselves in them as if they were blankets.

More valuable to historians are his descriptions of the imperial court of ‘Sandrokottos’, which he wrote was ‘maintained with barbaric and luxurious ostentation’. Even allowing for hyperbole, it is clear from his writings that Pāṭaliputra was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. It contained lakes and gardens brimming with lotus flowers, jasmine and hibiscus, and cooled by fountains – a far cry from the chaotic and crowded modern city of Patna that stands on its ruins. Candragupta’s palace was made entirely of wood and featured ‘basins and goblets of gold, some measuring six feet in width, richly carved tables and chairs of state, vessels of Indian copper set with precious stones, and gorgeous embroidered robes were to be seen in profusion, and contributed to the brilliancy of the public ceremonies’. Amusements included gladiatorial contests, ox races and royal hunts.

Megasthenes describes a well-organised civil service run by a ruler who was so preoccupied with the administration of his state and his own security that he slept little more than four hours a night. Guards accompanied him wherever he went – his preferred mode of transport being a gold palanquin carried by elephants and shaded from the sun by female umbrella bearers. Although he ruled for only twenty-four years, Candragupta came to be known as India’s ‘Julius Caesar’, its ‘man of blood and iron’. After expelling the Greek garrisons in the northwest, he expanded his territories to include most of northern India, from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. By embracing such a large territory, the Mauryan Empire became the first multi-ethnic kingdom in India. Under his grandson Aśoka, it would grow to encompass almost the entire subcontinent by the third century BCE, the closest India would come to its modern boundaries until the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in the late 1600s.

Greek writers such as Megasthenes and the occasional Indian playwright were the last word on the Mauryas until the early 1900s, when a Brahmin scholar from Tanjore arrived at the Mysore government Oriental Library carrying a manuscript of dried palm leaves. This turned out to be the Arthaśāstra, variously translated as the ‘Science of Polity’ or ‘Treatise on Success’. One of the most important sources of information on administration, law, trade, war and peace in ancient India, its authorship was attributed to Candragupta’s Brahmin adviser, Kauṭilya (375–282 BCE), whose name can be variously translated as meaning ‘crooked’, ‘bent’ or ‘devious’. Recent scholarship suggests it was revised extensively in the second or third century CE by multiple authors.

The Arthaśāstra’s clearest message, the Nobel Prize–winning Indian economist Amartya Sen states, is ‘might is right’. Others have compared it to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as a manual for aspiring entrepreneurs ‘seeking to amass wealth in a competitive and globalising country’. Trust in another prince was a recipe for death. Morality should never be allowed to influence statecraft. Skill in intrigue was a far better qualification for kingship than either power or enthusiasm. Intrigue was so fundamental to statecraft that Kauṭilya recommended courtesans be employed as spies or informers. Spies could also be used to spread misinformation, to cause panic among enemy troops or to inspire confidence among one’s own soldiers by fabricating victories, or by pretending astrologers had proclaimed a king’s omniscience.

To the German sociologist Max Weber, the Arthaśāstra’s radicalism made Machiavelli’s The Prince look ‘harmless’. Nowhere was this clearer than in Kauṭilya’s advice on the pursuit of power. His name for a king is vijigīṣu, meaning one who is yearning for conquest. But while an expansionary policy is key to Kauṭilya’s vision, the king was always faced with the dilemma of how to combine his power with the religious authority claimed by the Brahmin priestly order. As the political scientist Sunil Khilnani writes, ‘To acquire legitimacy, a ruler has to show his disinterest in worldly power for its own sake and to manifest a renunciatory streak – but never so much as to hobble his pursuit of power. The never-ending struggle to achieve that balance continues to challenge India’s rulers today.’

KAUṬILYA ON CORRUPTION: ‘Just as it is impossible to know when fish, moving about in water, are drinking water, so it is impossible to know when officers appointed to carry out tasks are embezzling money.’

KAUṬILYA ON POWER: ‘A ruler should win over his people by seduction: a king should know how to perform magic tricks to give him an aura of miraculous powers and should make liberal use of manipulation.’

According to legend, Candragupta abdicated in c. 297 BCE. Accounts of why he did so at the height of his power vary, with one Jaina legend referring to a prophecy by his spiritual adviser that his kingdom would be beset a twelve-year famine as retribution for the violence inflicted during his reign. According to this legend, he converted to Jainism and, together with a congregation of monks, travelled to southern India. They finally stopped at Śravaṇa Beḷagoḷa, where, it is said, he undertook the ultimate act of renunciation and fasted to death.

AŚOKA: THE ‘GREATEST OF KINGS’

What we know of the next chapter of Indian history owes much to the forensic work of William Jones’s successors at the Asiatic Society. In 1837, while examining inscriptions on the stone railings of the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, James Prinsep (1799–1840) deciphered two letters of the alphabet. They were enough to identify the language as Pāli. He then began to decipher other inscriptions scattered all over the subcontinent. Some were on boulders, others on cliff faces. But the most impressive were those inscribed on massive cylindrical pillars. Theories on the meanings of the inscriptions ranged from obscure Vedic incantations to peculiarly Indian versions of the Ten Commandments. It soon became clear to Prinsep that they were edicts announcing the directives of a single sovereign. Most began with the words ‘Thus speaks Devanāmpiya Piyādassi’. Buddhist chronicles of Ceylon referred to a Sri Lankan king called Piyādassi, who shared his name with an Indian sovereign who had championed Buddhism and ruled over an immense kingdom. But it would not be until the early twentieth century that Devanāmpiya Piyādassi, ‘beloved of the gods and gracious of men’, was identified as the emperor Aśoka.

In his A Short History of the World, H.G. Wells calls Aśoka the ‘greatest of kings’ for his renunciation of war, his adoption of Buddhism and his declaration that all his conquests ‘would be conquests of religion’. For the historian A.L. Basham, Aśoka ‘towers above the other kings of ancient India, if for no other reason than that he is the only one among them whose personality can be reconstructed with any degree of certainty’. Describing Aśoka’s character, Basham discerns a man who was ‘a little naive, often rather self-righteous and pompous, but indefatigable, strong-willed and imperious’.

When Aśoka came to the throne in c. 268 BCE, he inherited an empire with an estimated population of 50 million socially, religiously and ethnically diverse people. The area around Magadha and the Western Gangetic Plain was largely under the influence of Āryan culture. Those areas further to the west and north were in contact with the Hellenised culture of Afghanistan, while the south had its unique pre-Āryan Dravidian civilisation. The empire’s size and diversity required a strong emphasis on government machinery and authority. Roads were constructed, shaded by trees, with wells and rest houses a day’s walk apart. Aśoka also ordered the planting of medicinal herbs. To administer so vast an empire he appointed dhamma-mahāmāttas, or ‘overseers of the law’, to tour his kingdom and ensure that local officials were performing their duties. The edicts were integral to his imperial project. Placed in or near important population centres, their messages were meant to endure ‘as long as my sons and great-grandsons reign, [and] as long as the sun and the moon endure’.

Although Aśoka is most often remembered for his policies of persuasion over coercion, his reign began in violence. A rock edict at Girnar, in western India, describes how 100,000 people were slaughtered in his conquest of the Kalinga kingdom. Many more probably died from famine and disease, a calamity that awakened in Aśoka feelings of ‘remorse, profound sorrow and regret’, the edict stated.

Most of the thirty-three edicts that have been discovered are in Prākrit, a collection of vernacular dialects that were much more widely understood than the literary Sanskrit or the Pāli used in Ceylonese Buddhist texts. Those in the western part of India are in Greek and Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian Empire. The Aśokan pillars are remarkable for their artistic beauty, crowned with life-like images of lions and bulls, probably carved by skilled stonemasons who migrated to India from Persia after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. Carved out of a single stone, some pillars are 12 or 15 metres high. After being quarried at Chunar, near Varanasi, the pillars, which weighed up to 50 tonnes, were transported hundreds of kilometres to geographically important sites.

While the pillars and rock-cut edicts were probably derived from the monumental inscriptions of Darius I of Persia, they do not extol the emperor and his greatness, but rather explain his policy of dharma. The most important principle of dharma was tolerance, both of people and of their beliefs and ideas. As Aśoka explained, this meant ‘consideration towards slaves and servants, obedience to mother and father, generosity towards friends, acquaintances and relatives, and towards priests and monks’. Another principle was nonviolence. Wherever possible, conquest should be conducted with clemency. By setting an example of enlightened government, Aśoka believed that he would convince neighbouring kingdoms of the merits of his policies and they would seek to join his empire, forming a kind of enlightened confederacy.

The most famous Aśokan pillar is the lion capital discovered at Sarnath. It shows four lions looking out, one in each direction, standing on a dharma cakra (wheel of law). The image would become the official emblem of independent India, gracing coins, banknotes, stamps and seals. The cakra also appears on the Indian flag.

Indian statecraft, which until now had been based on the expansion of empire through violent conquest, was overturned. Influenced by Buddhist ideas, Aśoka came to believe that conquest could be based on the law of piety. He abolished animal sacrifices and restricted the consumption of meat. Royal hunts were ended. Parakeets, pigeons, bats, ants, tortoises, squirrels, cows, rhinoceroses and nanny goats were among the animals protected from slaughter. Thanks to his adherence to ahimsā, many of his subjects became vegetarians.

SECOND MINOR ROCK EDICT: ‘Father and mother must be obeyed; respect for living creatures must be enforced; truth must be spoken. These are the virtues of the Law of Duty which must be practised. Similarly, the teacher must be reverenced by the pupil, and proper courtesy must be shown to relations. This is the ancient standard of duty that leads to length of days and according to this men must act.’

Aśoka’s most lasting legacy was to transform Buddhism from a localised Indian sect into a world religion. He ordered the opening up of eight stupas where Buddha’s ashes had been buried in the region of Bihar. These were distributed throughout his kingdom, with many ending up in Taxila, which was linked to Pāṭaliputra by a royal highway constructed during Candragupta’s reign. He also directed caves be dug as meditation retreats for Buddhist and Jaina monks at several sites scattered around his empire. Those in the Barabar Hills near Bodh Gayā would be later immortalised as the Marabar Hills in Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). In c. 250 BCE, Aśoka convened a major conclave at Pāṭaliputra at which the Pāli cannon was codified. Members of the saṇgha were ordered to disseminate Buddhism throughout India and beyond.

The spread of Buddhism during this period is evidenced by the existence of a vibrant Buddhist colony set up by Indian merchants in Alexandria in the second century BCE. The colony prompted the city’s governor to complain that ‘the Greeks stole their philosophy from the barbarians’. Recent scholarship points to startling similarities between the Buddhist Jātaka tales and Christian parables and miracles. In one Jātaka tale, a pious Buddhist disciple walks on water only to sink when his faith abandons him. In another, the Buddha feeds 500 of his followers with a single piece of bread from his begging bowl. Another Buddhist work bears a close resemblance to the Old Testament tale of the prodigal son. As Vincent Smith writes: ‘Nascent Christianity met full-grown Buddhism in the Academies and markets of Asia and Egypt, while both religions were exposed to the influences of surrounding Paganism in many forms, and of the countless works of art which gave expression to the forms of polytheism.’

The peace and prosperity of Aśoka’s reign were fleeting. Despite deploying ‘Officers of Righteousness’ to spread the Buddha’s teachings, the ingrained stratification of Indian society gradually began to undermine his message. By the time Aśoka died in c. 232 BCE, the Mauryan Empire was beginning to fracture. His sons fought over succession. Aśoka’s renunciation of further conquest was forgotten, and war once again became the norm. ‘In general, the history of post-Mauryan India is one of struggles of one dynasty with another for regional dominance, and the political, though not the cultural, unity of India was lost for nearly two thousand years,’ A.L. Basham glumly notes.

The reasons for the decline of the Mauryan Empire are still disputed. Some historians argue that Aśoka’s pro-Buddhist sympathies were resisted by the Brahmin priestly caste. Others claim that his policies of nonviolence weakened the military strength of his state, leaving it vulnerable to invaders from the west. The difficulty of forging a sense of nationhood over such a large area is cited as another cause. Ultimately, it may well have come down to basic economics, with historians pointing to the debasement of silver coins in the later Mauryan period as proof that financing an army and the massive bureaucracy he inherited from Candragupta based on a largely agricultural economy became unviable.

THE AGE OF INTRUDERS

The period that followed the Mauryan civilisation is often described as India’s ‘Dark Age’. This descriptor is rather harsh. Although waves of nomadic warriors from Central Asia and Greek adventurers laid waste to India’s cities and towns, the period was not bereft of enlightened rulers. Buddhism grew in the land of its birth and spread to neighbouring countries, and Greco-Bactrian kings brought with them Western theories of astrology and medicine. Trade between India and West Asia and the Mediterranean flourished to such an extent that senators in ancient Rome complained that women were wasting their money on Indian luxuries such as silks and jewellery. India had become ‘the sink of the world’s gold’, Pliny the Elder lamented in 77 CE. Much of this gold came from the fabled mines of Kolar in southern India, where from the days of the Harappān civilisation it had made its way to much of Asia, Europe and Africa.

Events taking place thousands of kilometres to the northeast of India were now about to intrude on the history of the subcontinent. In China, the first phase of the Great Wall had been erected to repel a succession of marauding tribes. In c. 165 BCE, one of the tribes forced to turn back was the Yüeh-chih. As they made their way westwards, they displaced other tribes in an ‘ethic knock-on effect’ until they settled in Bactria, where a tribe known as the Shakas had earlier driven out the remnants of Greek settlers who had stayed on in the region after Alexander’s retreat.

Forced out of their strongholds in Bactria, the Greek settlers had no choice but to make an accommodation with the mainly Buddhist inhabitants of Gandhāra, the region in northern Pakistan around the city of Taxila. Buddhist scholars were appointed as advisers to the Greek rulers. It was an advantageous arrangement that ensured the spiritual, social, economic and cultural needs of the Buddhist community were taken care of. The Greek language began to be used in official documentation and Greek coinage was introduced. A unique school of sculpture that blended Greco-Roman aesthetics with distinctively Indian subject matter began to flourish.

By the late first century, one of the Yüeh-chih clans, the Kuśāṇa, moved into Gandhāra and then into northwest India, giving them control of two important trade routes into Asia. Like the Āryans a millennium and half earlier, they were excellent horseriders. Whether they came as invaders, as allies to one of the existing rulers or even as refugees is open to debate due to the paucity of historical sources.

The Kuśāṇa kings called themselves ‘sons of heaven’, adopting the title from Chinese rulers of the period. Their most illustrious ruler, Kaniṣka (r. 127–150 CE), came to power in c. 127 CE and governed an empire that stretched from Kashgar to the Gangetic Basin. His twin capitals were Purushapura, the site of today’s city of Peshawar, and Mathura, on the Yamuna River in northern India.

Like Aśoka, Kaniṣka converted to Buddhism. He convened a major Buddhist conclave in Kashmir attended by more than 500 monks, who undertook a thorough re-examination of the Buddhist cannon. Monasteries became large economic enterprises engaged in everything from trade to brewing and distilling alcohol, enabling them to fund missionary activity that saw the spread of Buddha’s teaching throughout Central Asia and China. In the latter part of his reign, coins bearing the image of Buddha inscribed in Greek lettering started to appear, as did images of deities from Persia, Rome and Greece, as well as Brahmanical India.

Kaniṣka’s other contribution to Indian civilisation was his patronage of Gandhāran art and Buddhist architecture. Standing figures of the Buddha in flowing toga-like robes and displaying distinctly Mediterranean hairstyles and facial features bear testimony to the influence of Greco-Roman art. They were probably executed by Roman sculptors who migrated along the Silk Routes that converged on northwestern India. The region around Taxila became the heartland of Buddhism. Hundreds of stupas dotted the landscape, ranging from small devotional shrines to what was the ancient world’s tallest building, a tower some 170 metres high and crowned with thirteen gilded and bejewelled umbrellas that greeted visitors to Purushapura.

In 1911, archaeologists uncovered a statue of Kaniṣka wearing a Kuśāṇa kaftan, ceremonial staff and broadsword and riding boots, but missing a head. An almost identical statue that stood in the Kabul Museum was destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Beyond this patronage of Buddhism, Indian civilisation borrowed little from these nomadic invaders aside from the use of horse-mounted cavalry in warfare. Almost nothing is known about Kaniṣka’s immediate successors, and the empire he founded eventually disintegrated. The Gandhāran school of art, however, continued to flourish in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Situated on the caravan route between Bactria and Taxila was the Buddhist monastic centre of Bamiyan, established in the second century. The sacred grottos dug into the cliff faces of Bamiyan’s narrow valley as monastic retreats still exist, but the three colossal Buddha statues, the tallest of which reached a height of 53 metres, fell victim to Taliban iconoclasts and were blown up in March 2001 – an event that marked the nadir of an even darker age than India had endured in the early part of the first millennium.