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India, Jainism, Hinduism & Religious
Rebellion

 

The Lost Civilization of Mohenjo-Daro : Sometime around 6000 BCE a nomadic herding people settled into villages in the Mountainous region just west of the Indus River. There they grew barley and wheat using sickles with flint blades, and they lived in small houses built with adobe bricks. After 5000 BCE the climate in their region changed, bringing more rainfall, and apparently they were able to grow more food, for they grew in population. They began domesticating sheep, goats and cows and then water buffalo. Then after 4000 BCE they began to trade beads and shells with distant areas in central Asia and areas west of the Kyber Pass. And they began using bronze and working metals.

The climate changed again, bringing still more rainfall, and on the nearby plains, through which ran the Indus River, grew jungles inhabited by crocodiles, rhinoceros, tigers, buffalo and elephants. By around 2600, a civilization as grand as that in Mesopotamia and Egypt had begun on the Indus Plain and surrounding areas. By 2300 BCE this civilization reached had reached maturity and was trading with Mesopotamia. Seventy or more cities had been built, some of them upon buried old towns. There were cities from the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains to Malwan in the south. There was the city of Alamgirpur in the east and Sutkagen Dor by the Arabian Sea in the west.

One of these cities was Mohenjo-Daro, on the Indus river some 250 miles north of the Arabian Sea, and another city was Harappa, 350 miles to the north on a tributary river, the Ravi. Each of these two cities had populations as high as around 40,000. Each was constructed with manufactured, standardized, baked bricks. Shops lined the main streets of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and each city had a grand marketplace. Some houses were spacious and with a large enclosed yard. Each house was connected to a covered drainage system that was more sanitary than what had been created in West Asia. And Mohenjo-Daro had a building with an underground furnace (a hypocaust) and dressing rooms, suggesting bathing was done in heated pools, as in modern day Hindu temples.

The people of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa shared a sophisticated system of weights and measures, using an arithmetic with decimals, and they had a written language that was partly phonetic and partly ideographic. They spun cotton and wove it into cloth. They mass-produced pottery with fine geometric designs as decoration, and they made figurines sensitively depicting their attitudes. They grew wheat, rice, mustard and sesame seeds, dates and cotton. And they had dogs, cats, camels, sheep, pigs, goats, water buffaloes, elephants and chickens.

Being agricultural, the people of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa had religions that focused on fertility, on the earth as a giver of life. They had a fertility goddess, whose naked image as a figurine sat in a niche in the wall of their homes. Like the Egyptians they also had a bull god. They worshiped tree gods, and they had a god with three heads and an erect phallus, which they associated with fertility. Like some others, including the Egyptians, they buried objects with their dead. And they had taboos, especially about cleanliness.

The Disappearance of Mohenjo-Daro Civilization : Between the years 1800 and 1700 BCE, civilization on the Indus Plain all but vanished. What befell these people is unknown. One suspected cause is a shift in the Indus River. Another is that people dammed the water along the lower portion of the Indus River without realizing the consequences: temporary but ruinous flooding up river, flooding that would explain the thick layers of silt thirty feet above the level of the river at the site of Mohenjo-Daro. Another suspected cause is a decline in rainfall and an accompanying decline in the abundance of food -- or an insufficient military strength and will to secure food supplies from distant areas.

Whatever the causes, people abandoned the cities in search of food. Later, a few people of a different culture settled in some of the abandoned cities, in what archaeologists call a "squatter period." Then the squatters disappeared. Knowledge of the Mohenjo-Daro civilization died - until archaeologists discovered the civilization in the twentieth century.

Aryans And The Origins Of The Hinduism : If rainfall declined in the Indus region between 1800 and 1700 BCE, around 1500 BCE it increased again, making the Indus Plain better able to support life. It was between 1500 and 1200 that an illiterate, pastoral people migrated from the steppe lands of central Russia through what is now Afghanistan, through the Kyber Pass and onto the sparsely populated Indus Plain. These migrants were to be called Aryans and to be classified as Indo-Europeans, their speech having been related to all modern European languages except Basque, Finnish and Hungarian.

The Aryans came to the Indus Plain on horseback and oxcart, in waves separated perhaps by decades or longer. Like other pastoral people, they were warriors. They had two-wheeled chariots like the Hyksos, and coming through the mountains and the Kyber Pass they had the precious wheels of their chariots packed away on their carts.

The Aryans were familiar with prowling and hunting with bow and arrow. They enjoyed chariot racing, gambling and fighting. Like other pastoral peoples, men dominated the women. Like the pastoral Hebrews each family was ruled by an authoritarian male. And each Aryan tribe was ruled by a king called a raja, who felt obliged to consult with tribal councils.

Gods, Creation & Human Mortality : Like other pastoral people, the Aryan invaders were storytellers. They brought with them to the Indus region their centuries old sacred hymns, myths and oral history - stories that expressed their desire to please the gods. Like the Hebrews, the Aryans who invaded India had a father god of the heaven, sky and atmosphere: Dyaus Pitar (sky father). They had a male god of thunder and rain called Indra, who was a god also of that other awesome disturbance - war. Indra was also called the "breaker of forts." And he was what the Aryan men thought a man should be: a warrior with courage, strength and energy who enjoyed drinking and making war.

The Aryans had a god of fire they called Agni. To the Aryans, Agni was fire, and they believed that Agni hungrily devoured the animals that they sacrificed in their rituals of burning. These sacrifices were performed by priests to obtain from their gods the gifts of children, success in war, wealth, health, longevity, food, drink or anything else that contributed to their happiness.

The Aryans enjoyed singing around their campfires, and they had a hymn about creation. Like many other creation myths, theirs described the world as beginning with the kind of creation they understood: birth. They believed that their father god, Dyaus Pitar, the embodiment of sky, had mated with his own daughter, the goddess that was earth.

A later Aryan version of The Creation reads as follows : In the beginning was nothing, neither heaven nor earth nor space in between. Then Non-being became spirit and said: "Let me be!" He warmed himself, and from this was born fire. He warmed himself further, and from this was born light.

The Aryans had a story that described humanity as having been created with virtue and everlasting life. According to this story, the gods were concerned that humanity would become gods like themselves, and to guard against this the gods plotted humanity's downfall. The gods talked Dyaus Pitar into creating a woman who lusted after sensual pleasures and who aroused sexual desires in men. According to this story, the world had become overcrowded because humankind lived forever like the gods. So Dyaus Pitar decided to make humankind mortal, and he created the goddess Death - not a goddess who ruled over death, but death itself. This creation of mortality for humankind pleased the gods, for it left them separate and of a higher rank than humans.

According to this story, Dyaus Pitar proclaimed that he did not create the goddess Death from anger. And the goddess Death was at first reluctant to carry out the task assigned her, but she finally did so, while weeping. Her tears were diseases that brought death at an appropriate time. To create more death, the goddess Death created desire and anger in people - emotions that led to their killing each other.

Settlement, Conquest & Autocracy : With the passing of generations, the waves of Aryan tribes that had come to the Indus Plain spread out across the region. They warred against local, non-Aryan people, and they settled in areas that provided them with pasture for their animals. They grouped in villages and built homes of bamboo or light wood -- homes without statues or art. They began growing crops. Their environment supplied them with all they needed, but, responding to their traditions, and perhaps impulses, the different Aryan tribes warred against each other - wars that might begin with the stealing of cattle. The word for obtaining cattle, gosati, became synonymous with making war. And their warring grew in scale, including a war between what was said to be ten kings.

Gradually, Aryan tribal kings were changing from elected leaders to autocratic rulers. Aryan kings had begun associating their power with the powers of their gods rather than the voices of their fellow tribesmen. They had begun allying themselves with priests. And, as in West Asia, kings were acquiring divinity. By taxing their subjects, these kings could create an army that was theirs rather than an instrument of the tribe. And these kings allied themselves with the horse owning warrior-aristocracy to which they often belonged.

Migration To The Ganges Valley : In the decades around 1000 BCE came a shortage of rainfall, and, running from drought, Aryan tribes 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 some Aryan priests wandered ahead of their tribe and tried to evangelize among the tribes they came upon. They found these societies with a more egalitarian organization than they had, and they despised them for not having kings as autocratic as theirs.

By now, the Aryans had iron tools and weapons, iron having spread eastward through Persia. And with their superior weaponry and self-confidence, the Aryans fought those who resisted their advance, the Aryans believing that their gods were on their side and that resistance from local peoples was inspired by demons. Gradually the Aryans spread over much of the Ganges Valley, clearing land for themselves by calling on their god of fire, Agni.

Some Aryans migrated south along the western coast of the Indian continent, and some Aryans went down the eastern coast, to an area called Kalinga. A few Aryans went as far south as the island that in Hindu literature was called Lanka. And some Aryan priests went as missionaries to southern India, where they found a dark-skinned people called Dravidians. Occasionally the missionaries felt mistreated. They sought the aide of their king, and their king's warrior nobles came south to their rescue. But southern India remained independent of Aryan rule.

The Beginnings of Caste : At their top of their class ranking were the priests and their entire families: the Brahmins. Also at the top were those called the Kshatriyas, the warrior-aristocrats, whose job it was to practice constantly for combat. Beneath these two classes were the Vaishas and their families: Ayrans who tended cattle and served the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in other ways. And the lowest class was the Shudras, the conquered peoples whom the Aryans had made servants.

With the Aryans settling alongside local peoples, a complex hierarchy of classes developed that would be called caste. At the top of this class ranking was the priests and their entire families: the Brahmins. Also at the top was 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 Vaishas and their families: Aryans who tended cattle and served the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in others ways. The lowest class was the conquered, darker, non-Aryans who were servants for the Aryans: the Shudras. The Aryans made these four classifications a part of their mythology. The four groups, it was claimed, came from the body of the god Prajapati, the Brahmins from the god's mouth, the warriors from the god's arms, the tenders of cattle from his legs, and the Shudras from his feet.

This class system was less rigid than it would be centuries later. People from different classes could dine together. A man from a non-Brahmin family could still become a priest and therefore a Brahmin. And although marriage within one's own class was preferred, there was no absolute restriction against marrying people from a different class. Brahmins married women from a lower caste whom they 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.

Urbanization, Trade and War : By around 700 or 600 BCE, the migrations of the Aryans had ended, and with their new successes in agriculture the Aryans increased in number, and they began to create cities. Aryan traders, merchants, landlords appeared, as did money lending. Aryans 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. By 600 BCE, numerous cities had arisen in northern India - cities with fortifications, moats and ramparts in response to the dangers of war. In northern India along the Ganges River, sixteen different kingdoms had emerged.

A Blending of Pastoral and Agricultural Religion : Like the mix between the agricultural religion of the Canaanites and the pastoral religion of the Hebrews, in India a mix developed between the pastoral religion of the Aryans and the local religions of the conquered. This mix came with Aryan males marrying non-Aryan females, and it came with some among the conquered accepting the religion of their conquerors - much as those in the Americas the 1500s (of the Common Era) would accept the religion of their Christian conquerors. In India this blend of Aryan and local religions became known as Hinduism, a word derived from the Aryan word Sindu, the name the Aryans gave to the Indus River. The Hindu religion ranged from veneration of traditional Aryan gods by urban intellectuals to the worship of a diversity of local, rural, agricultural deities.

Hindu Scripture and Sin : Around the same time that writing spread to the Hebrews, it appeared among the Aryans in India. Some Brahmins considered it a sacrilege to change from communicating their religion orally. But a sufficient number of Brahmins supported the innovation, and they put traditional Aryan stories into writing, in what became known as the Vedas -- Veda meaning wisdom. The Vedas became wisdom literature, a literature that would be considered an infallible source of timeless, revealed truth.

The most important of the Vedas was the Rig Veda, which consisted of hymns or devotional incantations of 10,562 written lines in ten books. Another Veda, the Yajur Veda, focused less on devotional incantations and more on sacrificial procedures as a means of pleasing the gods. A third Veda, the Sama Veda, was mainly concerned with the god Indra. Indra was now seen as the god that had created the cosmos, the ruler of the atmosphere, and the god of thunderbolts and rain - Dyaus Pitar having diminished in importance. Also mentioned in the Sama Veda were other gods of the sky and atmosphere: Varuna, guardian of the cosmic order; Agni, the god of fire; and Surya, the sun. A fourth Veda, the Atharya Veda, was a collection of 730 hymns, totaling six thousand stanzas, containing prescriptions for prayer, rituals for curing diseases, expiations against evils, protection against enemies and sorcerers, and prescriptions for creating charms for love, health, prosperity, influence, and a long life.

Among the Vedas were descriptions of funeral rites that included cremation, and there were descriptions of lengthy and solemn rituals for marriage. The Vedas implied that humanity is basically good, and, in contrast to the view of sin in West Asia, sin among the Hindus was viewed as a force from outside oneself - an invader. Hinduisms's Vedas saw evil as the work of demons that might take the form of a human or some other creature, which could be removed by the prayers and rituals of priests.

Diversity and the Upanishads : The religion of the Aryans continued to change. The Vedas, like other writings, had to be interpreted, and among the Hindus arose diversity in interpretations. Diversity in opinion was becoming a normal part of civilization, the result of a rise in population and freedom from tribal isolation and conformity. And diversity in opinion among the Aryans included skepticism. One 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 Rig Veda, writing that some priests had an unwarranted certainty in belief and were blind men leading the blind.

Some Hindus became less interested in the monotonous routines of the ritual sacrifices and more interested in probing relations between self and the universe. They were interested in attaining religious bliss, and this new interest was expressed in writings that were to be collected into what would be called the Upanishads, a collection of as many as two hundred books written across two 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 the Upanishads 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 a rebirth, with souls returning to earth within another human or some other creature-- reincarnation. Where a soul went, they wrote, depended upon how well a person had behaved in his previous life. Good actions led to a soul being bound to a higher form of life and the soul of the doer of evil 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, 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 a 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.

In these later contributions to the Upanishads the search for unity led to the question of how many gods exist - unity suggesting a single, all encompassing god. One contribution described a youth 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.

One contributor to the Upanishads wrote that a person had to realize the god in himself before he could realize the god of the cosmos, and he claimed that realizing the god in oneself is recognizing oneself in all others.

Another view in the Upanishads held that everything is unified but that there is a world of the senses, which is illusion, that God is a maker of this illusion, and that there is the world of the spirit and mental realization. This view held that to grasp reality and reach one's goal of harmony with the cosmos one must turn from the illusion of materiality to the world of mental realization.

A contrary view in the Upanishads combined the material and spiritual worlds more closely. Instead of turning from materiality, this view claimed that one helped oneself understand the unity of the universe by gaining knowledge about materiality, including the origins of the universe. One 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. Another 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.

Epic Literature - the Ramayana and Mahabharata : Eventually, Hindus followed the impulse that had appeared among the Sumerians and others and they wrote poetic stories that focused on the power of the gods. These Hindu stories were written to create ideals for people to follow. The better known of these are poems called the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

The Ramayana is believed to have been written by a Brahmin named Valmiki, a man whose style of poetry was new and was to be copied thereafter. The Ramayana appeared perhaps as early as 500 BCE. It describes an earlier period when Aryans were expanding their influence over the Dravidians in southern India. It describes missionary endeavors supported by military power and the Aryan strategy of divide and conquer. In its seven books and 24,000 verses the Ramayana praises the heroism and virtues of the Aryan warrior-princes: the Kshatriyas. The Ramayana has as its main hero a prince called Rama, whose life the Ramayana describes from birth to death -- Ramayana meaning the story of Rama. Rama and his brothers are depicted as embodying the ideals of Aryan culture: men of loyalty and honor, faithful and dutiful sons, affectionate brothers and loving husbands, men who speak the truth, who are stern, who persevere but are ready and willing to make sacrifices for the sake of virtue against the evils of greed, lust and deceit.

The Mahabharata, meaning Great India, might also have first appeared by 500 BCE, give or take a century or so. Across centuries, priestly writers and editors with different attitudes in different centuries were to add to the work, and the Mahabharata emerged three times its original size. The Mahabharata was divided into eighteen books of verses interspersed with passages of prose. It attempted to describe the period in which Aryan tribes in northern India were uniting into kingdoms and when these petty kingdoms were fighting to create empire. The work attempted to be an encyclopedia about points of morality. One of its heroes is Krishna, described as a royal personage descended from the gods - an eighth incarnation of the god Vishnu. The Mahabharata's heroes are described as yearning for power but, like the heroes of the Ramayana, as devoted to truth and as having a strong sense of duty and affection for their parents.

The Materialists : 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.

Spirituality without Mental Struggle : During the 500s, an alternative grew to spiritual attainment through the attainment of knowledge as advocated in the Upanishads. Many seeking spiritual fulfillment were uninterested in metaphysical complexities. They continued to worship gods such as Indra and Agni but they also found satisfaction in devotion to gods that were parental figures, gods with whom they could have a personal relationship - like Christians who believed in God the father and had their personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In the northwest of India, people worshiped a personal god called Shiva, a god who embodied a reconciliation between the extremes of passionate eroticism and ascetic renunciation, and between frenzy and serenity. Shiva was believed to dwell in the Himalayas, to have a benevolent goddess counterpart called Pavati, and to have many brides and numerous children.

Some Hindus turned from the complexities of the Upanishads to a more simple spiritual benefit by way of good behavior, which they claimed was more important than whatever god one worshiped. This good behavior included proper eating, restrictions on drinking, keeping oneself in godly cleanliness, performing one's duties and behaving in a manner appropriate with one's class and stage in life -- all described as good for one's soul.

In the latter half of the 500s came growth in another effort at spirituality through proper behavior:asceticism. These were times of insecurity and misery, and a greater number of young men were giving up on the material world and searching for eternal bliss. Orthodox Brahmins attempted to keep in check the loss of youthful manpower to asceticism, and they tried to confine asceticism to men beyond middle age. To this end they invented four stages in life regarding duties of a Hindu: the celibate religious student; the married Hindu, including priests; the forest hermit, who was older than the students; and the elderly wandering ascetic.

The Jains & Buddhists : In the far northeast, Brahmins performed as teachers and gave instruction to local, non-Aryan elites who had not been completely Hinduized. These elites were accustomed to deference from local people, and they were offended by the posturing, pride and arrogance of the Brahmins. They resisted the claims of Brahmins to higher rank and superior knowledge. Some among them opposed 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.

With this dissent against orthodox Hinduism, a variety of men with visions appeared who tried to create followings. These new sect leaders denied the authority of the Vedas, and each developed a code of conduct and claimed to have found the secret of eternal bliss. Local merchants who were gaining in wealth and influence threw their support to one or another of the religious rebels in their area. Sect leaders wandered across the northeast, sometimes with large bands of followers. They entered communities to engage in disputations with rival sects and orthodox Brahmins, disputations that were welcomed entertainment for local people.

The Jains : The most successful of the new sects were those that attempted to provide relief from orthodox Hinduism's failure to alleviate human suffering. One such sect was the Jains -- from the Sanskrit verb ji, meaning to conquer. The Jains sought relief from suffering by conquest over one's own passions and senses. This conquest they believed, gave one purity of soul.

According to legend, the Jains were led by Nataputta Vardhamana, the son of a royal governor from the Magadha region. Nataputta Vardhamana gave up his princely status for a life of asceticism, and he became known as Mahavira (Great Souled One). Legend describes Mahavira beginning as a reformer - as not seeking to overthrow the Hindu caste system or the worship of Hindu gods but wishing to do something about the misery that he saw. Legend describes him as having sympathy not only for people but also for the animals that the Brahmins sacrificed.

Mahavira appealed to people who wanted religion without the metaphysical speculations that most people found too vague and complex. He rejected the idea of everything connected into oneness: the doctrine of the universal soul included in the Upanishads. He believe in differentiations as well as associations. He envisioned a dualistic reality, a world with both conscious and unconscious elements, a world that is both spirit and material.

Mahavira became popular among the urban middle class and women in northeastern India. Jainist legend describes his following at the time of his death as 359,000 women and 159,000 men, including full-time devotees numbering 36,000 nuns and 14,000 monks.

After Mahavira's death his followers held onto the view that plants and insects, as well animals, had consciousness. It was not yet understood that life included microorganisms and viruses, or that fleas and other insects carried diseases, and the Jains believed that the destruction of any life, including that of insects, was evil. Maintaining Hinduism's belief in reincarnation, they held that by refraining from killing they could liberate their soul from the cycle of births and deaths. Jain monks swept the path in front of them to avoid crushing insects, and they strained their water believing that this prevented them from consuming any living organisms. Lay persons were less persistent, believing that it was enough that they not intentionally kill.

Jain lay persons took the following vows: never to intentionally destroy a living thing; never to speak falsehoods; never to steal; to always be faithful in marriage; to always be chaste outside of marriage; to possess no more money or other things than one had set for oneself as sufficient (a practical restriction that varied with how wealthy one was); to travel no farther than the limits that one had set for oneself; to think no evil thoughts about others; to sit in meditation as often as one had planned; to spend time as a temporary monk or nun; and to support the nuns and monks with contributions.

The Buddhists : Another who led a religious movement to relieve suffering was a prince named Siddhartha Gautama, to be known as the Buddha (Great Teacher). Siddhartha was born into the Sakya tribe at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains north of the Ganges Valley, in a small city, Kapilavastu, in what is now southern Nepal. He is reported to have seen his native city overrun and its people butchered. The Sakya tribe was under Aryan suzerainty and had retained independence in exchange for tribute paid to Aryan overlords. The Sakya tribe had aristocrats and commoners, and according to legend, Siddhartha was a prince.

According to legend, Siddhartha was sheltered in his youth from the ugliness and poverty around him, but when he was twenty-nine -- around 534 BCE -- he decided to become a wanderer. Apparently, Siddhartha withdrew from a world that was inhospitable to conquered royalty such as he, while he remained disturbed and fascinated by the Aryan civilization that had overrun his state and its traditions. The legend created by his followers describes Siddhartha as becoming a wanderer in order to learn about human existence. He became an ascetic and abused his body by hardly eating. Failing in his quest to understand human existence, and for spiritual satisfaction, Siddhartha began eating better, and he began devising what he believed were his own solutions to human misery.

Siddhartha agreed with the view expressed in the Upanishads that the cause of human misery was humanity itself, but he was determined not to fall into what he saw as the error of those who sought salvation in philosophical  speculations. He refused to question or discuss whether the cosmos is finite or infinite, whether there is life after death or other metaphysical questions, on the grounds that these sidetrack people from doing something practical about the misery of their existence.

According to legend, Siddhartha became a master of the tenets and practices of other sects, and many of his disciples were recruited after hearing him debate with religious rivals in gatherings that were then popular entertainment in towns across the Ganges Valley. Siddhartha preached no warnings of torments for evil deeds. Instead he preached the attaining of serenity, or nirvana, through self-discipline.

He outlined his numerous rules for attaining this personal salvation. His first rule was proper understanding, by which he meant realizing that there is nothing essentially permanent, that there is only change -- a radical departure from orthodox Hinduism. Siddhartha had decided that human misery came with people looking for permanence where there was no permanence and with people clinging to objects of desire that were transitory.

Siddartha's next rule was proper attitude, by which he meant not wanting the impossible and accepting the inevitable --  in other words self-control over one's appetites and ambitions. He had concluded that it was not wrong to desire good food and drink, fine clothes, or sexual satisfaction but that it was eventually destructive psychologically to persist in these appetites. He believed that giving up hope for that which one cannot have was a means to peace of mind.

Siddartha's third rule was proper speech, which he believed important because words preceded actions. His fourth rule was proper actions, Siddhartha seeing this as important in creating a righteousness about oneself that engendered serenity. His fifth rule was to do no injury to other living things. This included refraining from theft, lying, sexual immorality, and drinking liquors which engendered slothfulness. Siddhartha's additional rules reinforced his first five rules and included having a proper vocation, making proper efforts, exercising proper reflection, and partaking in proper meditation.

Like Mahavira (the founder of the Jains), Siddhartha rejected the authority of the Vedas and rejected animal sacrifices, and he rejected the claims of the Brahmins that they were superior. Siddhartha claimed that people should not expect assistance from any source other than themselves, that one could not lean on gods or other spiritual agents, that each person must work out his own salvation, that people had will and could not escape choice by choosing to follow the advice and assistance of others, that people should be their own lamps and their own salvation and take refuge in nothing outside of themselves. But Siddhartha did not ask his followers to give up their Hindu gods, and Indra, Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu would be worshiped by his followers for centuries to come.

Like Mahavira, Siddhartha created an order of monks, with whom he met during the rainy season for strategy sessions and teaching. The monks and nuns did not regard themselves as apart from lay followers or from the world. They saw themselves as promoters of the welfare and happiness not just of themselves but of the many.

Like Mahavira, Siddhartha did not preach against the caste system, which outside his movement was widely viewed as an essential ingredient in family values and necessary for social order. But he opened his movement to all classes and eventually to females, and within his movement everyone was released from caste restrictions.

Siddhartha Gautama died in 483 at the age of eighty. And according to legend, a council of five hundred Buddhist monks met at the city of Rajagriha, concerned about preserving Siddhartha's teachings. They had reason for worry : diversity in belief would soon appear among Buddhists as it had among the Jains and the rest of civilized humanity.

Soon splits among the Buddhists occurred over a variety of issues, some as small as whether one should drink buttermilk after dinner. A split arose among the Buddhists as some older members wanted to limit membership in the Buddhist movement to the ascetic monks and nuns. Other Buddhists wanted a broader movement, one that included those not ready to discipline themselves or to withdraw from the normal routines of life as did the monks and nuns - a split between purists and exclusionists that would appear among other religious movements.

 

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