Fields of Blood (12 page)

Others would draw upon these new ideas to challenge the social system. In the Punjab, the Aryans had tried to fight their way to “liberation” (
moksha
); now some, building on the internalized spirituality of the
Brahmanas, were looking for a more spiritual freedom and would investigate their inner world as vigorously as the Aryan warriors had once explored the untamed forests. The new wealth gave the nobility the time and leisure that was essential for such introspective contemplation. The new spirituality was, therefore, strictly for the
aristocracy; it was one of the civilized arts that relied on the state’s structural violence. No shudra or chandala would be permitted to spend hours in the meditations and metaphysical discussions that between the sixth and second centuries BCE produced the texts known as the
Upanishads.

These new teachings may have originally been formulated by
Brahmins who lived in the towns and understood the problems arising from urban living.
⁶⁰
But significantly many new practices were attributed to Kshatriya warriors, and the discussions reported in the Upanishads often took place in the raja’s court. They drew on the more interior spirituality of the Brahmanas and took it a step further. The
Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the earliest of these texts, was almost certainly composed in the kingdom of
Videha, a frontier state on the easternmost point of Aryan expansion.
⁶¹
Videha was scorned by the conservative Brahmins in the Doab, but there was a great admixture of peoples in these easterly territories, including Indo-Aryan settlers from earlier waves of migration and tribes from
Iran, as well as peoples indigenous to India. Some of these foreigners assimilated to the varna classes but brought their own traditions with them—including, perhaps, a
skepticism about Vedic orthodoxy. These new encounters were intellectually stimulating, and the early Upanishads reflect this excitement.

The social and political developments in these new states inspired some of the warrior class to imagine a new world free of priestly ascendency. Thus the Upanishads denied the necessity of the Vedic sacrifices and completed the devas’ downgrading by simply assimilating the gods into the contemplative’s psyche: “ ‘Sacrifice to this god. Sacrifice to that god.’ People do say these things, but in reality each of these gods is his own creation, for he himself is all these gods.”
⁶²
The worshipper now turned within. The focus of the Upanishads was the atman, the “self,” which, like the devas, was also a manifestation of the Brahman. So if the sage could discover the inner core of his own being, he would automatically
enter into the ultimate reality. Only by the ecstatic knowledge of the self, which would free him of the desire for ephemeral things here below, would a person be liberated from the ceaseless cycle of rebirth and redeath. This was a discovery of immense importance. The idea that the ultimate reality, which was “All” that is, was an immanent presence in every single human being would become a central insight in every major religious tradition. There was therefore no need to perform the elaborate rituals that had upheld the structural violence of the varna system, because once they encountered the deepest part of themselves, practitioners were one with “the All”: “If a man knows ‘I am
brahman
’ in this way, he becomes this whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (
atman
).”
⁶³
It was a defiant declaration of independence, a political as well as a spiritual revolution. The
Kshatriya could now cast aside his dependence on the priest who dominated the ritual arena. At the same time as vaishyas and shudras were climbing the social ladder, the warrior aristocracy was making a bid for the first place in society.

Yet the Upanishads also challenged the Kshatriya martial ethos. The atman had originally been
Agni, the deepest, divine “self” of the warrior that he had attained by fighting and stealing. The heroic Aryan drive eastward had been motivated by desire for earthly things—cows, plunder, land, honor, and prestige. Now the Upanishad sages urged their disciples to renounce such desire. Anyone who remained fixated on mundane wealth could never be liberated from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, but “a man who does not desire—who is without desires, who is freed from desires, whose only desire is his self (
atman
)—his vital functions do not depart.
Brahman
he is and to
brahman
he goes.”
⁶⁴
New meditative techniques induced a state of mind that was “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected”: in short, the very opposite of the old agitated Aryan mentality.
⁶⁵
One of the Upanishads actually described
Indra, no less, living peacefully as a humble student in the forest with his teacher and relinquishing violence in order to find perfect tranquillity.
⁶⁶

Aryans had always considered themselves inherently superior to others; their rituals had bred within them a deep sense of entitlement that had fueled their raids and conquests. But the Upanishads taught that because the atman, the essence of every single creature, was identical with the Brahman, all beings shared the same sacred core. The Brahman was the subtle kernel of the banyan seed from which a great tree
grows.
⁶⁷
It was the sap that gave life to every part of the tree; it was also the most fundamental reality of every single human being.
⁶⁸
Brahman was like a chunk of salt left overnight to dissolve in a beaker of water; even though it could not be seen the next morning, it was still present in every sip.
⁶⁹
Instead of repudiating this basic kinship with all beings, as the warrior did when he demonized his enemy, these sages were deliberately cultivating an awareness of it. Everyone liked to imagine that he was unique, but in reality his special distinguishing features were no more permanent than rivers that all flowed into the same sea. Once they left the riverbed, they became “just the ocean,” no longer proclaiming their individuality, crying “I am that river,” “I am this river.” Such strident assertion of the ego was a delusion that could only lead to pain and confusion. Release (
moksha
) from such suffering was dependent on the profound acknowledgment that at base everybody was Brahman and should therefore be treated with absolute reverence. The Upanishads bequeathed to India a sense of the fundamental unity of all beings, so that your so-called enemy was no longer the heinous other but inseparable from you.
⁷⁰

Indian religion had always endorsed and informed the structural and martial violence of society. But as early as the eighth century BCE, the “
renouncers” (
samnyasin
) mounted a disciplined and devastating critique of this inherent aggression, withdrawing from settled society to adopt an independent lifestyle. Renunciation was not, as is often thought in the West, simply life negating. Throughout Indian history,
asceticism has nearly always had a political dimension and has often inspired a radical reappraisal of society. That certainly happened in the Gangetic plain.
⁷¹
Aryans had always possessed the “restless heart” that had made
Gilgamesh weary of settled life, but instead of leaving home to fight and steal, the renouncers eschewed aggression, owned no property, and begged for their food.
⁷²
By about 500 BCE, they had become the chief agents of spiritual change and a direct challenge to the values of the agrarian kingdoms.
⁷³
This movement was in part an offshoot of
brahmacharya,
the “holy life” led by the Brahmin student, who would spend years with his guru, studying the
Vedas, begging humbly for his bread, and living alone in the tropical forests for a given period. In other parts of the world too, Aryan youths lived in the wild as part of their military
training, hunting for food and learning the arts of self-sufficiency and survival. But because the Brahmin’s dharma did not include violence, the
brahmacharin
was forbidden to hunt, to harm animals, or ride in a war chariot.
⁷⁴

Moreover, most of the renouncers were adult Brahmins when they embarked on their solitary existence, their apprenticeship long past.
⁷⁵
A renouncer made a deliberate choice. He repudiated the ritual sacrifices that symbolized the Aryan political community and rejected the family household, the institutional mainstay of settled life. He had in effect stepped right outside the systemic violence of the varna system and extracted himself from the economic nexus of society in order to become a “beggar” (
bhiksu
).
⁷⁶
Some renouncers returned home, only to become social and religious irritants within the community, while others remained in the forest and challenged the culture from without. They condemned the aristocratic preoccupation with status, honor, and glory, yearned for insults “as if they were nectar,” and deliberately courted contempt by behaving like madmen or animals.
⁷⁷
Like so many Indian reformers, the renouncers drew upon the ancient mythology of warfare to model a different kind of nobility. They evoked the heroic days in the
Punjab, when men had proved their valor and virility by braving the untamed forest. Many saw the bhiksu as a new kind of pioneer.
⁷⁸
When a famous renouncer came to town, people of all classes flocked to listen to him.

Perhaps the most important martial ritual revised by the renouncers was yoga, which became the hallmark of renouncer spirituality. Originally, as we have seen, the term had referred to the tethering of the draft animals to the war chariots before a raid; now it became a contemplative discipline that “yoked” the yogin’s mental powers in a raid on the unconscious impulses (
vrittis
) of passion, egotism, hatred, and greed that had fueled the warrior ethos and were so deeply entrenched in the psyche that they could be extirpated only by sheer mental force. Yoga may have been rooted in the indigenous traditions of India, but by the sixth century BCE it had become central to the Aryan spiritual landscape. A systematic assault on the ego, it expunged the “I” from the yogin’s mind, nullifying the warrior’s proud self-assertion: “I am the mightiest! I am supreme!” The ancient warriors of the Punjab had been like the devas, perpetually on the move and constantly engaged in martial activity. Now the new man of yoga sat for hours in one place, holding himself in such
unnatural stillness that he seemed more like a statue or a plant than a human being. If he persevered, a skilled yogin had intimations of a final liberation (
moksha
) from the confines of egotism that bore no relation to ordinary experience.

Before he was allowed even to sit in the yogic position, an aspirant had to complete an arduous ethical program, observing five “prohibitions” (
yamas
).
⁷⁹
The first of these was
ahimsa,
nonviolence: not only was he forbidden to kill or injure another creature, but he could not even speak unkindly or make an irritable gesture. Second, he was forbidden to steal: instead of seizing other people’s property like the raiders, the yogin had to cultivate an indifference to material possessions. Lying was also prohibited. Truth-telling had always been central to the Aryan warrior ethos, but the exigencies of war had occasionally forced even Indra into deceit; the aspirant, however, was not permitted to be economical with the truth, even to save his own life. He also abstained from sex and intoxicating substances that could enervate the mental and physical energies that he would need in this spiritual expedition. Finally, he must study the teaching (
dharma
) of his guru and cultivate habitual serenity, behaving kindly and courteously to everybody without exception. This was an initiation into a new way of being human, one that eschewed the greed, self-preoccupation, and aggression of the warrior. By dint of practice, these ethical disciplines would become second nature to the yogin, and when that happened, the texts explained, he would experience “indescribable joy.”
⁸⁰