INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

What the Indus Valley layer revealed were the archaic roots of Indic spirituality. The Indo-Brahmanical layer introduced the Indo-Aryan component with its intricate and obsessive sacrificial rituals (yajna), its sacred utterances of the Veda-s and Upanishad-s (shruti), its tripartite social organization of priests, warriors and food-producers destined to become the later caste system, and perhaps most important of all, the centrality of the priests both in terms of the performance of the ritual and in terms of the first proto-philosophical reflections in the Upanishad-s. With the Indo-Shramanical layer, which may well reflect the resurfacing of pre-brahmanical traditions, we begin to see some reactions against this powerful religion of the priests, and we begin to see some further dramatic manifestations of the two other kinds of spirituality that will prove to be as important in the formation of Indic religious traditions as ritual sacrifice (yajna), namely, ascetic or disciplined meditation (yoga), and focussed or single-minded devotion to a personal god (bhakti). We will also begin to see new and larger political formations in this period, occasioned probably by the new iron technology which greatly improved agricultural efficiency, enabled land clearance and the development of much more sophisticated weaponry, and provided overall an improved material base for increased trade and commerce.

THE INDO-SHRAMANICAL

Following Alexander the Great's brief foray into India (in the Indus Valley region, c., 326 B.C.E.), the local regional polities across North Central India were finally united for the first time into one coordinated, albeit loose, confederation by a power in the Magadha region of the Gangetic plain known as the Mauryan dynasty, the most illustrious representative of which was Ashoka, who reigned from ca., 269 -232 B.C.E.

Ravinder Kumar suggests that it is precisely in this Indo-Shramanical context that the basic structures or levels of Indic political activity and State formation take shape that will hold for the most part in subsequent centuries, indeed until the establishing of the British Raj in the nineteenth century, namely, three distinct levels of socio-political reality: local village levels of caste and kinship communities, regional levels shaped by the constellations of local levels, and a pan-India or all-India level in varying sorts of loose federations depending upon the great variety of imperial formations from century to century.

The older Indo-Brahmanical layer also undergoes some fundamental changes towards the end of what we are calling the formation of the Indo-Shramanical layer, mainly in terms of the development of a much more inclusive literature than the older Vedic corpus, including the generation of law-books known as Dharmashastra-s and the redaction of the two great epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the latter of which contains the most important religious text for the formation of the emerging Hindu traditions, the Bhagavad Gita or "Song of the Lord."

The term "shramana" is from the root shram, meaning "to exert oneself" or "to practice austerities," and refers to non-Indo-Brahmanical mendicant groups that began to appear in North India some time around the sixth century B.C.E. To some extent, these shramana groups were engaging in the same sorts of speculation about the Self or Soul that we noticed in the proto-philosophical Upanishad-s of the Indo-Brahmanical tradition. It is possibly the case that most of these groups got many of their ideas from the speculations of the priests. The search for inner truth, the turn towards meditation and self-searching, and the pursuit of disciplined meditation or Yoga, was not simply to be found among some of the priests. It was to be found as well among all of these mendicant groups.

The crucial difference, however, is that the shramana groups did not accept the authority of the priests nor did they accept the validity of the Indo-Brahmanical sacrificial system. They, therefore, also rejected the sacred utterances of the priests in their elitist language of Sanskrit, the Veda-s, as well as the supposed superiority of the priests in the developing hierarchical social reality. They formed their own separate mendicant communities and represent the first examples of organized monastic life in ancient India. The shramana ascetic in later classical Sanskrit literature as well as in Buddhist and Jain texts is frequently contrasted with the brahmana ascetic. One Indian grammarian introduces the compound word "shramana-brahmana" as examples of unending hostility, like that between "cat and mouse," "dog and fox," and "snake and mongoose." There were, thus, in this ancient period several separate traditions of disciplined meditation or Yoga, deriving from both Indo-Brahmanical and Indo-Shramanical sources. 

THE JAINS

There were many such shramana groups, but two in particular eventually developed into independent religious traditions in ancient India of great importance: the Jains and the Buddhists. To call to mind what was briefly mentioned in Chapter One, the founder of the Jain tradition was Vardhamana ("he who is bringing prosperity"), also known by the honorific epithet, Mahavira ("Great Hero"). He was born into a warrior clan and lived in the sixth century B.C.E. (c., 549-477 B.C.E.) in North-East India in the region of the Gangetic plain in what is now the State of Bihar. He practiced rigorous asceticism and organized a Jain monastic community. The word "Jain" comes from the word jina meaning "conqueror." As was mentioned earlier, according to the Jain tradition, Mahavira was not the first ascetic teacher of the tradition. There had been many other teachers before him called tirthankara-s or "crossing-makers," meaning teachers able to cross the rivers of suffering in this world and to attain enlightenment. Some have claimed that these traditions can be traced back to the old Indus Valley layer or earlier, but that is unlikely. It is likely, however, that the Jain tradition is considerably older than the Buddhist tradition.

The literature of the Jains is extensive, and most of it is composed in one or another form of a group of languages or dialects known as Prakrits. These are Middle Indic languages, in the "middle," as it were, linguistically, between the Old Indic languages (Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit), on the one hand, and Modern Indic languages (Hindi, and so forth), on the other. The scriptural basis for the Jain traditions are a group of some sixty Prakrit texts (called Agama-s or "sacred utterances"), including a group of Purva or "Ancient Texts" (no longer extant but referred to in later texts), Anga-s or "Limbs" (the basic teachings of the tradition), and Upanga-s or Angabahya-s or ("subsidiary texts"). There is also an extensive non-canonical Jain literature in various Prakrits, Sanskrit and Modern Indic languages as well. Some portions of the Jain canonical literature are very old and can be traced possibly to the time of Vardhamana. Most of it, however, and certainly all of the non-canonical commentarial literature comes from a much later period, probably not earlier than the end of this Indo-Shramaïical period, that is to say, the first centuries of the Common Era and even later.

The Jains believe in a rigorous dualism of Self (jiva) and Not-Self (a-jiva), somewhat like the Self (purusha) and materiality (prakriti) duality of the Upanishadic Samkhya mentioned above, with the important difference that the Jain Self or jiva is a concrete, determinate entity that can enter into relations with the Non-Self (a-jiva). The Self becomes imprisoned in the Not-Self through karman or worldly action, conceived in this tradition as a kind of physical stuff. Especially violent action or any act of killing leads to a great influx of karmic matter which leads to even further imprisonment and suffering of the Self. One ought to avoid ordinary worldly action, especially any violent action or killing. Hence, the Jains practice strict vegetarianism, follow the doctrine of non-violence (ahiësa) and encourage rigorous ascetic meditation in order to bring about the separation of the Self or Soul from the body. As was mentioned in the last Chapter, in the fourth century B.C.E. a great schism occurred in the community between the Shvetambara-s ("cloth-clad") and
Digambara-s ("sky-clad"), with the former mendicants and their lay followers finally settling largely in the Western regions of Gujarat, Rajasthan and northern Maharashtra, and the latter settling largely in the South in southern Maharashtra and Karnataka. Jain communities, both monastic and lay, have existed in India throughout the centuries, and as noted earlier, there are about 4,000,000 in contemporary India and several thousands who live outside of India in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.

THE BUDDHISTS

The other prominent tradition within the shramana context is the Buddhist, and again, to review what was mentioned briefly earlier, the founder of the Buddhist tradition was Gautama, also known by such epithets as buddha ("the awakened or enlightened one") shakyamuni ("the monk of the Shakya clan) and siddhartha ("he whose goal has been attained" or "he whose goal is perfection"). Like Vardhamana, he too was from a warrior clan and lived as an older contemporary of Vardhamana in precisely the same region of the Gangetic plain. The dates of the Buddha are usually set at 563 - 483 B.C.E.

According to tradition, Gautama is born as a prince of the Shakya clan, and it is predicted at the time of his birth that he will become either a great ruler or a great spiritual leader. His father tries to protect him from ordinary life and to direct him towards becoming a great ruler, but the young prince becomes weary of conventional life and leaves his family to seek spiritual enlightenment. At first he becomes a mendicant and learns the various types of disciplined meditation (yoga) available in his time, but concludes that they will not lead to enlightenment. Then, he pursues for some six years the extreme opposite of the conventional life of indulgence that he had enjoyed before leaving his family, that is to say, he pursues a regimen of extreme asceticism or tapas ("interior burning"), but he concludes that these extreme techniques will also not bring enlightenment. He, then, abandons extreme asceticism and begins to practice a moderate, new form of disciplined meditation (yoga) that comes to be known as the "Middle Way," a new moderate form of meditation which brings him to enlightenment. The content of his enlightenment experience, of course, is the well-known formula of the four "noble" (arya) truths and the eightfold path:

(l) all of life is frustrating;
(2) frustration has a cause (namely, clinging or thirsting after the impermanent as if it were permanent);
(3) frustration can be stopped (by means of a moderate form of disciplined meditation); and
(4) the method of disciplined meditation to be followed is the eightfold path of right views, right intentions, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.

The new "Middle Way" is called the dharma, a term which means variously "law," "doctrine," "righteousness" and even "truth" in Buddhist contexts. The term dharma also comes to have a technical meaning as the "constituents" or "force factors" that make up the phenomenal, empirical world, as will be seen below.

What is distinctive about the early Buddhist analysis of experience is (a) its repudiation of the extreme asceticism of other shramaïa-groups in favor of a "Middle Way" between the extremes of sensuous indulgence and extreme mortification, and (b) its declaring of a fresh and original interpretation of the nature of the world and human experience. Whereas the Indo-Brahmanical traditions of Upanishadic Vedanta and Samkhya as well as the Indo-Shramaïical Jain tradition had focussed their disciplined meditation or Yoga on the problem of the relation of Self or consciousness (atman, purusha, jiva) to the realm of objective multiplicity or the Not-Self (maya, prakriti, a-jiva), the Buddhists suggested on the basis of their new, moderate method of meditation that a more adequate perspective on the world and human experience revealed a radical and ever-changing process or transience (anitya) in which there was neither a substantial "world" nor a substantial "self." Whereas the early Vedanta, early Samkhya and Indo-Shramanical Jain traditions tended to think in terms of "things" or "entities," utilizing essentially spatial metaphors, the early Buddhists thought, rather, in terms of "events" and process, utilizing, in other words, a powerful temporal metaphor.

There is only change and transformation, a continuing sequence of unfolding events. Reality is really made up of discrete force-factors, flashes of energy or mathematical point-instants, which these early Buddhists called dharma-s. Notions or constructs like "world," or "nature," or "self" are simply verbal conventions (vikalpa-s) that may be serviceable enough for purposes of everyday conventional life but, in fact, have no ultimate validity. The early Buddhists suggested, instead, the radical notion of No-Self (an-atman) and, somewhat later, the more radical notion of "substancelessness" or "without own being" (nih-svabhava). Because we cling or thirst after permanence when, in fact, there is nothing permanent, we, therefore, get caught up in frustration and suffering (duhkha). We need to break the cycle or wheel of endless thirsting after permanence and pursue, instead, a radical cessation (nirodha) of ordinary conventional life. By following the eightfold path, which is, as it were, a new kind of "wheel of the truth" (the dhammacakka in Påli, or dharma-cakra in Sanskrit), we can achieve that cessation (nirodha) and eventually come to the final peace of complete freedom from frustration or suffering known as nirvana (literally meaning "blowing out" or, in other words, complete cessation). Gautama the Buddha is the exemplary figure who shows us the new way. He is not a god; indeed, the notion of a god is only one more verbal convention. We must follow the new path of disciplined meditation and discover the ultimate truth in our own experience.

The Buddhist tradition plays an important role in both the religious and political history of India. The Buddhist tradition itself refers to three phases in its history in India or what it calls "three turnings of the wheel of the law:" (a) an early period of some five hundred years (from the death of the founder in the fifth century B.C.E. to about the first century of the Common Era) during which the Sthaviravada or Theravada or "Tradition of the Elders" develops, (b) a second period of five hundred years (roughly from the first century C.E. through the fifth or sixth centuries) during which the more inclusive Mahayana or "Tradition of the Great Vehicle" develops, (c) and a third period of five hundred years (from about the sixth century through the tenth century, after which the Buddhist tradition declines and finally disappears from India) during which a highly ritualized form of esoteric practice develops known as the Vajrayana or "Tradition of the Diamond Vehicle" develops.

Initially the "Tradition of the Elders" was little more than one among many mendicant shramaïa-groups in the Gangetic plain region, but early along it became linked with some of the dramatic social and political changes occurring in the region: the development of cities, the development of a monied economy, and most important, the development of the first all-India or pan-Indian dynastic state, the Mauryan dynasty, and its most illustrious representative, Ashoka, who reigned ca., 269 - 232 B.C.E. It is not clear whether Ashoka himself ever became a Buddhist--evidence suggests that he supported a variety of religious traditions in addition to the Buddhists--but he did make use of the Buddhist notion of dharma ("law," "doctrine," "righteousness") as one of the the primary ideological notions for legitimizing his pan-Indian empire.

From this time onwards the Buddhist tradition rapidly became a pan-Indian tradition, supported, on one level, by the new pan-Indian empire, and, on other levels, by rich, regional landowners, urban dwellers, tradespeople, artisans, and so forth, who were coming into prominence with the emerging new social reality. Monasteries (vihara-s) and reliquary or burial monuments (stupa-s) begin to be built in various parts of the subcontinent for housing monks and for providing a network of pilgrimage places (celebrating the various events or acts of the Buddha) for wandering monks and lay people. The "Tradition of the Elders" develops into some eighteen different schools, many of which are related to specific regions in the subcontinent, with the greatest strengths of the tradition in the North Central area (the Gangetic plain), the North East region (in and around Bengal), the Southern region (in what is now Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu) and the far North-West (in and around Kashmir).

Like the Jain tradition, the early Buddhist traditions for the most part used the Middle Indic Prakrit languages rather than the elitist Indo-Brahmanical Sanskrit. The scriptural base for the "Tradition of the Elders" is referred to as the "Three Baskets" (Tipitaka in Påli, Tripitaka in Sanskrit), referring to the three subdivisions of (a) monastic rules, (b) discourses of the founder and (c) speculative and technical writings. Most of this was oral literature in the earliest period, and written texts in the form that we now have them are not much earlier than the time of King Ashoka. Most of them are considerably later, coming from the end of this Indo-Shramanical period, or, in other words, the first centuries of the Common Era. Early along the "Tradition of the Elders" or Theravada became firmly established in what is now Sri Lanka, and a full corpus of the "Three Baskets" has been preserved there in the Middle Indic Pali language and referred to simply as the Pali Canon. Some of the other early schools, however, for example, the Sarvastivada (the "Tradition that All Exists," a school stressing that the "force-factors" or dharma-s "exist" in all three times of past, present and future) and the Sautrantika (the "Tradition based on the Discourses," a school that puts a special focus on the discourses of the founder) in the far North-West, purportedly had Sanskrit versions of the "Three Baskets," although these for the most part are no longer extant. Also, the "Tradition of the Great Vehicle" (Mahayana) which arises towards the end of the Indo-Shramaicial period that we are discussing also utilizes the medium of Sanskrit. Evidently as the Buddhist traditions became pan-Indian traditions, the elitist vehicle of Sanskrit became more and more prevalent.

DEVOTIONAL CULTS

Before concluding our discussion of this Indo-Shramanical period, one other development must be mentioned, and that is the first appearance of devotional cults, specifically Shaiva (devotees of Lord Shiva) and Vaishnava (devotees of Lord Vishnu) traditions. Although, as mentioned earlier, both Rudra-Shiva and Vishnu were known in the older Indo-Brahmanical Vedic religion and are sometimes mentioned in the Upanishad-s, they were clearly not dominant figures. It is only here in this Indo-Shramaïical period that we begin to see the emergence of devotion (bhakti) to a personal god for the first time, and it appears to be the case that these devotional cults were originally outside the Indo-Brahmanical sacrifcial framework as were the shramaïa-groups themselves. Shiva, Vasudeva-Krishna, Narayana, Rama and many other later Hindu deities all to have begun as local traditions outside of the Indo-Brahmanical tradition, their origins in some instances possibly even going back to pre-Indo-Aryan times as we mentioned when discussing a possible proto-Shiva figure in the Indus Valley period). They begin now, however, to become major cults.

The later Bhagavata tradition of Vaishnavism (with a focus on Vasudeva-Krishna), the Shaiva-bhagavata (with a focus on Shiva), the Pashupata tradition (again with a focus on Shiva) and the Pancharatra tradition (with a focus on Vishnu) all appear to have their origins in this Indo-Shramaïical period. Moreover, like the shramnïa-groups themselves, they are all to some extent reactions against the Indo-Brahmanical sacrificial system and the authority of the priests. Emphases in these religious traditions begin to emerge that will achieve great prominence in the future: the making of images and image-worship (puja) in contrast to the older sacrifice (yajna), the appearance of temples (probably greatly influenced by the Buddhist building of stupa-s or relic-shrines of the Buddha), the practice of pilgrimage (again probably due largely to the Buddhist custom of making pilgrimage to certain sacred places), singing devotional songs, observing certain religious festivals, and so forth. All of these go considerably beyond and to a large extent begin to supplant the old sacrificial cult.
Moreover, the Jain and Buddhist traditions of reverencing highly realized spiritual persons (Mahavira and Buddha) probably had more than a little influence on the development of bhakti as a form of personal devotion that moves away from the older hieratic ritual performances. Such influence, to be sure, could easily work the other way as well, and it is frequently difficult if not impossible to trace the influence one way or the other. It is clear enough, for example, that the second period in the history of the Buddhist tradition, that it to say, the rise of the Mahayana contains an important dimension of what can only be called Buddha-bhakti. Also, the Mahåyåna focus on the spiritual ideal of the bodhisattva (the "enlightenment-being" or "the being on the way to enlightenment") who extends great compassion to all suffering creatures is not unlike notions of the compassionate grace (anugraha or "grasping after") of the personal deity in later Hindu bhakti.

It should also be kept in mind that it could well be the case that all of these more popular traditions were always present in the larger culture but never surfaced in the Indo-Brahmanical sacerdotal literature and could only show themselves as a result of the growing success, both spiritually and socio-politically, of the Indo-Shramanical protest traditions. In any case, there appears to be a clear affinity between the spirituality of the Indo-Shramanical (Jain and Buddhist) traditions and the devotional bhakti cults that begin to become prominent in this period.