Buddhism in India

The Background to Buddhism 25

world. It was an age of emerging consciousness of the individual in

the backdrop of social upheaval, when from China to Greece new

technologies, new social energies and cultural innovations burst

forth. It was also a period which seemed to have aeons behind it.

The first great age of civilisation, the Bronze Age cities built on the

flood plains of rivers, had passed. The first great waves of migra-

tion and invasions had swept across the Euro-Asiatic plains and

mountains; the primarily Indo-European ‘Bronze Age barbarians’

brought new turmoil with their horses, chariots and weapons. As

these settled, they interacted with urban civilisations and cleared

forests with the help of iron ploughs to spread agriculture farther,

surplus developed, population expanded, new large and small

urban centres multiplied, and trade grew. With increased mobility

of individuals within changing social formations, new ideas developed

and spread. The individual and the cosmos became subjects of

new questioning.

In India, these developments centered in the Gangetic valley,

eastwards of the Punjab and Indus valley areas where the first

civilisational development and cultural contacts had taken place.

India was at the time a mixture of ethnic and linguistic groups—

Dravidian (Tamil),^2 Aryan, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic. All of

them played some role in the Gangetic valley, and the languages of

the people developed not only on the basis of the Sanskritic back-

ground, as is often thought, but equally, if not more, influenced by

and other linguistic traditions, especially Tamil, the most ancient

form of the Dravidian languages.

These developments took place not in a vacuum, but on the

foundation of a long history of social-cultural developments in the

subcontinent. These broadly consisted of two streams, the Indic

and the Vedic.

The ‘Indic’ refers to the Indus valley civilisation, one of the oldest

in the world, centering in the Indus valley in Pakistan, in a region

that was to later become a Buddhist stronghold, one that very likely

24 Buddhism in India

by the god Brahma and out of compassion for the sufferings of
humanity, he ‘turned the wheel of the Dhamma’ and preached his
first sermon at the Deer Park at Sarnath to his initially sceptical five
former companions. Slowly he gathered disciples around him from
all walks of life, from wealthy merchants and Brahmans and fellow
Ksatriyas to the disregarded poor, lowly-born workers and women.
He initiated the men and organised them into a Bhikku Sangha, or
order of monks, and then with reluctance, admitted women to form
a Bhikkuni Sangha. His time was spent in peripatetic teaching, both
in rural solitude and in well populated and wealthy urban centers,
wandering for most of the year except during the rainy season. He
finally died after an attack of dysentery resulting from a meal given by
a metal-worker. The words of the Japanese Zen monk-poet Ryokan
poignantly capture his achievement,

Even if a man lives a hundred years

His life is like a floating weed, drifting with the waves

East and west continually, no time for rest.

Sakyamuni renounced nobility and devoted his life to

Preventing others from falling into ruin.

On earth eighty years,

Proclaiming the Dharma for fifty,

Bestowing the sutras as an eternal legacy;

Today, still a bridge to cross over to the other shore (Ryokan1988).

Millennium Magic

The background to the striking life and work of Gotama ‘Sakyamuni’
is important. We feel in the 21st century we are in a new millennium,
standing on the threshold of a new era. While dating from the
‘Christian era’—a mistaken date for Christ’s birth at that—is arbi-
trary, there is a sense in which a new global age, with new promises
and new dangers, is opening up before human society. Having gone
through capitalist industrialisation, the nation state, international
wars and the first great failed attempt at socialism, new linkages are
being built, new technologies experimented with, new social desires
expressed. Humanity appears to be poised on the threshold of an
expansion into both external and internal space.
The middle of the first millennium BCE similarly represented a
new era and turning point, not only in India but throughout the

(^2) Although the term ‘Dravidian’ is now used for the family of languages and ‘Tamil’
is limited to one of them, it is arguably more ancient. The term ‘Dravidian’ is itself
a Sanskritisation and we can trace the processes through which the word ‘Tamil’
became ‘Damila,’ ‘Damida’ and ‘Dravida.’ The 1st century Greek marital text, the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, uses the term ‘Dachinabades’ for the Deccan, from
which ‘Damirica’ or the Tamil country seems to be excluded.