Buddhism in India

Buddhist Civilisation 137

legitimacy from Confucian traditions of the ‘mandate of heaven’,

but the notion of a ‘just king’ implied in Buddhism also aided in

depriving an existing unjust regime of this mandate.

In India, politics quickly became more fragmented, particularly

after the gradual crystallisation of varna society, with numerous

regional kingdoms striving with one another, facing constant

turmoil within (but from feudatory intransigence rather than from

popular revolt) and often aspiring for all-India hegemony, but

unable to establish a long-enduring administration. After Asoka,

there were endless aspirants for continental power but none

succeeded. It seemed that the consolidation of the caste system

encouraged an inward-looking village society, one without living

connections with (or much expectation from) the larger state, with

all inhabitants encouraged to follow the professions of their

parents. It was almost the society of Marx’s ‘unchanging villages’

where people carried on with their lives unheeding the waves of

empire that crashed around them.

The Entrepreneurial Society

From the time of the Buddha, early Indian society was monetised

to a large degree. Most of the workers (dasa-kammakaras) are

shown as wage workers, while according to the Jatakas, most

artisans, including vegetable sellers (#70), sold their products. It

was only later with the triumph of Brahmanism that the famous

‘self-sufficient village’ of India, with its craftsmen bound by the

jajmani system to give their services to the dominant landholders in

exchange for a share of the crop, became prevalent.

This had global implications. Asoka’s unification of much of the

subcontinent under his rule promoted the development of an all-

India trade that fairly quickly became part of global links. By the

last part of the first millennium BCE developed, what might be

called the first era of global trade, one that linked Rome, Greece,

Egypt and Ethiopia to the west through India, then from northwest

India through Central Asia to China and from eastern India to

southeast Asia.

Indians themselves played a major role in creating this network.

The Jataka stories depict both trade and enterprise. There are many

examples of merchants, often including the Bodhisattva, sallying

that Chinese emperors often quite consciously used it for this
purpose. However, he adds,

Mahayana Buddhism had several doctrines that were of great potential

usefulness to demagogues, rebels, or would-be usurpers. One was the

doctrine of the three ages or periods of Buddhism, the last culminating

in the extinction of the religion: once mankind was well into this age...

there could be no government worthy of the respect and loyalty of

the devout. Such a notion was utterly subversive....Almost equally

dangerous were the worshipers of Maitreya, the future Buddha, who

believed that the end of the world was at hand.... The north in the

period of disunion had seen numerous popular uprisings centered on

this cult (Wright 1965: 69)

Buddhism thus provided some ideological resources for revolt. At
the same time, the Sangha as an institution that was ideally
autonomous, self-governing, outside the realm of state interference,
must have been troubling to rulers. Within such an institution,
collective opposition to an unjust state could be fostered.
There is evidence that Buddhist teachings in India also fostered,
as least to some extent, resistance to injustice. Some Jataka stories
endorse popular rebellion when the ideal of rulership is not met. In
one, a king and a priest steal the kingdom’s treasure; the
Bodhisattva knows where it is, but resists naming the king as the
thief, telling story after story with the theme that what was supposed
to protect and nurture proves to be destructive: ‘my refuge proved
my bane.’ The king ignores this and continues to press him to name
the thief, and when he finally does, the people are so infuriated that
they rise up and beat the king and priest to death (#432). In
another story, an evil king has the Bodhisattva who saved his life
beaten, and the infuriated people kill the king and put the
Bodhisattva in his place (#73). Strikingly, the only work of Sanskrit
literature recording a peasant revolt occurs in the Mrchhakatika
(‘Little Clay Cart’), a play which was written during the time of
Buddhist influence in the Satavahana regime and has Buddhist
characters.
On the whole, Buddhism appeared to foster a type of political
system different from that of the Chinese. Chinese politics was
one of cycles: strong empires, backed up by a solid bureaucratic
system, which after a period of time fell to peasant revolts, resulting
eventually in the foundation of another empire. The revolts gained

136 Buddhism in India