Buddhism in India

The Background to Buddhism 49

Brahmanic religious books, the Bhagavad Gita which was inserted

within the Mahabharata itself.

The Bhagavad Gita, intended for mass consumption and not just

for the elite, was an all-around cosmological–philosophical justifi-

cation, of the new varnashrama dharmasociety. The setting of the

Gita is the agonising of Arjuna, the hero of the Pandavas, just

before the battle of Kurukshetra is to take place: why should he take

part in such a mass slaughter of kinsmen? In giving a reply, Krishna

not only proclaims his own divinity and the unreality of slaughter,

but also sets forth the ideal of caste and proclaims swadharma, the

performance of one’s own caste duty, as the supreme responsibility

of the individual. ‘Better one’s own duty badly performed than that

of another well done’ is reiterated at the beginning and the end of

the Gita. Self-control, dispassionate action, non-attachment were

all proclaimed, but firmly within the framework of varna:

Of brahmans, ksatriyas and Vaisyas, and of Sudras, scorcher of the foe,

the actions are distinguished

according to the strands that spring from their innate nature.

Calm, self-control, austerities, purity, patience and uprightness,

theoretical and practical knowledge, and religious faith

are the natural-born actions of brahmans.

Heroism, majesty, firmness, skill, and not fleeing in battle also,

are the natural-born actions of warriors.

Agriculture, cattle-tending and commerce are the natural-born actions

of Vaisyas;

action that consists of service is likewise natural-born to a Sudra

(translation by Edgerton 1944: 87).

Here we can see how the ‘essence’ of the all-pervading brahman is

fragmented, in the case of humanity, into varna–jati differentiation.

Performance according to one’s swadharma, for example, the duty of

fighting in case the warrior, represents the performance of the Vedic

sacrifice, the true yagna. Kurukshetra, the great slaughter-ground of

the kshatriyas, is thus ‘dharmakshetra’, the field of religious duty.

With the Gita, it becomes clear that the essentialist assertion of the

immortality of the soul until it merges with the immanent all-in-all

is one that seeks to maintain a static–cyclic view of the cosmos

and of the place of humanity in it. Life, the social round, war, love-

making, money-making, all are part of sacred duty, and there is no

individual salvation apart from social responsibility. There is also

helping in the creation of an individualism appropriate to the new
commercial age, but he also sees the Upanishadic teachings as a
major step forward in the development of such an individualism
(Upreti 1997: 89–98). If it was, this was an abstracted individualism,
one that left no truly moral or ethical way of relating one individual
to another. In Yagnavalkya’s teaching, there is no philosophical
justification for loving the otheras an empirical individual.
The individual ‘I,’ the subject of consciousness, was then said to
be identical with the universal deity, ‘that art thou’, or Atman is
Brahman. The play of the whole world, its seasons and changes, its
sorrows and joys, was only that in the end, a play, an illusion of
the eternal spirit. The notions of karma and rebirth were accepted
as part of this; indeed they were used to provide the major rationale
for the varna system. While there was a subtle denigration of the
Vedas, it was never carried through to the point of out-and-out
rejection. Similarly, while the Upanishads show that in fact many
non-Brahmans played a role in this philosophical development, this
was never openly admitted to challenge Brahman superiority. In
the end, while the Upanishadic teachings themselves are sometimes
said to have been marginal in the first millennium BC, their basic
themes were later elaborated by thinkers like Shankaracharya and
called ‘Vedanta’, to emphasise continuity with the Vedas themselves.
This eternal Brahman that was also held to be the individual ‘I’
could be identified with any of the Vedic gods or with popular local
cult deities. The ability of the Brahmans to appropriate existing
cults was one of the major factors behind their eventual historical
success. Two major cults those of Shaivism and Vaishnavism, i.e,
the Shaiva/Shakti or ‘Pashupati’ cult and the Bhagwat cult of Krishna
that were taken up, ‘colonised’ or appropriated into a kind of
Vedic framework, were in fact so different from one another that
for two millennia afterwards they served to identify almost two
separate religious traditions.
Vishnu, the second of the developed Brahmanic ‘trinity’ of gods,
was said to have many avatarsor incarnations, of whom the most
appealing was Krishna. Many legends surrounded Krishna, a ruler of
the Yadavas and an ally of one set of brothers in the epic Mahabharata.
(Indeed, the society was full of stories, many of them shown in the
Jataka legends, which also give early versions of both the Rama
and Mahabharata stories). This charioteer of Arjuna became iden-
tified with the supreme deity in what is now the most famous of

48 Buddhism in India