THE CITIES OF BUDDHISM
Accepting the theory that Buddhism was developed in India, not as a sect or church, but only as a religious order, founded by one of the greatest of the World-Teachers, we find ourselves compelled to account for the relations that would arise between the king or the populace impressed by the memory of Buddha, and the order that followed in his succession and bore his name.
To do this, however, it is first necessary that we should have some determinate idea as to where, in the India of the Buddhist period, were the great centres of population. An Indian city, it has been well said, is a perishable thing, and it is easy to think of names which would justify the statement. No one who has seen the Dhauli Rock, for instance, seven miles away from Bhubaneshwar, can imagine that the edict it bears, fronted by the royal cognisance of the elephant head, was originally sculptured in the wild woods where it now stands. A glance is enough to tell us that the circular ditch which surrounds the fields below was once the moat of a city, backed and fortified by the Dhauli Hill itself, and that the edict-bearing rock stood at the south-eastern corner of this city, where the high-road from the coast must have reached and entered the gates. This city of Dhauli was the capital, doubtless, of Kalinga, when Asoka in his military youth conquered the province. In order to estimate its value and importance in the age to which it belonged, we must first restore to the mind's eye the ports of Tamralipti and Puri, deciding which of these two was the Liverpool of the Asokan era. A theocratic institution such as pilgrimage is frequently a sort of precipitate from an old political condition, and almost always embodies elements of one sort or another which have grown up in a preceding age. Presumably, therefore, Puri was the great maritime centre of the pre-Christian centuries in Northern India; and if so, a road must have passed from it, through Dhauli, to Pataliputra in the north. By this road went and came the foreign ^rade between India and the East, and between the north and south. In the age of the Kesari kings of Orissa, not only had Dhauli itself given place to Bhubaneshwar, but [Puri, perhaps by the same process, had been superseded by Tamralipti, the present Tamluk. It was at the second of these that Fa Hian in the fifth century embarked on his return voyage. Such a supersession of one port by another, however, would only be completed very gradually, and for it to happen at all we should imagine that there must have been a road from one to the other along the coast. If only the covering sands could now be excavated along that line, there is no saying what discoveries might be made of buried temples and transitional cities. For a whole millennium in history would thus be brought to light.
On the great road from Dhauli to the north, again, there must have been some point at which a route branched off for Benares, passing through Gaya, and crossing the Punpun River, following in great part the same line by which Shere Shah's ddk went later and the railway goes to-day.
Let us suppose, however, that two thousand and more years have rolled away, and that we are back once more in that era in which Dhauli was a fortified capital city. The elephant-heralded decree stands outside the gates, proclaiming in freshly-cut letters of the common tongue the name of that wise and just Emperor who binds himself and his people by a single*^ body of law.
"I, King Piyadassi, in the twelfth year after my anointing, have obtained true enlightenment," the august edict begins. It goes on to express the royal distress at the imperialistic conquest of the province, in Asoka's youth, and assures his people of his desire to mitigate this fundamental injustice of his rule by a readiness to give audience to any one of them, high or low, at any hour of the day or night. It further enumerates certain of the departments of public works which have been established by the new government, such as those of wells, roads, trees, and medicine. And it notes the appointment of public censors, or guardians of morality.
In his reference to the obtaining of "true enlightenment" Asoka records himself a non-monastic disciple of the great monastic order of the day. Nearly three hundred years have elapsed since the passing of the Blessed One, and in the history of the Begging Friars whom He inaugurated there has been heretofore no event like this, of the receiving of the imperial penitent into the lay-ranks served by them. Their task of nation-making is slowly but surely going forward nevertheless. In the light of the Gospel of Nirvana the Aryan Faith is steadily defining and consolidating itself. The Vedic gods have dropped out of common reference. The religious ideas of the Upanishads are being democratised by the very labours of the Begging Friars in spreading those of Buddha, and arg coming to be regarded popularly as a recognised body of doctrine characteristic of the Aryan folk. Vague racial superstitions about snakes and trees and sacred springs are tending more and more to be intellectually organised and regimented round the central figure of Brahma, the creator and ordainer of Brahmanic thinkers.
Thus the higher philosophical conceptions of the higher race are being asserted as the outstanding peaks and summits of the Hinduistic faith, and the current notions of the populace are finding their place gradually in the body of that faith, coming by degrees into organic continuity with the lofty abstractions of the Upanishads. In other words, the making of Hinduism has begun.
The whole is fermented and energised by the memory of the Great Life, ended only three centuries agone, of which the yellow-clad brethren are earnest and token. Had Buddha founded a church, recognising social rites, receiving the new-born, solemnising marriage, and giving benediction to the passing soul, his personal teachings would have formed to this hour a distinguishable half-antagonistic strain in the organ-music of Hinduism. But he founded only an order. And its only function was to preach the Gospel and give individual souls the message of Nirvana. For marriage and blessing, men must go to the Brahmans : the sons of Buddha could not be maintainers of the social polity, since in his eyes it had been the social nexus itself which had constituted that World, that Maya, from which it was the mission of the Truth to set men free.
The work of the mork, then, as a witness to the eternal verities, was in no rivalry to the more civic function of the Brahmanic priesthood. And this is the fact which finds expression in the relation of the monkhood to the Indian cities of the Asokan era. The Brahman is a citizen-priest, living in a city. The Buddhist is a monk, living in an abbey. In all lands the monk has memorialised himself by buildings instead of by posterity. In India these have been largely carved, as at Mahavellipore in the south, or excavated, as at Ellora and elsewhere, instead of built. But the sentiment is the same. In place of a single monastery with its chapel or cathedral, we find here a number of independent cells or groups of cells, and frequently a whole series of cathedral shrines. Apparently a given spot has remained a monastic centre during generation after generation. Dynasties and revolutions might come and go, but this would remain, untouched by any circumstance save the inevitable shifting of population and the final decay of its own spiritual fire.
In its decoration the abbey would reflect the art of the current epoch. In culture it would act as a university. In ideals it represented the super-social, or extra-civic conception of the spiritual equality and fraternity of all men. Its inmates were vowed to religious celibacy. And we may take it that the place of the abbey would always be at a certain distance from a city whose government was in sympathy with it.
Thus the city of Dhauli, under the Emperor Asoka and succeeding worshippers of Buddha, had Khandagiri at seven miles' distance as its royal abbey. The civic power was represented at Gaya : the monastic at Bodh-Gaya. Benares was the seat of Brahmans : Sarnath of monks. Elephanta was the cathedral-temple of a king's capital,[1] but Kenheri, on another island a few miles away, offers to us the corresponding monastery. From these examples and from what we can see to have been their inevitableness, we might expect that any important city of the Buddhistic period would be likely to occur in connection with a monastic centre some few miles distant. Now it is possible to determine the positions of a great many such cities on grounds entirely a priori. It is clear, for instance, that whatever geographical considerations might make Benares great would also act at the same time to distinguish Allahabad. By a similar induction, Mathura on the Jumna and Hardwar on the Ganges might also be expected to furnish proof of ancient greatness. Now outside Prayag we have to the present time, as a haunt of sadhus, the spot known as Nirvanikal. And in the vicinity of Hardwar, is there not Hrishikesh? The caves of Ellora have near them the town of Roza. But this we must regard as a sort of Mohammedan priory, "in as much as its population consists mainly of religious beggars (of course not celibate) living about the tomb of Aurangzebe. The neighbouring capital that supported the youth of Ellora was probably at Deogiri, now called Daulatabad.
It is the broken links in the chain, however, that fascinate us most in the light of this historical generalisation. What was the city, and what the state, that made Ajanta possible? What was the city that corresponded to the dharmsala at Sanchi? What was the city, and what the abbey, in the case of Amravati? Undoubtedly a fashion once started in such strength under Buddha-worshipping sovereigns and commonwealths would tend to be imitated in later ages when the system of ideas that we know as Hinduism had come more definitely into vogue. It is also possible that when the Buddhistic orders failed or died out their places were sometimes taken, in the ancient maths and foundations, by Jain religious. Something of this sort appears at least to have happened at Sarnath and possibly at Khandagiri also. But the whole history of the relations between Brahmans, Buddhists, and Jains wants working out from an Asiatic and not European point of view, if many pages of history are to become clear to us.
One question of great interest that arises in this connection, is, What of this parallelism in the case of Pataliputra? Going back to Rajgir, we see the early ancestral capital of the Nanda kings confronted, at least in later ages, by Nalanda, the historic university of Bengal, to which Hiouen Tsang owed so much. But what of Pataliputra itself? Can we suppose that the imperial seat had no official ashrama of piety and learning in its vicinity? Yet if it had, and if perhaps the "Five Pahars" mark the site of this religious college, what was the situation of the capital in regard to it?
Again we find place and occasion, by means of this generalisation, for more definite consideration than was hitherto possible of Indian culture and civilisation at various epochs. What were the various functions performed by these great extra-civic priories? No Englishman has reason to be prouder of Oxford than the Hindu of Ajanta. The eternal antithesis of Europe between "town and gown" was never a source of rioting and disorder in the East, only because from the beginning they were recognised by universal consent as distinct entities, whose separateness of interests demanded a certain geographical distance. What was the life lived in these royal abbeys, whose foundations date back in so many cases—notably Bodh-Gaya, Sarnath, Dhauli, and Sanchi—even earlier than the reign of Asoka himself? They were a symbol of democracy to the eyes of the whole community, of the right of every man to the highest spiritual career. It is not conceivable that they should lhave been entirely without influence on the education of youth. But undoubtedly their main value intellectually lay in their character of what we should now call post-graduate universities.
Here must have been carried on such researches as were recorded, in the lapse of centuries, by Patanjali, in his Yoga Aphorisms, one of the most extraordinary documents of ancient science known to the world. Here must have been the home of that learning which made the golden age of the Guptas possible, between 300 and 500 A.D. We must think too of the international relations of these ancient monastic colleges. Fa Hian (400 A.D.) and Hiouen Tsang (650 A.D.) were not the only eastern students who came in the ages that followed the Christian era to drink of the springs of Indian learning. They were a couple whose books of travels happen to have become famous. But they were two out of a great procession of pilgrim-scholars. And it was to the abbeys that such came. It was from these abbeys, again, that the missions proceeded to foreign countries. No nation was ever evangelised by a single teacher. The word Patrick in Irish, it is said, means praying-man, and the vaunted saint is thus, beyond a doubt, either a member or a personification of a whole race of Christian preachers who carried Baptism and the Cross to early Ireland. Similarly Mahinda, Nagarjuna, and Bodhidharmma in the twelfth century, were not the isolated figures painted by history as we know it. They were merely conspicuous elements in a whole stream of missionary effort, that radiated from the quiet abbeys and monasteries of India in its great ages towards the worlds of east and west. Christianity itself, it has been often suggested, may have been one of the later fruits of such a mission, as preached in Persia and Syria.
Here, in these lovely retreats—for they are all placed in the midst of natural beauty—was elaborated the thought and learning, the power of quiet contemplation, and the marvellous energy of art and literary tradition, that have made India as we know her to-day. Here were dreamed those dreams which, reflected in society, became the social ideals of the ages in which we Hve. And here was demonstrated the great law that will be expressed again and again in history, whenever the glory of India rises to one of it's supreme moments, the law of the antithesis between city and university, between samaj and religious orders, between the life of affairs and the life of thought. Antithetic as they are, however, these are nevertheless comple- mentary. Spirituality brings glory in its train. The monastic life reacts to make civic strength.
- ↑ And Elephanta is of considerably later date.