Alternatively, it may be taken to suggest a much longer time-lapse between the India of later Vedic texts, like the Upanisads, and that of the earliest Buddhist and Jain texts. Even a cursory acquaintance with these sources leaves the reader wondering whether they can possibly refer to the same society. The Sanskrit texts evoke a mostly agrarian way of life in which states play a minor part and status is governed by lineage and ritual observance. Buddhist and Jain texts, on the other hand, portray a network of functioning states, each with an urban nucleus heavily engaged in trade and production. Here wealth as much as lineage confers status. Indeed, the Buddhist concept of ‘merit’ as something to be earned, accumulated, occasionally transferred and eventually realised seems inconceivable without a close acquaintance with the moneyed economy. By interleaving between these two societies a further century, Buddhism’s newly revised or ‘short chronology’ allows for a more gradual and credible evolution of state and city without unduly taxing the archaeological record.
Similarly, it allows room for the evolution of a tradition of heterodoxy and dissent. Buddhist texts in particular portray a society that was already in religious ferment when the Buddha was born. Rival holy-men swarm across the countryside performing feats of endurance, disputing one another’s spiritual credentials and vying with one another for followers and patronage. That this was not simply the impression of partisan hotheads is shown by the dispassionate Kautilya whose compendium on statecraft, the Arthasastra, recognises such renunciates as an important constituent of any state; they are to be given legal protection and free passage; special forest areas are to be allotted to them for meditation, and special lodging-houses in the city. Saints or charlatans, they evidently mirrored a society to which the paranormal, the supernatural and the metaphysical had a strong appeal. Many of them went naked or unwashed and they cheerfully flouted the taboos of caste status. Defying social convention, they yet enjoyed society’s indulgence. Renunciation had become an accepted way of life in which asceticism was seen as a prerequisite to spiritual enlightenment.
The philosophies on offer from this rag-tag army of reformers ranged from mind-boggling mysticism to defiant nihilism and blank agnosticism, from the outright materialism of the Lokayats to the heavy determinism of the Ajivikas, and from the rationalism of the Buddha to the esotericism of Mahavira. Most, however, agreed in condemning the extravagance of Vedic sacrifice, in sidelining the Vedic pantheon, and in ignoring brahmanical authority. Moreover many, including the Jains, Buddhists and Ajivikas, recognised an assortment of antecedents whose teachings or experiences had in some sense anticipated their own. In other words, Mahavira, the Buddha, and Gosala of the Ajivikas acknowledged well established traditions of heterodoxy; and as one might infer from their own reception, they were able to capitalise on an already existing thirst for spiritual and moral guidance, as well as on an abiding credulity. Clearly the new sources of wealth and authority associated with state-formation and urbanisation had plunged society into a crisis which the rigidities of the varnasramadharma (the organisation of society into caste varnas and into social vocations based on age) could scarcely accommodate, and to which the ritual oblations of the Vedas seemed irrelevant as well as wildly extravagant.
Adopting, then, not the conventional 486–3BC for the parinirvana but some date between 400 and 350 BC, one may place the birth of Siddhartha Gautama, the ‘Buddha’, some time in the mid-fifth century. Like his contemporary, Mahavira Nataputta of the Jains, he was a ksatriya, the son of Suddhodana, raja of the Sakyas. The Sakya state being one of those republican gana-sanghas, it had many rajas. And since their chief was elected, the ‘Prince’ Siddhartha of later legend must be considered a fabrication. Moreover, Kapilavastu, the Sakya capital, was not a major political centre. Just within the southern border of present-day Nepal, it may have served as a staging post on the uttarapatha. Trade and craftsmanship were more the Buddha’s milieu than royal ceremonial. The affluence against which he eventually reacted by renouncing his wife and family to begin an enquiry into the human condition may have been real; equally it may have been the perceived luxury of more celebrated urban centres like Vaisali, capital of the Licchavis, or the Koshalan metropolis of Sravasti, or Rajagriha in Magadha.
In the course of his quest, Siddhartha visited all of these places and studied under a variety of distinguished but ultimately unconvincing teachers. On one occasion, while traversing Magadha, he met its king. His name was Bimbisara and the date (given the Buddhist ‘short chronology’) must have been around 400 BC. Bimbisara’s origins are uncertain, but he is said to have lived for over fifty years. He was now in the middle of his reign, and had already added to his domain the important kingdom of Anga.
Anga lay to the east, with its famed capital at Champa in west Bengal. Thence Magadha gained access by river to the Bay of Bengal, where Tamluk (Tamralipti, near Calcutta) would become a thriving port for trade with the peninsula, Burma and Sri Lanka. Having inherited access to the rich copper and iron deposits of southern Bihar, Bimbisara had thus in effect laid another of the foundations of Magadhan supremacy. Seemingly a just and practical ruler, he married much but not always wisely. Dealings with Koshala, Avanti (Malwa), Taxila and the Licchhavis are recorded and, with the exception of the last, they were generally amicable. A rudimentary administrative system is evident and, possessed of a ready source of both elephants and metals, it has been suggested that Magadha’s military establishment was well equipped and professionally organised. Whether Bimbisara worried about manpower being drained off by the ferment of heterodox sects is not recorded. But he did advise the wandering Siddhartha to return to his proper ksatriya station, and offered to provide him with a suitable establishment.
The advice was rejected. For the next few years Siddhartha remained in Magadha but was much on the move. Like those earlier exiles in the epics, he had forsaken the security of a settled, civilised life for the uncertainties of the vagrant and the outcaste. Austerities, whether unavoidable or self-imposed, cowed the appetites, cleared the mind, and let the spirit soar. After prolonged meditation beneath a tree at the place henceforth called Buddh Gaya, the now thirty-five-year-old Siddhartha Gautama at last isolated the nature of suffering and transience, formulated a scheme for overcoming it, and so attained Enlightenment. As the Buddha, the ‘Enlightened One’, he hastened to Varanasi, and in the Deer Park at nearby Sarnath, evidently one of those forest areas reserved for ascetics, he propounded his reasoning to five erstwhile companions in what is known as the First Sermon.
The imagery of the Buddha’s ‘Middle Way’ (between the extremes of indulgence and asceticism) with its ‘Noble Eightfold Path’, as also that of the ‘Wheel of Dharma’ and of the ‘Three Refuges’ (the Buddha, the dharma or teaching, and the sangha or monastic community), clearly reflected the itinerant’s experience. Buddhism began as a code for the road, a set of rationalised precepts designed to direct and smooth man’s progress along life’s unhappy highway. Suffering came from within, from desire and indulgence. By mastering desire, restraining indulgence and yet eschewing extreme asceticism, the human condition became bearable, and merit might be accumulated whereby release (nirvana) might eventually be attained. The notion of continuous rebirths and the challenge of escaping from their endless cycle were common to both orthodox teachings derived from the Upanisads and to the Buddha’s teaching. Buddhism was not a belief system, not a rival faith to the post-Vedic cults and practices which prevailed under brahmanical direction, but more a complementary discipline. About gods, worship, offerings, prayers, priests and ritual, the Buddha claimed no special knowledge. He offered merely heightened insight, not divine revelation. It was his followers in the generations to come who would elevate the Buddha and other semi-enlightened ones (Boddhisatvas) into deities, thus claiming for Buddhism the authority and the supernatural paraphernalia of a religion.
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