THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESLate Vedic age. This reform movement is mainly identified with the
teaching of Gautama Buddha who is regarded as the first historic figure of
Indian history. The date of his death (parinirvana) has always been a
controversial issue. Whereas the Buddhist world celebrated in AD 1956 the
2,500th anniversary of his Nirvana (in 544 BC), modern historians and
Indologists had generally accepted c. 483 BC as the date of his death. But
in the early 1980s the German Indologist H.Bechert has convincingly
shown that none of these dates which are based on later Buddhist
chronicles and canonical texts can be taken for granted and that the
Buddha may instead have lived and preached about a century later. These
findings were generally approved at an international conference at
Göttingen in 1988 even though they are not unanimously accepted,
especially by Indian historians. As early Buddhist literature, in particular
the Jataka stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, depict an already
flourishing urban society in North India, archaeological evidence also
seems to indicate that the Buddha lived in the fifth rather than in the sixth
century when urbanisation in the Ganges valley was still in its incipient
stage. The Buddha, however, was not the only great reformer of that age.
There was also Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, who is supposed to have
been a younger contemporary of the Buddha. Jainism, this other great
ascetic religion, was destined to have an unbroken tradition in India,
especially in the rich merchant communities of Western India. Buddhism
spread to many other countries later on, but has declined in India itself. It
could be said that Mahavira’s teachings reappeared in the rigorous ethics
of Mahatma Gandhi who was influenced by Jainism as he grew up in a
Gujarati Bania family, the Banias being a dominant traders’ caste in that
region.
Both these ascetic religious movements of the fifth century BC are
characterised by a transition from the magic thought of the Vedas and the
mystical speculations of the Upanishads to a new type of rationality. This
rationality is also in evidence in the famous grammar of the great Indian
linguist, Panini. His grammar, India’s first scientific treatise, was produced
in this period. Buddha’s teachings were later on fused once more with
mystical speculation and even with magic thought in Tantric Buddhism,
but his original quest for rationally enlightened experience is clearly
documented by this explanation of the four noble truths, and of the
‘eightfold path’ of salvation from the burden of human suffering. He had
practised penance and experienced the futility of mystical speculation
before he arrived at his insight into the causes of human suffering and the
way to remove them. The eightfold path of right conduct (in vision,
thought, speech, action, giving, striving, vigilance and concentration)
which leads to a cessation of the thirst for life and thus stops the cycle of
rebirths appears to be a matter of practical instruction rather than the
outcome of mystical speculation.