At the top were the priests, or Brahmins – even higher than the warriors. Their task was to perform sacrifices to the gods and look after the temples, and, as in Egypt, they were in charge of sacred knowledge. They had to learn all the chants and prayers off by heart so that they were preserved and handed down, unchanged. They did this for more than a thousand years until the texts were finally written down.
A tiny part of the population was excluded from any caste. They were pariahs – people who were given the dirtiest and most unpleasant tasks. Not even members of the lowest castes could associate with them – their very touch was thought to be defiling. So they became known as the ‘untouchables’. They weren’t allowed to fetch water from the streams that other Indians used, and had to make sure that their shadow never touched another person, because even that was thought to be defiling. People can be very cruel.
But it would be wrong to say that the Indians were a cruel people. On the contrary, their priests were serious and profound thinkers, who often withdrew into the forest to meditate, alone and undisturbed, on the most difficult questions. They meditated on their many fierce gods, and on Brahma, the Sublime, the highest divinity of all. They seemed to sense the breath of this one Supreme Being throughout the natural world – in gods as well as men, and in every animal and plant. They felt him active in all things: in the shining of the sun and in the sprouting of crops, in growing and in dying. He was everywhere, just as a little salt dropped in water makes all the water salty, down to the last drop. In all the variety of nature, in all her cycles and transformations, we only see the surface. A soul may inhabit the body of a man, and after his death, that of a tiger, or a cobra, or any other living creature – the cycle will only end when that soul has become so pure that it can at last become one with the Supreme Being. For the divine breath of Brahma is the essence of all things. To help their pupils understand this, Indian priests had a lovely formula which you may turn over in your mind. All they said was ‘This is you’, by which they meant that everything around you – all the animals and plants and your fellow human beings – are, with you yourself, part of the breath of God.
The priests had invented an extraordinary way of actually feeling this all-embracing unity. They would sit down somewhere in the depths of the ancient Indian forest and think about it, and nothing else, for hours, days, weeks, months, years. They sat on the ground, upright and still, their legs crossed and their eyes lowered. They breathed as little as possible and they ate as little as possible – indeed, some of them even tormented themselves in special ways to purify themselves and help them sense the divine breath within them.
Holy men like these penitents and hermits, were common in India three thousand years ago, and there are still many there today. But one of them was different from all the others. He was a nobleman called Gautama, and he lived about five hundred years before Christ.
The story goes that Gautama, whom they were later to call the ‘Enlightened One’, the ‘Buddha’, grew up in Eastern luxury and splendour. It is said that he had three palaces which he never left – one for summer, one for winter, and one for the rainy season – and that they were always filled with the most beautiful music. His father wouldn’t allow him to leave their lofty terraces because he wanted to keep him far away from all the sorrows of the world. And no one who was sick or unhappy was ever allowed near him. However, one day Gautama summoned his carriage and went out. On the way he caught sight of a man, bent with age, and he asked his driver what it was. The driver was forced to explain that this was an old man. Deep in thought, Gautama returned to his palace. On another occasion he saw someone who was sick. No one had ever told him about illness. Pondering even more deeply, he went home to his wife and his small son. The third time he went out he saw a dead man. This time he didn’t go home to his palace. Coming across a hermit in the road, he decided that he, too, would go into the wilderness, where he would meditate on the sufferings of this world which had been revealed to him in the forms of old age, sickness and death.
Later in his life Gautama told the story of his decision in a sermon: ‘And so it came about that, in the full freshness and enjoyment of my youth, in glowing health, my hair still black, and against the wishes of my weeping and imploring elders, I shaved my head and beard, dressed in coarse robes, and forsook the shelter of my home.’
For six years he led the life of a hermit and penitent. But his meditations were deeper and his sufferings greater than those of any other hermit. As he sat, he almost stopped breathing altogether, and endured the most terrible pains. He ate so little that he would often faint with weakness. And yet, in all those years, he found no inner peace. For he didn’t only reflect on the nature of the world, and whether all things were really one. He thought about its sadness, of all the pain and suffering of mankind – of old age, sickness and death. And no amount of penitence could help him there.
And so, gradually, he began to eat again. His strength returned, and he breathed like other people. Other hermits who had formerly admired him now despised him, but he took no notice of them. Then, one night, as he sat beneath a fig tree in a beautiful clearing in a wood, understanding came. Suddenly he realised what he had been seeking all those years. It was as if an inner light had made everything clear. Now, as the ‘Enlightened One’, the Buddha, he went out to proclaim his discovery to all men.
It wasn’t long before he found like-minded people who were soon convinced that he had found a way out of human suffering. And because these followers admired the Buddha, they formed what we would call an ‘order’ of monks and nuns. This order lived on after his death, and still exists today in many Eastern countries. You can recognise its members by their yellow robes and their austere way of life.
I imagine that you’d like to know exactly what happened to Gautama, as he sat under that fig tree – the Tree of Enlightenment, as it became known – that took away his doubts and brought him inner peace. But if you want me to try and explain it, you will have to do some hard thinking too. After all, Gautama spent six whole years thinking about this and nothing else. The idea that came to him, his great Enlightenment, the solution to human suffering, was this: if we want to avoid suffering, we must start with ourselves, because all suffering comes from our own desires. Think of it like this. If you are sad because you can’t have something you want – maybe a book or a toy – you can do one of two things: you can do your best to get it, or you can stop wanting it. Either way, if you succeed, you won’t be sad any more. This is what the Buddha taught. If we can stop ourselves wanting all the beautiful and pleasant things in life, and can learn to control our greed for happiness, comfort, recognition and affection, we shan’t feel sad any more when, as so often happens, we fail to get what we want. He who ceases to wish for anything ceases to feel sad. If the appetite goes, the pain goes with it.
I can already hear you saying: ‘That’s all very well, but people can’t help wanting things!’ The Buddha thought otherwise. He said that it is possible to control our desires, but to do so we need to work on ourselves, perhaps even for years, so that in the end we only have the desires we want to have. In other words, we can become masters of ourselves, in the same way that an elephant driver learns to control his elephant. A person’s highest achievement on earth is to reach the point at which he or she no longer has any desires. This is the Buddha’s ‘inner calm’, the blissful peace of someone who no longer has any wishes, someone who is kind to everyone and demands nothing. The Buddha also taught that a person who is master of all his wishes will no longer be reborn after his death. Only souls which cling to life are reborn – or so the Buddha’s followers believe. He who no longer clings to life is released from the unending cycle of birth and death, and is at last freed from all suffering. Buddhists call this state ‘Nirvana’.
So this was the Enlightenment that the Buddha experienced under the fig tree: the realisation that, instead of giving in to our wishes, we can break free from them – rather like when we ar
e feeling thirsty and take no notice, and the feeling goes away. You can see that the way to do this is far from easy. The Buddha called it the ‘middle way’, because it lay between useless self-torment and thoughtless pleasure-seeking. The important thing is to find the right balance: in what we believe, in the decisions we make, in what we say and what we do, in the way we live, in our ambitions, in our conscience and our innermost thoughts.
That was the essential message of the Buddha’s sermons, and these sermons made such a deep impression on people that many followed him and worshipped him as a god. Today there are almost as many Buddhists in the world as there are Christians, especially in South East Asia, in Sri Lanka, Tibet, China and Japan. But not many of them are able to live their lives in accordance with the Buddha’s teachings, and so achieve that inner calm.
11
THE GREAT TEACHER OF A GREAT PEOPLE
When I was a schoolboy, China was to us, as it were, ‘at the other end of the world’. At most we had seen the odd picture on a teacup or a vase, so that we imagined a country of stiff little men with long plaits down their backs, and artful gardens full of hump-backed bridges and little turrets hung with tinkling bells.
Of course there never was such a fairyland, although it is true that for more than two hundred years, until 1912, Chinese men were made to wear their hair plaited in a pigtail, and that we first learnt about them through delicate objects of porcelain and ivory made by skilled craftsmen. From their palace in the capital emperors had ruled over China for more than a thousand years. The fabled emperors of China who called themselves the ‘Son of Heaven’, just as the Egyptian pharaoh called himself ‘Son of the Sun’. But at the time I am going to talk about, around 2,500 years ago, all this was yet to come, though China was already a vast and ancient kingdom. In its fields many millions of hard-working peasants grew rice and other crops, while in the towns people strolled through the streets in sumptuous, silken gowns.
Over all these people a king ruled, and beneath him many princes who governed the many provinces of this immense country which was larger than Egypt, and larger than Assyria and Babylonia put together. But soon these princes had become so mighty that the king could no longer command their obedience. They were constantly at war with each other, the big provinces gobbling up the smaller ones. And because the empire was so vast that in all its corners the Chinese spoke quite different languages, it would probably have fallen apart altogether had they not had one thing in common. This was their script.
‘But wait a minute!’ you say. ‘If they all spoke different languages, how could using the same script make any difference?’ Well, Chinese writing is special. You can read and understand it even if you don’t know a single word of the spoken language. That must be magic! No, absolutely not, it is really quite simple. Instead of writing words you write things. If you want to write ‘sun’, you make a picture like this: . Then you can read it in any language: sun in English, soleil in French or jih in Mandarin Chinese. Everyone who knows the sign will know what it means. Now I’ll show you how to make the sign for ‘tree’. Again it is quite easy, just a couple of strokes like this:,. In Mandarin it is pronounced ‘mu’, but you hardly need know the sign to guess it is a tree.
‘All right,’ you say, ‘I can see that works quite well for things you can draw, but what if you want to write “white”? Do you just paint a blob of white paint? And what if you want to write “East”? You can hardly draw a picture of “East”!’ On the contrary, you’ll see that it’s all quite straightforward. We can write ‘white’ by drawing something that is white - in this case, a sunbeam. A stroke coming out of a sun stands for ‘white’ - blanc – pai, and so on. And “East”?’ East is where the sun rises, behind the trees. So I draw a picture of a sun behind a tree: !
That is clever, isn’t it? Well, it is and it isn’t. There are two sides to everything! For when you think how many words and things there are in the world, in Chinese each one has its own sign which must be learnt. There are already more than forty thousand of them, and some are really complicated and hard to learn. So I think we should congratulate our Phoenicians on their twenty-six letters, don’t you? However, the Chinese have been writing like this for many thousands of years, and their signs are read in many parts of Asia, even where no Chinese is spoken. And this meant that the thoughts and principles of the great men of China were able to spread quickly and influence many people.
Now at the same time as the Buddha was seeking to relieve man’s suffering in India (as you remember, that was around 500 BC), there was in China another great man who was also trying to make people happy through his teachings. And yet he was as different from the Buddha as he could possibly be. He wasn’t a wealthy nobleman’s son but came from a family that had fallen on hard times. He didn’t become a hermit, but an adviser and teacher. Rather than helping individuals not to want things, and therefore not to suffer, what mattered most to Confucius was that everybody should live peacefully together – parents with their children and rulers with their subjects. That was his goal: to teach the right way of living together. And he succeeded. Thanks to his teachings all the peoples of China lived together for thousands of years, more contentedly and more peacefully than many other peoples of the world. So I am sure you will be interested in the teachings of Confucius – or K’ung Fu-tzu, as he was called in Chinese. They aren’t hard to understand. Nor to remember. Perhaps that’s why he was so successful.
What Confucius proposed is quite simple. You may not like it, but there is more wisdom in it than first meets the eye. What he taught was this: outward appearances are more important than we think – bowing to our elders, letting others go through a door first, standing up to speak to a superior, and many other similar things for which they had more rules in China than we have. All such practices, so he believed, were not just a matter of chance. They meant something, or had done once. Usually something beautiful. Which is why Confucius said: ‘I believe in Antiquity, and I love it.’ By this he meant that he believed in the sound good sense of all the many-thousand-year-old customs and habits, and he repeatedly urged his fellow countrymen to observe them. He thought that everything in life ran more smoothly if people did. Almost by itself, as it were, without the need to think too hard about it. Of course such behaviour does not make people good, but it helps them stay good.
For Confucius had a very good opinion of humanity. He said that all people were born honest and good, and that, deep down, they remained so. Anyone seeing a small child playing near the water’s edge will worry lest it fall in, he said. Concern for our fellow human beings and sympathy for the misfortunes of others are inborn sentiments. All we need do is to make sure we do not lose them. And that, said Confucius, is why we have families. Someone who is always good to his parents, who obeys them and cares for them – and this comes naturally to us – will treat others in the same way, and will obey the laws of the state in the same way that he obeys his father. Thus, for Confucius, the family, with its brotherly and sisterly love and respect for parents, was the most important thing of all. He called it ‘the root of humanity’.
However, he didn’t mean that respect and obedience should be shown only by a subject to his ruler, and not the other way round as well. On the contrary, Confucius and his disciples often came up against obstinate princes, and would usually tell them exactly what they thought of them. For a prince must take the lead in observing the forms. He must demonstrate a father’s love in providing for his people and deal with them justly. If he neglects to do so, and brings suffering on his subjects, then it serves him right if they rise up and overthrow him. So taught Confucius and his followers. For a prince’s first duty was to be an example to all who lived in his kingdom.
It may seem to you that what Confucius taught was obvious. But that was exactly his intention. He wanted to teach something that everyone would find easy to grasp, because it was so just and fair. Then living together would become much easier. I have already told you that he s
ucceeded. And, thanks to his teaching, that enormous empire, with all its provinces, was saved from falling apart.
But you mustn’t think that in China there weren’t other people more like the Buddha, for whom what mattered was not living together and bowing to one another, but the great mysteries of the world. A wise man of this sort lived in China at about the same time as Confucius. His name was Lao-tzu. He is said to have been an official who became tired of the way people lived at court. So he gave up his job and wandered off into the lonely mountains at the frontier of China to be a hermit.
A simple border guard at a frontier pass asked him to set down his thoughts in writing, before leaving the world of men. And this Lao-tzu did. But whether the border guard could make head or tail of them I do not know, for they are very mysterious and hard to grasp. Their meaning is roughly this: in all the world – in wind and rain, in plants and animals, in the passage from day to night, in the movements of the stars – everything acts in accordance with one great law. This he calls the ‘Tao’, which means the Way, or the Path. Only man in his restless striving, in his many plans and projects, even in his prayers and sacrifices, resists, as it were, this law, obstructs its path and prevents its fulfilment.