Emperor Whisperers: India's Unwittingly Hellenistic Philosophers
My new book is out, and is free for paid subscribers to this Substack
To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.
Like I said a few times before, my new “Emperor Whisperers: a Comparative History of Ancient Western and Chinese Philosophy,” published last year, is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here.
Just as a reminder, I’m sending a free electronic copy to all paid subscribers, existing and those who become paid subscribers throughout this year. Anyway, here’s another extract, this time from Chapter Ten, on the impact of Buddhism, Jainism and Greek-style philosophical speculation on Indian thought.
The rapid urbanization and centralization of India led to key caste distinctions in the Vedic tradition becoming more prominent than ever. In small towns and the countryside, castes could be kept at a distance, but this was impossible in cities that quickly became crowded. Direct contact led to a stronger emphasis on purity rules, which could no longer be ignored by anyone. Those appalled by or uninterested in this state of things often became renunciants, advocating a rejection of material things and social relationships – a sure way to avoid abiding by caste restrictions and rules.
The renunciants were referred to by various terms including “wanderers” when they were more like Tao-style ambulant scholars, but also “strivers” after the truth (this with some admiration) and “beggars” when their means of finding sustenance weren’t all that respectable. Early Dharmasutras contain the first detailed references to the four ashrama or stages of truth-seeking – brahmacharya (celibate studenthood), grihastha (the householder stage), vanaprastha (partial renunciation), and sannyasa (total renunciation) – as a sort of plotted course towards Vedic priesthood, but many strayed from this course and into radical notions.
Jainism, the first challenge to emerge against the domination of Vedic Hinduism in India, was at first a systematic form of radical renunciation, with very radical twists that it later shared with Buddhism: it allowed anyone to embrace renunciation, not just the upper castes, and provided such renunciants with a community where they would find spiritual support and succor, and material supplies – provided by non-renunciant sympathizers in exchange for wisdom and instruction – so that they could wander and search the truth without begging.
Jainism and Buddhism were just two of many competing visions of renunciation embracing a peaceful but persistent spiritual struggle against the caste system, that they eventually managed to absorb, in the process erasing the traces of those other schools. That these even existed is only known through fleeting and generally unflattering portrayals in texts of their more successful Buddhist and Jaina rivals, leaving the impression that many of these competing wise men independently came up with many of the same notions that others in Greece and China were pondering at roughly the same time, mostly around the 6th century BC.
According to Buddhist texts, Purana Kassapa was a proto-cynical teacher who rejected the distinction between moral and immoral acts and denied that actions had consequences. He taught that good actions did not lead to the accumulation of any merit and that deeds like killing, stealing, and lying were not sinful.
Going a tad further, Ajita Keshakambalin taught a materialist doctrine, in which actions earned neither merit nor demerit, the body returned to the elements after death, and there was no rebirth. He is widely considered as the main forerunner to the later Charvaka/Lokayata School, a long if little influential strain of atheism in Indian thought that may have been reanimated by contact with Hellenistic rulers and thinkers after the 4th century BC.
Pakudha Kachchayana held that the elements such as earth, water, fire, and air, as well as happiness, sorrow, and life are fixed and unchanging. An extreme atomist, he believed that human action affects nothing so that, for example, if a man were to cut off someone’s head with a sharp knife, he would not take his life, because the thrust of the sword would simply pass between the seven elements.
Sanjaya Belatthiputta was a radical relativist, member of a skeptic school called Ajnana, characterized by a reluctance to make definite statements, and by a oppositionist stance to pretty much every other school of thought or religion; Sanjaya’s typical, very Taoist response to any question is thus described in the Buddhist text Digha Nikaya: ‘If you asked me, “Is there another world?” and if I believed that there was, I should tell you so. But that is not what I say. I do not say that it is so; I do not say that it is otherwise; I do not say that it is not so; nor do I say that it is not not so.’
As it slowly became an organized religion, Jainism may have been distantly influenced by Persia’s Achaemenid empire and its monotheistic religion. Founded by Mahavira, a native of a small kingdom on the northeastern part of the Ganges plain, it soon became popular among the darker-skinned trading castes who were quickly growing wealthier on the strength of a simple, non-cynical message of liberating, universal love somewhat similar to that later embraced by China’s Mozi.
Jainism, unlike the Vedic tradition and later Hinduism, is based on the notion of a godless, universal universe in which liberated souls of whichever color reign supreme – that is, even above those of upper-caste snobs down below on Earth. Jainism, however, had a significant flaw that was much used by its Vedic opponents: as it grew among a class that had means and was thus liable to show off through abstinence of consumption, it rapidly became associated with feats of asceticism and self-control that were easily copied and became part of Vedic mainstream behaviors.
A good example of this is fasting, popular among Jainist groups to signal virtue and a capacity to abstain from earthly pleasures in the search for spiritual improvement within the framework of renunciation. Eventually Hindus quickly got the trick of fasting, which is not really that complicated especially for those who are not fat, rich merchants, and the sight of skinny Hindu holy-men has been common for centuries in India ever since[1].
Buddhism presented a more serious challenge: like Jainism, it emerged from Hinduism, taking many of its core concepts within, notably karma and dharma, and also the idea of cycles of rebirth. Dignāga (480-540), the great Buddhist logician, helped to mold the Hindu idea of reincarnation into an acceptable Buddhist shape, using a curious combination of physics and logic in the process. As the current, 14th, Dalai Lama has pointed out[2]:
“When we talk about material things, we have to consider substantial causes and cooperative conditions. Our physical bodies, for example, are composed of particles. Each particle has a substantial cause, and we could theoretically trace these back to the Big Bang and even beyond that. Therefore we conclude that the particles that make up the material world have no beginning. Just as there are no beginnings on a physical level, consciousness, too, is without a beginning. Dignāga argued that the substantial cause of consciousness must be of the same nature as consciousness. He asserted that, while matter can provide cooperative conditions in terms of our sense organs, brain, and nervous system, matter cannot be the substantial cause of consciousness. The substantial cause of consciousness must be of the same nature as consciousness. In other words, each moment of consciousness is preceded by an earlier moment of consciousness; therefore we say that consciousness has no beginning – and it is on that basis that we describe the theory of rebirth.”
Through this process, Buddhism takes another key concept, that of Nirvana, even further than Jainism: after a proper existence and a virtuous death, the soul doesn't become enlightened and eternal, as in Hinduism, or liberated from all chains as in Jainism, but disappears into a higher path of existence that doesn't preserve the concept of the self.
The Buddhist Nirvana is, at the same time, a Nihilistic and egalitarian void into which all hopes and fantasies can be deployed, and a response to lingering lower- and middle-caste suspicion that, after death, Heaven may very well replicate the earthly arrangement in which the upper castes boss everyone else around: only this time the arrangement lasts for eternity[3].
Hinduism co-existed with, and struggled against, Buddhism for around a millennium in India. Eventually, the colorful, complex, multi-deity, multi-path cacophony of Hinduist belief won the day. By the time Chinese travelers under the Tang dynasty (around the 7th century AD) made it to India to visit the land from which their religion had once arrived, only relics of Indian Buddhism, and small Buddhist minorities, survived in the land of Siddhartha
This, somewhat unexpectedly, may have actually reinforced the Buddhist hold on China and the highly sinicized lands of Indochina, as it helped Buddhism to become regarded as an integral, traditional part of Chinese culture.
[1] As a result, asceticism eventually became a commonplace component of the expected package of virtues often associated with Indian leadership. Narendra Modi, an Indian PM in the 21st century AD, boasted of ascetic habits in his youth, including the renunciation of salt, chilies and oil (!), a preference for cold-water baths and even a temporary hunger for celibacy. See “Narendra Modi: A political Biography” (HarperCollins, 2014) by Andy Marino.
[2] In his prologue to Bhikku Analayo's 'Rebirth in Early Buddhism' (2018)
[3] As Julius Evola noted, ancient Buddhism also curiously asserted that buddhas can only be born of the top two (Hindu) castes.
I have been fascinated by Hinduism since I started working with a team in India. I was never able to travel there, although it is a goal.
I became close to Himanshu M. he helped me understand his team and the part of India he is familiar with.
His elderly Mother lived with him. I made her a crocheted blanket and sent it over. He reacted like I had sent pure gold!
I remember telling him crocheting was a hobby of mine and I had given away a lot of blankets, I already had too many at home.
He sent me back multiple gifts, a hookah, a Tajmahal replica, a hand woven wallet & a few other little things.
I thanked him of course, but he seemed to feel he was not reciprocating enough.
We reman Facebook friends, after almost 20 years.
Insightful article till I came across the charlatan named Narendra Modi. A hoax. A vile man.