Buddhist India

Author: T. W. Rhys Davids

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass (India reprint) 1997

First Edition (London): 1903

My Mother and I went on a pilgrimage to India in May 1999.  We were at Buddha Gaya on the Vesak day.  It was very hot—in the range of 40-45 degrees Celsius—and the river Nēranjanā was a wide sandbar devoid of any water. Evan the Sona river—one of the five major rivers mentioned in Buddhist History (The old name was Sarabū.)—was a sand bar, though a much wider sand bar than the Nēranjanā river.

When we reached Kusinārā on this trip, we met a Sri Lankan Bhikkhu at the Parinirvāna Dāgaba.  If my memory serves me right, he was staying in a small building near the road; it wasn’t a vihāra.  We had a conversation with him and he was telling my mother that all the brickwork of the dāgabas were more recent reconstructions since there were no bricks or brickwork during Asoka’s time. (I.e., ගඩොල් හැදීමේ තාක්ශණය ඒ කාලේ තිබුනෙ නැහැ.)  I excused myself from this conversation and found a bookstore close by.  I picked up this book from that bookstore in Kusinārā.  (By the way, most Sri Lankan Bhikkhus we met in this tour were very knowledgeable; this bhikkhu was an exception.)

Nearly twenty four years later, and more than a decade after the departure of my mother, a reason to read this book has emerged.  (I found a bo-leaf,—in decayed and brittle state in side the book,—picked up by my mother under the Ananda bōdhiya at Jétavanārāmaya during our pilgrimage.)

Professor Rhys Davids used Pali Tripitaka (and Jāthaka kathā), Southern Buddhist sources such as Mahāwaṃsa and Dēpawaṃsa, some Northern Buddhist Sources, some Vedic sources, some Jain sources, and some findings reported in Royal Asiatic Society publications in visualizing the society in the north-east of Jambudvēpa mainly from Buddha’s time to Asoka’s time. (The final chapter of this book is a small chapter titled Kanishka.)

He organized Buddhist India in the following order using the following titles.  The kings, The clans and nations, The Village, Social Order, In The Town, Economic Conditions, Writing—The Beginnings, Writing—Its Development, Language and Literature—General View, Literature—The Pali Books, The Jāthaka Book, Religion—Animism, Religion—The Brahmin Position, ChandraGupta, Asoka, and Kanishka.

By the time he was writing this book at the beginning of the twentieth century, the social conditions in India in the sixth and seventh centuries BC remained unnoticed by European scholars since they relied for their information exclusively on the brahmin books.  They convey the impression that the only recognized, and in fact universally prevalent, form of government was that of kings under the tutelage of priests.  Scholars like H.H. Wilson and Vincent Smith relied heavily on priestly books for interpretations of new findings.  Not only they rely on priestly books, they also rejected Pali sources.  Vincent Smith was particularly vicious in rejecting Pali sources, Rhys Davids felt that he had to write something about it in this book.  Reminding Princeps’ work in deciphering Asoka inscriptions with the aid of Mahāwaṃsa, Rhys Davids says:

“It may be human to kick down the ladder by which one has just climbed up. But we need not do so, in this case, with too great violence. We may want it again. And it jars upon the reader to hear the Chronicles called the mendacious fictions of unscrupulous monks. Such expressions are inaccurate; and they show a grave want of appreciation of the points worth considering.”

The following summary of the book is not in the same order Rhys Davids had organized his book. However, I extracted most of the verbiage directly from the book with some minor changes.

Society at the time of the Buddha

The earliest Buddhist records, and somewhat later Jain records, leave no doubt upon the point that there were powerful monarchies, and of republics with either complete or modified independence.  Brahmins had very little or no influence on the kings and emperors prior to the second century AD.

A good deal of information is available about three or four clans such as the Sākya clan of Kapilavastu.  There were other clans such as Mallā of Kusinārā, Licchavī of Vesāli, Kālāmas of Kesaputta, and Moriyas of Pipphalivana.  The administrative and judicial business of a clan was carried out in public assembly in their common Mote Hall (Santhāgāra).  

It was at such a hall that King Pasenadi’s proposition for a Sākya bride was discussed at Kapilavastu. When Ambaṭṭa goes to Kapilavastu on business, he goes to the Mote Hall where Sākyas were in session. And it is to the Mote Hall of the Mallas that Ānanda goes to announce the death of the Buddha. 

A single chief was elected as office-holder for sessions and the state. He bore the title raja.  Suddhodana, the Buddha’s father is a rāja of the Sākya clan. (Sudddhodana is elsewhere spoken of as a simple citizen, Suddhodana the Sākyan.)  

There were sixteen powers in Buddha’s time of which Kosala was the most powerful.  (Magada became the most powerful state after absorbing Kosala closer to Buddha’s parinirvana.)  Those powers are: Angā, Magadā, Kāsi, Kosalā, Vajjī, Mallā, Cetī, Vaṃsā, Kurū, Pañcālā, Macchā, Sūrasenā, Assakā, Avantī, Gandhārā, and Kambojā.  

There was no mention of any region south of the Godhavari river. These geographical considerations are of very considerable importance for the history of later Vedic and early Sanskrit literature. They go far to confirm the views as to the wholesale recasting of brahmin literature in the Gupta period. 

In towns, there were gambling halls, hot-air baths and open-air bathing tanks.  There were workers in wood, metal, and stone, weavers, leather workers, potters, ivory workers, dyers, jewelers, basket makers, painters, barbers, cooks, and butchers.  In addition there were hunters, and sailors.

There were trade routes from North to South-west, North to South-east,  and East to West. The North to South-west route was from Sāvatthi to Patiṭṭhāna and back with stopping places (beginning from the south): Māhissati, Ujjeni, Gonaddha.  The North to South-east route was from Sāvatthi to Rājagaha with stopping places (beginning from Sāvatthi): Setavya, Kapilavastu, Kusinārā, Pāvā, Hatti-gāma, Bhaṇḍagama, Vesāli, Pātaliputra, and Nālandā.  This road may have passed Gaya crossing the road from Tāmaralipti to Benares.  The East to West route was along the Ganges as far west as Sahajāti, and along the Jamuna as far west as Kosambi. In later times at least, the boats went right down to the mouths of the Ganges and thence to Burma. (In earlier books, the boats went to Champa in Maghada.)  Transactions were carried on in kahāpaṇa, a square copper coin and guaranteed as to weight and fineness by punch marks made by private individuals.

A great number of people lived in villages. There were kings, priests, outcasts, soldiers, citizens, and mendicant thinkers.  Among the social grades, Kshatriyas and the nobles, who claimed descent from the leaders of Aryan tribes were at the head.  Then came the brahmins, claiming decent from the sacrificing priests.  Below them were peasantry, the people, the Vaisyas or Vessas. 

It will sound most amazing to those familiar with brahmin pretensions (either in modern times in India, or in priestly books such as Manu and the epics) to here brahmins spoken of as “low-born.” Yet that precisely is an epithet applied to them in comparison with the kings and nobles.  And it ought to open our eyes as to their relative importance in these early times. 

The fact is that the claim of the priests to social superiority had nowhere in North India been then, as yet, accepted by the people.  In Jain books you find that the priests in social standing are below the nobles. 

The nobles and priests were members of the third class Vessas who had raised themselves into a higher social rank later.  That is, the three upper classes had originally been just one.  It was still possible, not as easy as before, for analogous changes to take place.  That is, it was still possible for a poor man to become a noble, and a poor man and a noble to become brahmin. 

It is generally admitted that there are no pure Aryans left in India. Had the actual custom been as strict as the brahmin theory this would not be so. 

Religions

From Takka-silā all the way down to Champā no one spoke Sanskrit. The living language, everywhere was a “sort of” Pali.  The Vedic-Sanskrit in actual use in the schools of priests was as far removed from the Vedic-dialect as it is from the so-called classical-Sanskrit of the post-Buddhistic poems and plays. 

And at least three lines of evidence all tend to show there were many other beliefs, commonly held among the Aryans in India, but not represented in Vedas. 

(1) The Atharva Veda was not a Veda until just before the Buddhism arose.

The Atharva Veda, an old collection of charms, to be used in sorcery had been actually put together long before Buddhism arose. But it was only just before that time it had come to be acknowledged by the sacrificial priests as a Veda—inferior to their own three older ones, but still a Veda.  (The Mābhārata mentions the Atharva Veda, and takes it as a matter of course, as if it were an idea generally current, that it was a Veda, the fourth Veda. The Nikāyas constantly mention the three others but never the Atharva.)

(2) The general view of religious beliefs, as held by the people, given to us in the Epics, and especially in the Mahā Bhāratha. 

It is, in many respects, altogether different from the general view as given in the Vedic literature. Unfortunately, the poem has certainly undergone one, if not two, or even three, alterations at the hand of later priestly editors. As a result, we do not know as yet exactly which of the conceptions of Mahā Bhāratha can be taken as evidence of the seventh century BC. 

Later priestly editors must have recast the poem with two main objects in view—in the first place to insist on the supremacy of the Brahmins, which had been so much endangered by the great popularity of the anti-priestly views of the Buddhists and the others; and in the second place to show that brahmins were in sympathy with, and had formally adopted, certain popular cults and beliefs highly esteemed by the people. 

Whatever the date to be assigned to the ballad literature preserved in the Nikāyas, the date of the Mahābaārata and of the Rāmāyaṇa, as Epics, must be later. We may be pretty sure that if the Epics had existed at the period when Buddhist literature was composed, they would have been referred to in it. But they are not. 

(3) The third line is based on references to the religious beliefs, not of the Buddhist themselves, but of the people, recorded in the Buddhist cannon. 

We are told of palmistry, divination of all sorts, auguries drawn from the celestial phenomena, prognostications by interpretation of dreams, auguries drawn from marks on cloth gnawed by mice, sacrifices to Agni—it is characteristic to find these in such company,—oblations of various sorts to gods, determining lucky sites, repeating charms, snake charming, using similar arts on other beasts and birds, astrology,  the power of prophecy, incantations, oracles, consulting gods through a girl possessed or by means of mirrors, worshiping the Great One, invoking Siri (the goddess of luck), vowing vows to gods, muttering charms to cause virility or impotence, consecrating sites. 

It is an eccentric list; and very suggestive both of the wide range of animistic superstitions, and of the proportionate importance, then and to the people at large, of those particular ones included in the Veda. 

In nether of these two lists is Indra, the great god of the Veda, ever mentioned.  His place, as bearer of the thunderbolt, is taken by Sakka, who is in many, if not most, respects a quite different conception. 

And Vishṇu, though mentioned in our poem under the name of Veṇhu, has scarcely as yet appeared above the horizon. 

Just like the rest of the world, the Indians were no different in similar stages of development. Derived partly from a too exclusive study of the priestly books, partly from reading back into the past a mistaken view of the modern conditions, it cannot stand against the new evidence derived from the Jain and Buddhist literature written, or rather composed, in independence of the priests. The real facts leads to the opposite view.

The Phallus-worship is often mentioned, quite as a matter of course, in the Mābhārata, as if it had always been common everywhere throughout North India.  In the Nikāyas, though they mention all sorts of what the Buddhists regarded as foolish or superstitious forms of warship, this particular kind, Shiva-worship under the form of the Linga, is not even once referred to. 

Religion—The Brahmin Position

It is difficult to imagine anything more brutal and more material than the theology of the Brāhmanas. Notions which usage afterwards gradually refined, and clothed with a garb of morality, take us aback by their savage realism. 

Morality finds no place in this system. Sacrifice, which regulates the relation of man to the divinities, is a mechanical act, operating by its own spontaneous energy; and that, hidden in the bosom of nature, is only bought out by the magic art of the priest. 

As for the fees, the rules are precise, and propounders of them are unblushing. The priest performs the sacrifice for the fee alone, and it must consist of valuable garments, kine, horses, or gold;—when each is to be given is carefully stated. Gold is coveted most, for ‘this is immortality, the seed of Agni,’ and therefore peculiarly agreeable to the pious priest. 

The expense must have been very great, even for the less complicated; and it is probable that this had something to do with the fact that a way was discovered to obtain the desired result without sacrifice. The nearer we get to the time of Buddhism the greater is the importance we find attached to this second method, that of tapas,—self mortification, or more exactly self-torture. 

It had been by sacrifice that gods had made the world. Now it came to be said, in different cosmological legends, that one god or another had brought forth the world by Tapas. 

Besides the Hermits, there was another body of men, greatly respected throughout the country called the Wanderers (Paribbājakā).  Such wondering teachers are always represented as being held in high esteem by the people. They were teachers or sophists who spent eight or nine months wandering about with the object of engaging in conversational discussions.  

Though brahmins take part in the religious and philosophical conversations of those earlier times, and are always referred to with respect, and treated with the same courtesy that they always themselves (with one or two instructive exceptions) extended (also) to others, yet they hold no predominant position.

The priests, very naturally, did not like the gradually growing esteem in which a body of men (and women) were held who despised the sacrifice, the source of the priests’ income and reputation.  And the priests were divided against themselves. They vied with one another for sacrificial fees. The demand for their services was insufficient to maintain them all. Brahmins followed therefore all sorts of other occupations; and those of them not continually busied about the sacrifice were often inclined to views of life, and of religion, different from the views of those who were. 

Unable therefore, whether they wanted or not, to stay the progress of newer ideas, the priests strove to turn the incoming tide into channels favorable to their Order. They formulated—though this was sometime after the rise of Buddhism—the famous theory of Āśramas, or Effects, according to which no one could become either a Hermit or a Wanderer without having first passed many years as a student in the brahmin schools, and lived after that the life of married householder as regulated in the brahmin law-books. It was bold bid for supremacy. 

It is quite true that the priestly manuals, especially those later than the Christian era, take it as a matter of course that the rule was observed. 

Soul

A soul in priestly texts—the pre-Buddhistic Upanishads—is supposed to exist inside each human body, and to be the sole and sufficient explanation of life and motion.  One passage says it consists of consciousness, mind, breath; eye and ears; earth, water, fire, and either; heat and no heat; desire and no desire; anger and no anger; law and no law—in a word, of all things. 

There is an almost entire unanimity of opinion in these Upanishads that the soul will not obtain release from rebirth either by performance of sacrifice or by the practice of penance. It must be by a sort of theosophic or animistic insight, by the perception, the absolute knowledge and certainty, that one’s own soul is identical with the Great Soul, the only permanent reality, the ultimate basis and cause of all phenomena. 

At last, just before Buddhism, the hypothesis was started of a one primeval soul, the world-soul, the Highest soul, the Paramātman, from whom all the other gods and souls had proceeded. 

Where as historically speaking, soul was the original idea, and the gods (and god) had grown out of it. 

We have abundant evidence that this grand generalization was neither due to the priests who adopted it, nor had its origin in the priestly schools. Precisely as regards the highest point of the generalization, the very keystone of the arch, the priestly literature has preserved the names of the rajput laymen who thought it out and taught it to the priests.  When this point had been reached, speculation on the basis of the soul theory could go no further.

In India only, that the further step was taken, by Gotama the rajput and his disciples, to abandon the soul theory altogether; and to built up a new philosophy on other considerations in which soul or souls played no part at all. 

The members of the Buddhist Order were called Sākyaputtīya Samanas. The members of the Jain Order were called Niganthas, “The Unfettered.” There was an Order of which members were called the Ājivakā, the “Men of the Livelihood.”  Both of these orders were older than the Buddhists.  The Ājivakās still existed as an organized community down to the time of Dasaratha, the grandson of Asoka. They have long been died out.

Writing

Even though the writing was available, there was no written books. There is pretty constant reference to the texts as existing, but existing only in the memory of those who had learnt them by heart.

The knowledge of writing was not confined to any particular class and acquired by ordinary folk, and that it was sufficiently prevalent to have been made the basis of a game for children.  There was a game played by children is called Akkharikaā (Lettering). It is explained as “guessing at letters traced in the air, or on a playfellow’s back”. And for children to have such a game, and to call it by the name “Lettering,” shows that the knowledge of an alphabet was fairly prevalent at the time of the question. 

To say indeed that the need was not felt is, as regards the Vedic schools, not nearly strong enough. The priests were, as a body, exceedingly keen to keep the knowledge of the mantras (the charms or verses), on which the magic of the sacrifice depended, in their own hands. There are some “petty” rules about this in the latter priestly law-books—rules that received, it should be noted, the cordial approval of (Adi) Shankara.

One such rule is the following.

“The ears of a Sudra who listens, intentionally, when the Veda is being recited are to be filled with molten lead. His tongue is to be cut out if he preserve it in his memory.” 

They were not just indifferent to writing of their books, but strongly opposed to it as a method that can be so dangerous to their exclusive privileges. 

The oldest manuscripts on bark or palm leaf known in India are Buddhist; that the earliest written records on stone and metal are Buddhist; that it is the Buddhists who first made use of writing to record their canonical books.

On the monuments of the third century BC we find the following names of donors: 

(1) Shamma-kathika.—“Preacher of the system” (The Dhamma)—the “system” being a technical term in the Buddhist schools to signify the philosophical and ethical doctrine as distinguished from the Vinaya, the Rules of the Order. 

(2) Peṭakin.—“One who had (that is known by heart) the Piṭaka.” The word Piṭaka is used exclusively by the Buddhists. 

(3) Suttantika.—“A man who knows a Suttanta by heart.” 

(4) Suttantakinī.—“A woman who knows Suttanta by heart.” Suttanta is, again, a technical term used exclusively of the Buddhist cannonical books. 

(5) Pancha-nekāyika—“One who knows the Five Nikāyas by heart.” 

They are conclusive proofs that some time before the date of Asoka Inscriptions, there was a Buddhist literature in North India, where the inscriptions are found. And further, that that literature had divisions known by the technical names of Piṭaka, Nikāya and Suttanta, and that the number of Nikāyas then in existence is five. 

The Pali canonical books make no mention of Asoka. Had they undergone any serious re-editing after the reign of the great Buddhist Emperor (of whom Buddhist writers were so proud), is it possible that he would have so completely ignored? 

The books never mention any person, or any place, in Ceylon; or even in South India. It would have been so easy to bring in a passing reference to some Ceylon worthy—in the same way as the brahmin Buddhagosa does so often, in his Atta Sālinī which was revised in Ceylon. 

*** Ceylon scholars regarded the canon as closed. *** 

On the other hand, in North India, the books were not considered closed.  One whole book Kathā Vatthu, was added as late as the time of Asoka; and perhaps the Parivāra, a mere string of examination questions, is not much older. One story in Peta-Vattu is about a King Pingalaka, said in the commentary to have reigned over Surat two hundred years after the Buddha’s time. This may have been added at Asoka’s Council. And the whole of this little book of verses, together with the Vimāna Vatthu is certainly very late in tone as compared with the Nikvyas. 

Rhys Davids says: any one who habitually reads Pali would know at once the Nikāyas are older than the Dhamma Sangani; that both are older than the Kathā Vatthu; that all three are older than Milinda. 

We must take our Pali canonical books (preserved in Ceylon) to be North Indian, not Sinhalese in origin, and the word “northern” has been replaced by “Tibetan,” “Japanese,” “Mahāyanist,” etc., according to the context. 

Asoka

The Greeks do not mention him, and the Brahmin records completely ignore him until the time when, ten or twelve centuries afterwards, all danger of his influence had passed definitely away. They then go so far as to include his name among others in a list of kings. When this was done the authors of it had no access to the Buddhist writings, and could not read the inscriptions. 

And while, on the one hand, the Dhamma was common property to them all, was Indian rather than Buddhist, yet, on the other hand, the people we now call Buddhists (they did not call themselves so) were concerned so exclusively with the Dhamma, apart from ritual or theology, that their doctrine was called Dhamma. It fell, naturally for them into three divisions, quite distinct one from the other,—the theory of what it was right (good form) for the layman to do and to be, of what it was right for the Wanderer to do and to be; and, thirdly, what had entered the Path to Arahatship, should do, and be, and know. 

The Dhamma promulgated by Asoka was the first, only, of these three divisions. It was the Dhamma for laymen, as generally held in India, but in the form, and with modifications, adopted by the Buddhists. 

The appeal is made, in apparent confidence that the statements are self-evident, to all the subjects of the empire. 

It follows that the doctrine, as an ideal, must have been already widely accepted, though men did not always act upon it. It is as if, in a country already Christian, the king should issue proclamations calling on the people, in this point or in that, to act up to the recognized ideal of the Christian life. 

Asoka remains one of the most striking and interesting personalities in the history of the world. There is a personal touch in the Edicts which cannot be ignored. The language must be his own. No minister would have dared to put such confessions and such professions into the mouth of so masterful a master. 

Asoka made the boast (vain boast) that the brahmins, who claimed to be gods upon the earth, had, by his efforts, ceased to be so regarded, and he himself committed the irreparable blunder of imagining himself to be a deus ex machinâ, able and ready to put all things and all men straight. 

Concluding remarks.

Those who think Indian affairs should be looked at through the spectacles of mediaeval brahmins can never forgive Asoka for having made light of priests, and the gods, and the superstitious ceremonies of the day. But the gospel Asoka preached was applicable to India of that day as it would be to India now. 

Three-fourths or more of the persons named, and the objects of donations specified, in all inscriptions throughout India, from Asoka’s time to Kanishka’s, are Buddhist, and the majority of the remainder are Jain.

From that time onwards the brahmins, the gods they patronized, the sacrifices they carried out, receive ever-increasing notice till the position of things exactly reversed, and in the fifth century AD three-fourths are brahmin, and the majority of the rest are Jain. 

But for the four centuries before that (300 BC to 100 AC) no brahmin, no brahmin temple, no brahmin god, no sacrifice, or ritualistic act of any kind is ever, even once, referred to. These early inscriptions are in a sort of Pali.

This is the clearest evidence of a strange revulsion of feeling. What had been the predominant national faith has become the faith of a minority. India, which can fairly, down to the time of Kanishka, be called “Buddhist India”, ceases to be so. And the process goes on, slowly indeed but continually, until there is not a Buddhist left in the land where Buddhism arose. 

Once Brahmins gained supremacy, not only they remained silent about the Buddhist history, they even invented history, added new gods and worships to their writings. 

After brahmins established their influence in Northern India in the fourth and fifth centuries, they expanded their influence to the South. It developed so strongly in the South where the final victory was actually won during the period from Kumārila to Sankara (700 - 830 AC). 

The victory was won. But how far was it a victory? The brahmins had become the sole arbiters in law and social institutions. Their theory of caste had been admitted, and their own castes was accorded an unquestioned supremacy. Their claim to the exclusive right to teach was particularly acknowledged. Of those rajputs who had disputed their authority, the Buddhists and Jains were both reduced to feeble minorities, and the rest had become mostly subservient. 

Brahmin accounts attribute the final stages in the movement to a furious prosecution brought about at the instigation of the great brahmin apostle, Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, in the first half of the the eighth century. 

Their own later books persistently exaggerate, misstate, above all omit the other side. They have thus given a completely distorted view of Indian society, and the place, in it, of the priests. And we shall continue to have a blurred and confused idea of Indian history unless and until, the priestly views are checked and supplemented throughout by a just and proportionate use of the other views now open to research. 

The Buddhists were probably, at least during fourth and third centuries BC, formed the majority of people and it was a Buddhist India.