32 India, Empire and Chaos

India, Empire and Chaos

Migration and a New Civilization | The Upanishads | Hinduism in the 500s BCE | the Jains | Buddhism's founder, Siddartha Gautama | Epic Hindu Literature | Chandragupta | the Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka |Military coup and invasions | the Gupta Dynasty...

Around the year 1000 BCE, tribes living in the Indus Valley began running from drought. They trekked eastward along the foot of the Himalayan mountains, where jungles were less dense and rivers easier to cross. They entered the plains of the Ganges Valley, and there they found these societies with a more egalitarian organization than they had, and they despised them for being different, for not having kings as autocratic as theirs and for having strange religious beliefs.   By now, these migrating Hindus had iron tools and weapons, iron having spread eastward through Persia. And with their superior weaponry and self-confidence, the migrants advanced against local resistance.

With the Hindu conquests, a complex hierarchy of classes developed. At the top were the priests and their entire families: the Brahmins. Also at the top were the warrior-aristocrats, the Kshatriyas, whose job it was to practice constantly for combat. Neither the Brahmins nor the Kshatriyas conceded superiority to the other, but they agreed that the other classes were lower than they. The first of these lower classes was the Vaishyas and their families: those conquerors who tended cattle and served the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in others ways. The lowest class was the conquered, darker-skinned people who were servants for the conquerors. The servants were called Shudras. Hindus made these four classifications a part of their mythology and religion.

People from different classes could dine together. A man from a non-Brahmin family could still become a Brahmin. A Brahmin might marry a woman from a lower caste whom he found attractive, but this was a male prerogative. A girl from a Brahmin family was allowed to marry only someone also from a Brahmin family.

The conquerors sent priests as missionaries to southern India. And occasionally these missionaries felt mistreated and warrior nobles went to their rescue. But southern India remained independent of northern rule

By around the 700s or 600s BCE, the migrations ended, and with their new successes in agriculture came an increase in population. In northern India by the Ganges River and its tributaries cities arose, cities with fortifications, moats and ramparts in response to the dangers of war. In northern India sixteen different kingdoms emerged.

Traders, merchants and landlords appeared, as did money lenders. Indians began trading with Arabia and the great empire of the Assyrians. In the 600s, India began trading with China, the Malay peninsula and the islands of what are now Indonesia and the Philippines.

Hindu Brahmins were giving instruction to local elites who had not been completely Hinduized. These elites were accustomed to deference from local people. They resisted the claims of Brahmins to higher rank and were offended by the posturing, pride and arrogance of the Brahmins. Some of them were opposed to the bloodletting of Hinduism’s animal sacrifices. Some of them thought the Brahmins too involved in ceremonial formalities and ritual and saw the Brahmin’s view of gods and salvation as strange.

Going into the 700s BCE, Hinduism like other religions was subject to a widening diversity. One Hindu Brahmin had the genius to see that there were truths not yet known, and he advocated doubt and recorded his insights in a late contribution to the Hinduism sacred book, the Rig Veda. He wrote that some priests had an unwarranted certainty in belief and were blind men leading the blind.  Meanwhile, some Brahmins had little interest in ritual sacrifices and more interest in probing relations between self and the universe. They were interested in attaining religious bliss, and perhaps as early as the 700s BCE their writings were collected into what would be called the Upanishads, a collection of as many as two hundred books that were to be written across centuries.

The Upanishads consisted of attempts to describe truth through poetry and analogy. Some contributors made points drawn from observed fact, and some merely recorded their intuitions and asked the reader to accept their insights on faith. Some contributors to theUpanishads repeated beliefs already expressed in the Vedas, such as every living thing having a spirit, or soul, and spirits being able to migrate in and out of things. They wrote of death as the passing of one's spirit into other beings, and death as rebirth, with souls returning to earth within another human or some other creature – reincarnation. It was written that where a soul went depended upon how well a person had behaved in his previous life. Good actions were described as directing a soul to a higher form of life. The soul of the evil doer, it was claimed, found its way to a lower form of life.

Some contributors to the Upanishads pleaded that one's fate could be altered only by learning – like a Born Again Christian who transforms himself by acquiring a knowledge of God. In the Upanishads this was expressed in the claim that rather than rejoice in externals known through the senses, people should turn their thoughts inward in a quest for self-realization and knowledge about themselves. They claimed that material or sensual pleasure should not be ultimate goals, that what people really want lies more deeply. They claimed that God is within us and that the wise seek the joys of the infinite, the joy that comes with separating the self from the body and freeing oneself from the clutches of birth and death.

It was written in the Upanishads that there are two kinds of knowledge. One kind was called lower knowledge, which was described as knowledge about the existence of God, knowledge of rituals and the knowledge that one acquires through one's senses about the material world. This lower knowledge was described as standing in the way of the other kind of knowledge: higher knowledge. This higher knowledge was described as impossible to explain, like trying to explain warmth to someone who knows only cold. Higher knowledge was described as a personal experience that touched one's soul. It was claimed that written instructions might help guide one toward acquiring this knowledge but that in this acquisition emotions had to dominate.

This view of knowledge did not acknowledge a limited ability to know so much as it did a limited ability to teach. Some contributors to the Upanishads wrote that all they could do was stimulate thinking in others that would lead these others to acquire wisdom on their own. They described this search as an adventure on behalf of the human spirit. One contributor to the Upanishads wrote:

Into blind darkness enter they who worship ignorance;
Into darkness greater than that enter they who delight in knowledge.

Additional contributions to the Upanishads made this search for higher knowledge an attempt at awareness of an underlying, universal unity. Assumptions were made about universal consciousness. Various writings described different unifying forces: Vishvkarman, the Great Soul; the god Hiranyagargha, who established the earth and sky;Brahmanaspate the Lord of Prayer, who also produced the world; and Aditi, the mother of gods.

The viewpoint in the Upanishads that everything is interconnected suggested an all encompassing god. A youth was described as asking a learned man how many gods there are. The learned man named three hundred and three. "Yes," responded the youth, "but how many are there really?" The learned man narrowed their number to thirty-three. "Yes," responded the youth, "but how many are there really?" And finally the learned man said there was only one god.   

Another contributor to the Upanishads wrote that a person had to realize the god in himself before he could realize the god of the universe, and he claimed that realizing the god in oneself is recognizing oneself in all others. Another wrote of the senses as an illusion and of God as the maker of this illusion. This view held that to grasp reality and to reach one's goal of harmony with the cosmos one had to turn from the illusion of materiality to the world of mental realization.

Another writer claimed that one helped oneself understand the unity of the universe by gaining knowledge about materiality, including the origins of the universe. Another writer of this persuasion speculated that the world had begun as water, that the earth is water solidified, that every solid is basically water and that water and God are one. A third contributor to the Upanishads saw reality and God as fire.

One contributor to the Upanishads described God as mystery, and another contributor claimed that in the beginning there was nothingness, that the world was created from nothingness and would eventually return to nothingness. Another writer described God as having existed before all else. He wrote that in the beginning God was alone, that he looked around and saw nothing, and, being lonely, he divided himself into male and female, and that these two aspects of God then mated and brought into creation all living things.

Intellectual unrest continued in India through the 500s. A few writers in India challenged Hinduism by proclaiming that the universe was essentially inanimate and functioned other than by the magic of gods. They claimed that when a person dies he dissolves back into primary elements, that after death there is neither pain nor pleasure, that there is no afterlife or reincarnation, that soul and god are only words and that Hindu sacrifices accomplish nothing.

The materialist point of view found its way into the Upanishads, and Brahmin authorities responded by removing the offending entries, and they destroyed other materialist writings. No writings expressing the materialist point of view were to survive. They were to be known only through those who argued against them.