the third century B.C. There were many other cities that displayed a
brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating fragments of the
brief empire of Alexander. There was, for example, the Greek city of
Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and science flourished for two
centuries; there was Pergamum in Asia Minor, which also had a great
library. But this brilliant Hellenic world was now stricken by
invasion from the north. New Nordic barbarians, the Gauls, were
striking down along the tracks that had once been followed by the
ancestors of the Greeks and Phrygians and Macedonians. They raided,
shattered and destroyed. And in the wake of the Gauls came a new
conquering people out of Italy, the Romans, who gradually subjugated
all the western half of the vast realm of Darius and Alexander. They
were an able but unimaginative people, preferring law and profit to
either science or art. New invaders were also coming down out of
central Asia to shatter and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off
the western world again from India. These were the Parthians, hosts of
mounted bowmen, who treated the Græco-Persian empire of Persepolis and
Susa in the third century B.C. in much the same fashion that the Medes
and Persians had treated it in the seventh and sixth. And there were
now other nomadic peoples also coming out of the northeast, peoples who
were not fair and Nordic and Aryan- speaking but yellow-skinned and
black-haired and with a Mongolian speech. But of these latter people
we shall tell more in a subsequent chapter.
XXVIII
THE LIFE OF GAUTAMA BUDDHA
But now we must go back three centuries in our story to tell of a great
teacher who came near to revolutionizing the religious thought and
feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama Buddha, who taught his disciples
at Benares in India about the same time that Isaiah was prophesying
among the Jews in Babylon and Heraclitus was carrying on his
speculative enquiries into the nature of things at Ephesus. All these
men were in the world at the same time, in the sixth century
B.C.—unaware of one another.
This sixth century B.C. was indeed one of the most remarkable in all
history. Everywhere—for as we shall tell it was also the case in
China—men’s minds were displaying a new boldness. Everywhere they were
waking up out of the traditions of kingships and priests and blood
sacrifices and asking the most penetrating questions. It is as if the
race had reached a stage of adolescence—after a childhood of twenty
thousand years.
The early history of India is still very obscure. Somewhen perhaps
about 2000 B.C., an Aryan- speaking people came down from the
north-west into India either in one invasion or in a series of
invasions; and was able to spread its language and traditions over most
of north India. Its peculiar variety of Aryan speech was the Sanskrit.
They found a brunette people with a more elaborate civilization and
less vigour of will, in possession of the country of the Indus and
Ganges. But they do not seem to have mingled with their predecessors
as freely as did the Greeks and Persians. They remained aloof. When
the past of India becomes dimly visible to the historian, Indian
society is already stratified into several layers, with a variable
number of sub-divisions, which do not eat together nor intermarry nor
associate freely. And throughout history this stratification into
castes continues. This makes the Indian population something different
from the simple, freely inter-breeding European or Mongolian
communities. It is really a community of communities.
Siddhattha Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family which ruled a
small district on the Himalayan slopes. He was married at nineteen to
a beautiful cousin. He hunted and played and went about in his sunny
world of gardens and groves and irrigated rice-fields. And it was
amidst this life that a great discontent fell upon him. It was the
unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks employment. He felt that the
existence he was leading was not the reality of life, but a holiday—a
holiday that had gone on too long.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
un-satisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of
Gautama. While he was in this mood he met one of those wandering
ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India. These men
lived under severe rules, spending much time in meditation and in
religious discussion. They were supposed to be seeking some deeper
reality in life, and a passionate desire to do likewise took possession
of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when the news was
brought to him that his wife had been delivered of his first-born son.
“This is another tie to break,” said Gautama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow
clansmen. There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to celebrate the
birth of this new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in a great agony
of spirit, “like a man who is told that his house is on fire.” He
resolved to leave his happy aimless life forthwith. He went softly to
the threshold of his wife’s chamber, and saw her by the light of a
little oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with his
infant son in her arms. He felt a great craving to take up the child
in one first and last embrace before he departed, but the fear of
waking his wife prevented him, and at last he turned away and went out
into the bright Indian moonshine and mounted his horse and rode off
into the world.
TIBETAN BUDDHA
TIBETAN BUDDHA
Gilt Brass Casting in India Museum, showing Gautama Buddha in the
“earth witness” attitude
_India Mus._
Very far he rode that night, and in the morning he stopped outside the
lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river. There he cut
off his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his ornaments and
sent them and his horse and sword back to his house. Going on he
presently met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him, and so
having divested himself of all worldly entanglements he was free to
pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way southward to a resort
of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur of the Vindhya Mountains.
There lived a number of wise men in a warren of caves, going into the
town for their simple supplies and imparting their knowledge by word of
mouth to such as cared to come to them. Gautama became versed in all
the metaphysics of his age. But his acute intelligence was
dissatisfied with the solutions offered him.
A BURMESE BUDDHA
A BURMESE BUDDHA
Marble Figure from Mandalay, eighteenth century work, now in the India
Museum
The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and
knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism, by fasting,
sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gautama now put to the
test. He betook himself with five disciple companions to the jungle
and there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible penances. His
fame spread, “like the sound of a great bell hung in the canopy of the
skies.” But it brought him no sense of truth achieved. One day he was
walking up and down, trying to think in spite of his enfeebled state.
Suddenly he fell unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness
of these semi-magical ways to wisdom was plain to him.
THE DHAMÊKH TOWER
THE DHAMÊKH TOWER
In the Deer Park at Sarnath. Sixth Century A.D.
_(From a Painting in the India Museum)_
He horrified his companions by demanding ordinary food and refusing to
continue his mortifications. He had realized that whatever truth a man
may reach is reached best by a nourished brain in a healthy body. Such
a conception was absolutely foreign to the ideas of the land and age.
His disciples deserted him, and went off in a melancholy state to
Benares. Gautama wandered alone.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its
advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has
made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it
realizes its victory. So it happened to Gautama. He had seated
himself under a great tree by the side of a river to eat, when this
sense of clear vision came to him. It seemed to him that he saw life
plain. He is said to have sat all day and all night in profound
thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world.
He went on to Benares and there he sought out and won back his lost
disciples to his new teaching. In the King’s Deer Park at Benares they
built themselves huts and set up a sort of school to which came many
who were seeking after wisdom.
The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a fortunate
young man, “Why am I not completely happy?” It was an introspective
question. It was a question very different in quality from the frank
and self-forgetful _externalized_ curiosity with which Thales and
Heraclitus were attacking the problems of the universe, or the equally
self-forgetful burthen of moral obligation that the culminating
prophets were imposing upon the Hebrew mind. The Indian teacher did
not forget self, he concentrated upon self and sought to destroy it.
All suffering, he taught, was due to the greedy desires of the
individual. Until man has conquered his personal cravings his life is
trouble and his end sorrow. There were three principal forms that the
craving for life took and they were all evil. The first was the desire
of the appetites, greed and all forms of sensuousness, the second was
the desire for a personal and egotistic immortality, the third was the
craving for personal success, worldliness, avarice and the like. All
these forms of desire had to be overcome to escape from the distresses
and chagrins of life. When they were overcome, when self had vanished
altogether, then serenity of soul, Nirvana, the highest good was
attained.
This was the gist of his teaching, a very subtle and metaphysical
teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to understand as the Greek
injunction to see and know fearlessly and rightly and the Hebrew
command to fear God and accomplish righteousness. It was a teaching
much beyond the understanding of even Gautama’s immediate disciples,
and it is no wonder that so soon as his personal influence was
withdrawn it became corrupted and coarsened. There was a widespread
belief in India at that time that at long intervals Wisdom came to
earth and was incarnate in some chosen person who was known as the
Buddha. Gautama’s disciples declared that he was a Buddha, the latest
of the Buddhas, though there is no evidence that he himself ever
accepted the title. Before he was well dead, a cycle of fantastic
legends began to be woven about him. The human heart has always
preferred a wonder story to a moral effort, and Gautama Buddha became
very wonderful.
Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If Nirvana was too
high and subtle for most men’s imaginations, if the myth-making impulse
in the race was too strong for the simple facts of Gautama’s life, they
could at least grasp something of the intention of what Gautama called
the Eight-fold way, the Aryan or Noble Path in life. In this there was
an insistence upon mental uprightness, upon right aims and speech,
right conduct and honest livelihood. There was a quickening of the
conscience and an appeal to generous and self-forgetful ends.
XXIX
KING ASOKA
For some generations after the death of Gautama, these high and noble
Buddhist teachings, this first plain teaching that the highest good for
man is the subjugation of self, made comparatively little headway in
the world. Then they conquered the imagination of one of the greatest
monarchs the world has ever seen.
We have already mentioned how Alexander the Great came down into India
and fought with Porus upon the Indus. It is related by the Greek
historians that a certain Chandragupta Maurya came into Alexander’s
camp and tried to persuade him to go on to the Ganges and conquer all
India. Alexander could not do this because of the refusal of his
Macedonians to go further into what was for them an unknown world, and
later on (303 B.C.) Chandragupta was able to secure the help or various
hill tribes and realize his dream without Greek help. He built up an
empire in North India and was presently (303 B.C.) able to attack
Seleucus I in the Punjab and drive the last vestige of Greek power out
of India. His son extended this new empire. His grandson, Asoka, the
monarch of whom we now have to tell, found himself in 264 B.C. ruling
from Afghanistan to Madras.
Asoka was at first disposed to follow the example of his father and
grandfather and complete the conquest of the Indian peninsula. He
invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country on the east coast of Madras, he
was successful in his military operations and—alone among conquerors—he
was so disgusted by the cruelty and horror of war that he renounced it.
He would have no more of it. He adopted the peaceful doctrines of
Buddhism and declared that henceforth his conquests should be the
conquests of religion.
A LOHAN OR BUDDHIST APOSTLE (Tang Dynasty)
A LOHAN OR BUDDHIST APOSTLE (Tang Dynasty)
_(From the statue in the British Museum)_
His reign for eight-and-twenty years was one of the brightest
interludes in the troubled history of mankind. He organized a great
digging of wells in India and the planting of trees for shade. He
founded hospitals and public gardens and gardens for the growing of
medicinal herbs. He created a ministry for the care of the aborigines
and subject races of India. He made provision for the education of
women. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist teaching orders, and
tried to stimulate them to a better and more energetic criticism of
their own accumulated literature. For corruptions and superstitious
accretions had accumulated very speedily upon the pure and simple
teaching of the great Indian master. Missionaries went from Asoka to
Kashmir, to Persia, to Ceylon and Alexandria.
TRANSOME SHOWING THE COURT OF ASOKA
TRANSOME SHOWING THE COURT OF ASOKA
_India Mus._
ASOKA PANEL FROM BHARHUT
ASOKA PANEL FROM BHARHUT
_India Mus._
Such was Asoka, greatest of kings. He was far in advance of his age.
He left no prince and no organization of men to carry on his work, and
within a century of his death the great days of his reign had become a
glorious memory in a shattered and decaying India. The priestly caste
of the Brahmins, the highest and most privileged caste in the Indian
social body, has always been opposed to the frank and open teaching of
Buddha. Gradually they undermined the Buddhist influence in the land.
The old monstrous gods, the innumerable cults of Hinduism, resumed
their sway. Caste became more rigorous and complicated. For long
centuries Buddhism and Brahminism flourished side by side, and then
slowly Buddhism decayed and Brahminism in a multitude of forms replaced
it. But beyond the confines of India and the realms of caste Buddhism
spread—until it had won China and Siam and Burma and Japan, countries
in which it is predominant to this day.
THE PILLAR OF LIONS
THE PILLAR OF LIONS
Capital of the Pillar (column lying on side) erected in Deer Park in
the time of Asoka, where Buddha preached his first sermon
_(From a print in the India Museum)_
XXX
CONFUCIUS AND LAO TSE
We have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and Lao Tse,
who lived in that wonderful century which began the adolescence of
mankind, the sixth century B.C. In this history thus far we have told
very little of the early story of China. At present that early history
is still very obscure, and we look to Chinese explorers and
archæolologists in the new China that is now arising to work out their
past as thoroughly as the European past has been worked out during the
last century. Very long ago the first primitive Chinese civilizations
arose in the great river valleys out of the primordial heliolithic
culture. They had, like Egypt and Sumeria, the general characteristics
of that culture, and they centred upon temples in which priests and
priest kings offered the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those
cities must have been very like the Egyptian and Sumerian life of six
or seven thousand years ago and very like the Maya life of Central
America a thousand years ago.
If there were human sacrifices they had long given way to animal
sacrifices before the dawn of history. And a form of picture writing
was growing up long before a thousand years B.C.
And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western Asia were
in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the nomads of the north,
so the primitive Chinese civilizations had a great cloud of nomadic
peoples on their northern borders. There was a number of tribes akin
in language and ways of living, who are spoken of in history in
succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks and Tartars. They
changed and divided and combined and re-combined, just as the Nordic
peoples in north Europe and central Asia changed and varied in name
rather than in nature. These Mongolian nomads had horses earlier than
the Nordic peoples, and it may be that in the region of the Altai
Mountains they made an independent discovery of iron somewhen after
1000 B.C. And just as in the western case so ever and again these
eastern nomads would achieve a sort of political unity, and become the
conquerors and masters and revivers of this or that settled and
civilized region.
It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was not
Mongolian at all any more than the earliest civilization of Europe and
western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite possible that the
earliest civilization of China was a brunette civilization and of a
piece with the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian and Dravidian civilizations,
and that when the first recorded history of China began there had
already been conquests and intermixture. At any rate we find that by
1750 B.C. China was already a vast system of little kingdoms and city
states, all acknowledging a loose allegiance and paying more or less
regularly, more or less definite feudal dues to one great priest
emperor, the “Son of Heaven.” The “Shang” dynasty came to an end in
1125 B.C. A “Chow” dynasty succeeded “Shang,” and maintained China in
a relaxing unity until the days of Asoka in India and of the Ptolemies
in Egypt. Gradually China went to pieces during that long “Chow”
period. Hunnish peoples came down and set up principalities; local
rulers discontinued their tribute and became independent. There was in
the sixth century B.C., says one Chinese authority, five or six
thousand practically independent states in China. It was what the
Chinese call in their records an “Age of Confusion.”
But this Age of Confusion was compatible with much intellectual
activity and with the existence of many local centres of art and
civilized living. When we know more of Chinese history we shall find
that China also had her Miletus and her Athens, her Pergamum and her
Macedonia. At present we must be vague and brief about this period of
Chinese division simply because our knowledge is not sufficient for us
to frame a coherent and consecutive story.
CONFUCIUS
CONFUCIUS
Copy of stone carving in the Temple of Confucius at K’iu Fu
_(From the records of the Archæological Mission to North China
(Chavannes))_
And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and in shattered
and captive Jewry prophets, so in disordered China there were
philosophers and teachers at this time. In all these cases insecurity
and uncertainty seemed to have quickened the better sort of mind.
Confucius was a man of aristocratic origin and some official importance
in a small state called Lu. Here in a very parallel mood to the Greek
impulse he set up a sort of Academy for discovering and teaching
Wisdom. The lawlessness and disorder of China distressed him
profoundly. He conceived an ideal of a better government and a better
life, and travelled from state to state seeking a prince who would
carry out his legislative and educational ideas. He never found his
prince; he found a prince, but court intrigues undermined the influence
of the teacher and finally defeated his reforming proposals. It is
interesting to note that a century and a half later the Greek
philosopher Plato also sought a prince, and was for a time adviser to
the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syracuse in Sicily.
Confucius died a disappointed man. “No intelligent ruler arises to
take me as his master,” he said, “and my time has come to die.” But
his teaching had more vitality than he imagined in his declining and
hopeless years, and it became a great formative influence with the
Chinese people. It became one of what the Chinese call the Three
Teachings, the other two being those of Buddha and of Lao Tse.
The gist of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the noble or
aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal conduct as much as
Gautama was concerned with the peace of self-forgetfulness and the
Greek with external knowledge and the Jew with righteousness. He was
the most public-minded of all great teachers. He was supremely
concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world, and he wanted to
make men noble in order to bring about a noble world. He sought to
regulate conduct to an extraordinary extent; to provide sound rules for
every occasion in life. A polite, public- spirited gentleman, rather
sternly self-disciplined, was the ideal he found already developing in
the northern Chinese world and one to which he gave a permanent form.
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
As it crosses the mountains in Manchuria
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge of the
imperial library of the Chow dynasty, was much more mystical and vague
and elusive than that of Confucius. He seems to have preached a
stoical indifference to the pleasures and powers of the world and a
return to an imaginary simple life of the past. He left writings very
contracted in style and very obscure. He wrote in riddles. After his
death his teachings, like the teachings of Gautama Buddha, were
corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and
extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them.
In China just as in India primordial ideas of magic and monstrous
legends out of the childish past of our race struggled against the new
thinking in the world and succeeded in plastering it over with
grotesque, irrational and antiquated observances. Both Buddhism and
Taoism (which ascribes itself largely to Lao Tse) as one finds them in
China now, are religions of monk, temple, priest and offering of a type
as ancient in form, if not in thought, as the sacrificial religions of
ancient Sumeria and Egypt. But the teaching of Confucius was not so
overlaid because it was limited and plain and straightforward and lent
itself to no such distortions.
EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL
EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL
Inscribed in archaic characters: “made for use by the elder of Hing
village in Ting district;” latter half of the Chou Dynasty, Sixth
Century B.C.
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
North China, the China of the Hwang-ho River, became Confucian in
thought and spirit; south China, Yang-tse-Kiang China, became Taoist.
Since those days a conflict has always been traceable in Chinese
affairs between these two spirits, the spirit of the north and the
spirit of the south, between (in latter times) Pekin and Nankin,
between the official- minded, upright and conservative north, and the
sceptical, artistic, lax and experimental south.
The divisions of China of the Age of Confusion reached their worst
stage in the sixth century B.C. The Chow dynasty was so enfeebled and
so discredited that Lao Tse left the unhappy court and retired into
private life.
Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the situation in those
days, Ts’i and Ts’in, both northern powers, and Ch’u, which was an
aggressive military power in the Yangtse valley. At last Ts’i and
Ts’in formed an alliance, subdued Ch’u and imposed a general treaty of
disarmament and peace in China. The power of Ts’in became predominant.
Finally about the time of Asoka in India the Ts’in monarch seized upon
the sacrificial vessels of the Chow emperor and took over his
sacrificial duties. His son, Shi-Hwang-ti (king in 246 B.C., emperor in
220 B.C.), is called in the Chinese Chronicles “the First Universal
Emperor.”
More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for thirty-six
years as king and emperor. His energetic reign marks the beginning of
a new era of unity and prosperity for the Chinese people. He fought
vigorously against the Hunnish invaders from the northern deserts, and
he began that immense work, the Great Wall of China, to set a limit to
their incursions.
XXXI
ROME COMES INTO HISTORY