Buddhism in India

The Background to Buddhism 29

who cared little for morality. In the Buddha’s time the two major

kingdoms saw cases of kings attaining their thrones through parri-

cide, with Vidudabha killing his father Pasanedi in Kosala, and

Ajatasattu (Sanskrit Ajatshatru) of Magadha killing Bimbisara; the

story appears consistently in Buddhist literature. The kingdoms

fought each other, and fought to undermine the gana-sanghasby

out-and-out conquest, by treachery, and by fomenting dissension

from within. Even though they did ultimately destroy the gana-

sanghas, the Buddha borrowed the term and probably the model of

a collective society for his Bhikku Sangha or order of monks came

from these gana-sanghas. All this internal tumult was also linked

to growing intrusions from the outside world, represented by the

ability of the Persians to establish a satrapy in Sindh and by

Alexander’s failed invasion of India in 327–325 BCE. In the clash

of the new kingdoms, it was ultimately Magadha—considered an

impure land, a country of the mleccha, by the more orthodox

Brahmans—that was to emerge successful, and from Magadha

came the empire of Asoka, 100–150 years after the mahaparinibbana

(Keay 2001: 78–80).

The emerging urban-based, commercial, prosperous, dynamic

class society, with its mixture of tribes and peoples, of languages,

Dravidian, Indo-European, Austro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan; with its

ancient strains of the Indic and Vedic cultures and its tenuous links

to the greater realm of Asian and European developments beyond

the mountains, was thus characterised by intense turmoil and often

great immorality. We see slavery and runaway slaves, robbers, war-

fare between clans, patricide in the new monarchies, sons not caring

for parents, wicked women provoking their husbands, immoral

individualism rampant. As the old bonds of tribal society dissolved

and the old religions and ideological solutions seemed inadequate,

people entered the new mobile society with no established

moral–philosophical code. For this reason, it has been argued that

when the Buddha in his famous ‘fire sermon’ described this a world

in flames, it had its underlying emotional appeal in the sense of a

world in transition (Upreti 1997: 112):

Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms

are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is

aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the

eye—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that

the growth of an economic surplus, cities and kingdoms came
increasing social strains, class divisions, and pressure on the older,
more equalitarian tribal and lineage-based societies of the region.
Two major political forms appeared by the time of Gotama: the strati-
fied but still ‘tribal’ gana-sanghas, and an emerging monarchical
kingdoms.
The gana-sanghas, one of which Gotama was born into, were
oligarchies. While these have been called ‘tribal republics’ and they
were in fact democratically and collectively governed, they were
nevertheless incipient class societies themselves. Like the ancient
Greek city states, they rested on the labour of a subservient class,
the dasa-kammakarasor ‘slaves and servants’—a category that
included both paid and unpaid labour. Their ruling elites who
governed by collective tradition were still defined by kinship, as
members of a common lineage (Thapar 1984). Given time they
may well have evolved beyond traditionalism into ‘citizen’-based
political societies like the Greek city-states. However, this did not
happen. The very material facts of geography were the major
obstruction: in the Gangetic plain, in contrast to the more isolated,
mountainous terrain of Greece, the gana-sanghaswere vulnerable
and were finally overwhelmed by the rising monarchies.
The gana-sanghas are identified with the Khattiyas (Sanskrit
kshatriya), who considered themselves the supreme example of
‘Aryan’ nobility. However, we cannot assume that these were lineal
descendants of the Vedic warriors, or that the term ‘Arya’ or ‘Ariya’
had by the time a racial meaning. Tremendous amounts of inter-
marriage and mixing had taken place; there is evidence of this even
in the Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata (where the Pandavas
and Kauravas are actually descended not from Bharat-Shantanu but
from the rishi son of a fisherwoman and captured indigenous
brides!). The gana-sanghasmay have evolved from tribal groups of
indigenous background, from ‘Dravidian’ or ‘Sino-Tibetan’ as well
as ‘Indo-European’ ethnic groups. There is a tradition of the Buddha
being ‘golden-skinned’ that indicates a partial Sino-Tibetan origin for
this clan which was located near the Himalayan foothills. One scholar
argues that the related Licchavis were Kiratas or ‘Indo-Mongoloids’
(Sino-Tibetan) (Chatterji 1974: 40).
The gana-sanghas, assaulted by the rising new social form, the
monarchical kingdoms declined not too long after the time of the
Buddha. These kingdoms were urban based, often headed by kings

28 Buddhism in India