Incarnations Read online

  The Buddha’s life played out in the midst of this flux. He grew up within sight of the high mountains of Nepal, on the northern edges of the Magadha region. Social life was largely regulated by the rituals contained in the Vedas. These practices, and the sacred verses describing them, were in turn fiercely controlled by the priestly castes that constituted the highest varna, or estate, of men, the Brahmins.

  But across Magadha, communities were beginning to reject both Brahminic power and Vedic rituals, such as animal sacrifice. Some of these communities were chiefdoms dominated by men from the warrior and trading varnas. The Buddha himself was a member of the second-highest varna, the Kshatriyas, made up of warrior castes. He was “a product of his own time,” the Harvard scholar Charles Hallisey says, but he was also “an innovator, someone who creates something new in the world—and this tension is right at the centre of everything we think about who the Buddha was historically.”

  There are almost as many versions of how the Buddha developed his radical moral vision as there are Buddhist traditions around the world today. Perhaps the most well known, depicted on the walls of the Ajanta caves, is an inward drama: the story of one man’s religious, psychological, and ethical experimentation. After a cosseted upbringing, Siddhartha Gautama was deeply shaken by his first encounters with human suffering. (Let’s set aside how sheltered he must have been, to have grown up not encountering suffering.) Undone by his belated exposure to worldly pain, he resolved to escape it. Renouncing his wealthy family, he took up the life of a wandering ascetic. “My body became extremely lean,” he later said. “When I thought I would touch the skin of my stomach, I actually took hold of my spine.”

  Over the course of six years, Siddhartha explored a number of the spiritual practices and philosophies swirling around northern India, but his attempts to find a release from suffering proved fruitless. Then, after abandoning these efforts, he was jolted, Proust-like, by a childhood memory of how, as his father worked nearby, Siddhartha sat under the shade of a rose apple tree in a state of pure joy, “without sensual desires, without evil ideas.” How could he recover that state? Days passed in mental struggle, and then one spring night, while sitting under a bodhi tree, he achieved it. And in that state, he believed he had grasped the causes of suffering, and its cure. He had now awakened, emerging from our worldly life of attachments, desires, and pain as if from an interminable dream.

  * * *

  Around five hundred kilometers south of Ajanta, in the rice paddy and cotton fields of northern Karnataka, is another major Buddhist site, Kanaganahalli, where the remains of a large domed reliquary shrine, or stupa, dating from roughly the first century BCE, were uncovered just twenty years ago. In the centuries after the Buddha’s life, many ordinary, nonliterate Indians would have learned of him through Jatakas, popular morality tales about his imagined previous lives, which were often depicted on sculptural friezes that decorated stupas such as the one at Kanaganahalli. There is something particularly captivating about these sculptures, perhaps because the soft gray limestone gave the carvers a freer hand to imbue the friezes with a sense of liveliness and humor. But we also see the Buddha represented here just by symbols: an empty seat that expresses the extinction of his self, the bodhi tree where he reached enlightenment, and the cakka, or cakra, the great wheel, which has come to represent his teaching.

  After waking into his new state of consciousness, the Buddha decided to share his liberating insights. He began to advocate a path he called the middle way, which avoided both asceticism and worldly indulgence. His teachings became the dhamma, which roughly means “law”; it was a set of principles to be followed, but also a teaching about the principle, or essence, of suffering and experience. The term was originally a Brahmin one, the Sanskrit dharma, which prescribed a different law for each caste—laws that encompassed every dimension of life, from marriage to work to meals. The Buddha took this established term and bent it to his own purpose; his dhamma was a single ethical vision embracing all living beings. “Identify oneself with all,” he taught—that is, regard every creature in the universe with compassion.

  The Buddha’s solution to suffering lay in the individual mind. Yet he was also sketching a new form of society. His relative egalitarianism is clear even from the language he used to teach his followers. Brahmins fiercely protected the Sanskrit in which the Vedas were expressed, and the lower orders were forbidden from learning this “language of the gods.” Instead of Sanskrit, the Buddha used the local dialect of the people. He also dispensed with the idea of a deity, and with a priestly caste meant to direct social life according to scripture. As his following grew, he founded an order of monks, the sangha, which adopted broadly collectivist principles, taking important decisions through discussion in council and sharing much of what little property they were permitted to have. Low-caste members were allowed the same religious education that was open to other followers, another practice barred within Brahminic society. After some resistance—it seems the Buddha was not entirely immune from patriarchal attitudes—he allowed women to be admitted to the order as nuns. He also rejected doctrines of predestination, by which birth supposedly determined people’s roles in society. He was a moral meritocrat, and to an extent a social one, too.

  * * *

  Following the Buddha’s death, his teachings spread first by word of mouth and then by imperial enthusiasm. In the third century BCE, India’s greatest empire-builder, Ashoka (5), embraced the Buddha’s teachings and accelerated their transmission throughout India, inscribing on pillars and rock faces across the subcontinent messages inspired by them. Judging from the archaeological evidence alone, India for much of the next thousand years seems to have been at least as much Buddhist as it was Hindu.

  By the seventh century CE, things had visibly changed. Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim visiting the way stations of the Buddha’s life in northern India, found a dwindling community of monks and roughly a thousand monasteries “deserted and in ruins. They are filled with wild shrubs, and solitary to the last degree.” How did this come to pass? In short, we don’t know. As Xuanzang traveled, he recorded stories of attacks on Buddhist holy sites, including the toppling of the original bodhi tree where the Buddha had found enlightenment. Later Tibetan and other Buddhist chronicles also mention Hindu hostilities against the faith. What’s clearer, historically, is that Buddhism eventually came under assault from Muslim marauders—for instance, in the devastating twelfth-century sack of Nalanda, a great center of Buddhist learning, which forever destroyed a major storehouse of human knowledge.

  But it’s possible that Hinduism also adapted over the centuries in ways that allowed it to win back followers. Around the start of the Common Era, there were efforts to formalize the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and legal treatises such as the Manusmriti, or the Laws of Manu. Some scholars see in these works attempts to incorporate Buddhist ideas in order to neutralize and rebut Buddhism—effecting a kind of Brahminic counterreformation. After all, Hinduism has never been a fixed doctrine moored to a single sacred text: it remained multiple and in some respects labile, a fact that allowed it to absorb criticism and challenges.

  * * *

  Once, in Japan, I traveled to the ancient capital of Nara to see its Buddhist temples and shrines. Built of massive timber beams, they’ve been protected, even burnished, by the wrap of Japanese civilization. So I was startled to come across images and statues bearing names I knew: Indian names for some of the Buddha’s many incarnations. Discovering them in shrines used continuously for around twelve centuries, I was moved anew by the difficulty of the Buddha’s course through the history of the land where he was born. The Sanskrit roots of the word Buddha mean “someone who has woken up.” In India, Buddhism seemed to sleep for centuries. It was only the anguished choice of one of modern India’s founding figures that summoned the Buddha back to life.

  On October 14, 1956, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (41), the leader of a political move
ment to gain rights and dignity for the country’s Dalits, stood on a stage in the city of Nagpur and formally converted to Buddhism. Before him, in the crowd, were some four hundred thousand or more of his followers. Though Ambedkar had been an architect of the new Indian Constitution, he doubted that lower-caste citizens would be able to thrive in what remained, despite his active struggle, a caste-dominated polity. After taking his own oaths, he turned to administer a set of conversion vows to the individuals in the massive crowd:

  I renounce the Hindu religion which has obstructed the evolution of my former humanity and considered humans unequal and inferior … I regard all human beings as equals … From this time forward I vow that I will behave according to the Buddha’s teachings.

  Ambedkar was chiseling his own Buddha: near enough a social revolutionary, or an ancient Indian Rousseau. Like other founders of modern India, he was recycling historical figures who could be endowed with new life in order to solve the problems of Indian society—a little like the scrap shop workers just behind the Mumbai slum temple, sifting through their bags for something of continuing value.

  2

  MAHAVIRA

  Soldier of Nonviolence

  Fifth century BCE

  Mohandas Gandhi (38), the Mahatma, was fond of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. One blind man, grabbing the elephant’s tail, said that an elephant was like a rope. Another, holding its trunk, countered that it was like a snake. A third, touching one of its legs, protested that it was really like a tree. Those touching its ears or sides made still other claims. All were “right from their respective points of view,” Gandhi wrote in the mid-1920s, “and wrong from the point of view of one another, and right and wrong from the point of view of the man who knew the elephant.”

  For Gandhi, the parable illustrated “the doctrine of the many-sidedness of reality.” “It is this doctrine that has taught me to judge a Mussalman from his own standpoint and a Christian from his,” he continued. “I used to resent the ignorance of my opponents. Today I can love them because I am gifted with the eye to see myself as others see me and vice versa … My anekantavada is the result of the twin doctrine of Satya and Ahimsa.”

  Anekantavada, satya, and ahimsa: “many-sidedness,” “truth,” and “nonviolence.” These principles were particularly urgent for Gandhi in the 1920s, as relations between Hindus and Muslims slid into rioting and bloodshed. Though Gandhi would give these virtues his own characteristic twist, they were rooted deep in Indian thought, in a critique of Vedic Hinduism that coalesced in the Gangetic river basin some twenty-five hundred years ago. That critique eventually became Jainism, one of the four great religions born in India (along with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism). The man who systematized the Jain worldview, in the fifth century BCE, is known by the honorific Mahavira, which means “the great hero.” Ahimsa, rigorous attachment to the truth, and the doctrine of anekantavada were central to Mahavira’s teaching, and he would later be canonized by Gandhi (along with the Buddha and Tolstoy) as a “soldier” of nonviolence.

  * * *

  Mahavira, according to Jain tradition, was the last in a line of twenty-four superhuman figures known as tirthankaras, or “ford makers”: beings who had crossed over from the mundane world of human suffering and violence and into the realm of spiritual liberation, and could help others do the same. In our human history, he was the descendant of a Kshatriya martial clan—like the Buddha (1), his contemporary in fifth-century Magadha. Also like the Buddha, he became one of the most compelling of a range of early Indian religious philosophers generally referred to as Shramanas, or “seekers”—renouncers who turned their backs on domestic life and explored various paths to individual spiritual liberation, while rejecting the priestly role of the Brahmin caste.

  Mahavira’s teachings shared many important features with the Buddha’s; in particular, they both opposed beliefs at the core of the Vedas, the earliest Hindu texts, about the role of caste in spiritual life, the supremacy of the gods, and the indispensable nobility of ritual sacrifice. These sacrifices often required animal slaughter and supposedly generated a potent creative force that sustained both individual life and the cosmos.

  The rejection of sacrificial rituals was especially significant for Mahavira and his followers. “All forms of existence, according to Jainism, are embodied souls—the Jain term is jiva, which means life force,” explains Paul Dundas, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and a scholar of Jainism. For Jains, this life force is manifest not just in humans, animals, and plants; it is also present as unseen souls moving through earth, air, fire, and water. “So we are surrounded by life, and the correct stance towards this is to govern oneself,” Dundas says, “to discipline one’s behavior so that we can minimize the destruction of life, whether witting or unwitting.”

  * * *

  This, in essence, is the Jain doctrine of ahimsa, a direct inversion of Vedic beliefs about the sustaining powers of animal sacrifice. Mahavira’s teachings required not only that one abstain from violent acts (except in extraordinary circumstances), but also, more important, that one adopt a fundamental stance of benign intention toward the world. Some have tried to connect this stance directly to anekantavada, as Gandhi did, claiming that the spirit of nonviolence informed an attitude of intellectual humility and religious tolerance that is manifest in the works of several important early Jain thinkers.

  You can see the Jain attitude toward living creatures at a two-story hospital on the premises of the seventeenth-century Digambar Jain temple in Delhi’s old city. The hospital is not for humans, but for birds. In its four hundred cages, cooled by ceiling fans, fluttering convalescents are fed compound medicine and liquid protein and then released into the air, or into the arms of little boys, who race home with their healed roosters.

  Strict Jain vegetarianism prohibits the eating not just of animals or eggs, but also of root vegetables, in part because pulling them from the ground disturbs the lives of other plants and little creatures. Today, in the Chowpatty area of South Mumbai, which is home to many Jain laypeople, these dietary guidelines are adhered to even in the popular new Starbucks.

  The stereotypical image of the Jain renunciant is a monk (or possibly nun) dutifully sweeping the ground gently before him with a small broom, so that he doesn’t tread on any living creatures, with his mouth covered to prevent the accidental swallowing of any small bugs. Yet Mahavira took his inversion of Vedic Hinduism one step further, transforming the tapas, or heat, of the Brahminic sacrificial fire into the tapas, or austerity, of a severe personal discipline. For the Jains, salvation might indeed be the sum of sacrifices: not of living beings, but of one’s self.

  * * *

  Most of what we know about the life of Mahavira derives from two Jain hagiographies: the proselytizing Kalpa Sutra, written centuries after Mahavira, and the earlier Acharanga Sutra, which supposedly contains his own words. (There are also tantalizing references to Mahavira in some relatively early Buddhist texts.) Mahavira was born Vardhaman, the son of a clan leader, in Kundagrama, a kingdom in today’s Bihar—though his exact place of birth remains a subject of contentious village rivalries in the state’s pilgrim tourist trade. In the Kalpa Sutra, his anti-Brahminism predates even his birth: in the nick of time, Mahavira’s embryo was transplanted from the womb of a Brahmin woman into a woman from the Kshatriya caste. He was also apparently a very early adopter of nonviolence: the Kalpa Sutra reports that he kept calm and still in his mother’s womb, so as not to discomfort her, though he quivered from time to time to reassure her he was alive.

  The Acharanga Sutra paints a strikingly austere picture of Mahavira’s life. Much in his story echoes the biography we have inherited for the Buddha, though with differences that seem calibrated to depict Mahavira as the more benign, rigorous, and therefore righteous of the two. Brahminic male ideals of maintaining a household were not for Mahavira. In some Jain accounts, he was married with a child before he left to become a celibate; in others, he
was celibate for life. But the traditions agree that he abandoned a comfortable (and probably aristocratic) home to wander naked and alone through the wilderness. In at least one version of the Mahavira story, his renunciation was more sensitively plotted than that of the Buddha, who supposedly fled in the middle of the night, abandoning his wife and son. Mahavira is said to have waited, better mannered, until after his elderly parents died, so as not to upset them.

  Mahavira’s path toward enlightenment began with a famously violent, flamboyant act. For him (and subsequently for his disciples), it was not enough to shave his head as the Buddhists did. “After fasting two and a half days without drinking water,” the Kalpa Sutra says, Mahavira “put on a divine robe, and, quite alone, nobody else being present, he tore out his hair … and entered the state of houselessness.”

  He was thirty years old, roughly the same age as the Buddha was at his renunciation; but his period of mendicant wandering lasted twelve years, twice as long as the Buddha’s phase of spiritual experimentation. During these years, Mahavira engaged in deep reflective meditation and harsh physical penances, eating next to nothing and suffering the violent contempt of those who couldn’t fathom his actions. He finally found enlightenment at the age of forty-two, in a characteristically self-punishing way. “The Buddha is always depicted as sitting underneath the Tree of Enlightenment,” Dundas says. In contrast, “a very old description of Mahavira’s enlightenment has him sitting near this tree, but under the heat of a blazing sun, squatting on his heels in a rather uncomfortable position, and maintaining this position for two and a half days until he attained enlightenment.”