Asoka, the Philosopher Emperor

India in the early third millennium B.C. boasted several fair cities in the Indus valley. It is thought that the builders of this civilisation, parallel with those of Sumeria or Egypt, were Armenoid-Mediterranean peoples, who during that third millennium B.C. were flooded by an immigration from the Iranian plateau and the Pamirs. Meanwhile men elsewhere, in the Asian steppes and in Mesopotamia, had learned to use the horse, and in the second millennium B.C. the Indo-Aryan barbarians from the steppes of Turkestan poured over the Hindu Kush into the fertile prosperous Indus valley. They were warrior horsemen armed with swords, attacking in one wild onrush with loud cries. Disciplined military tactics were unknown to them. They brought their own women, and their cattle, with them, and successfully overran the pre-existing civilisation. Their great gift to India was to be their language, offering a remarkable scope of mental and cultural development.

The inhabitants of pre-Aryan India appear to have had their own social organisation and a developed religious system. Theirs was an already ancient culture, on which came the impact of the warlike Aryans of the second millennium B.C., bringing with them a religious practice based on nature gods — sky, wind, thunder, etc. The invaders, although they retained their pride of ancestry and military prowess, were over-awed in a religious sense by the culture of the conquered peoples. Their own gods sank to a lower level than those of ancient India, among whom Siva is still the most important. The priests of Siva and the Indian pantheon eventually became an exclusive Brahman caste some centuries before the advent of the Buddha. They became the ritual leaders in contrast with the administrators and warriors who constituted the Kshattriya caste.

Like the Roman priests of the Dark Ages in Western Europe, the Brahmans sought the friendship of the Kshattriyas; and, whilst recognising merchants and others as to some extent privileged, as Vaisyas, both despised the common people of the conquered races as Sudras. Thus we have broadly the four-fold division of Hindu society. But the earlier, simpler organisation lost its elasticity and became a more rigid and increasingly complex caste system — i.e. a system in which the main object of each group of persons was to preserve in its original form or purity what was accepted as right and proper in religious worship and customs, in social behaviour and customs, in professional duties or occupations, and in the routine of physical life. Caste is derived from “castus”, pure; and the term caste system was first loosely used by the Portuguese to describe the social organisation of the peoples of India.

There is evidence from the Atharva Veda (III. 4), the Aitareya Brahmana (I. 14), the Taittirya Brahmana (I. 5 and 9), the Ambattha Suttanta of the Buddhists (I. 113), the Arthasastra of Kautalya (I. 13), and the Mahabharata (Rajadharma Parva, Chapter 67), that several, if not all, of the earliest Aryan states may have had a republican pattern of government. Elective chieftainship was in vogue. The chief, chosen from among the best warriors, enjoyed kingly estate; but the people wielded the right to expel him, and subsequently to recall him if they so desired. This system proving cumbersome and insufficiently effective for the maintenance of security, it gave way to the establishment of an institution of select ladies on the eldest of whom it was the duty of the chief priest to beget a prince. This prince had to live a celibate life and rule the state in accordance with the will of the people’s assembly. But soon these princes were fighting for the right to marry and to found dynasties. In some states the priests gave in and saved their other privileges, while other states experienced civil war, which ended disastrously for the princes. We have hints of this in the Rigveda (X. 124,8); and in the Atharva Veda (VI. 87 and 88), the dependence of the sovereign’s power on the faithfulness of the assembly is emphasised.

But when a millennium had swung past, there existed in Aryavarta great kingdoms with hereditary monarchs who autocracy was controlled by a select inner cabinet and by a slightly larger body consisting of the principal Ministers of State; and the powers of these governments, though they could not be constitutionally checked, were effectively limited, often enough, by a vast self-governing democratic society below. Local government in a real sense has been a vital characteristic of living India through millennia.

Such in brief was the political and social background offered in that first Aryan millennium by the great kingdoms, which had developed all over Northern India, to those thinkers who ascended the peaks of Transcendental philosophy and left us the legacy of the Upanishads and of the Samkhya philosophy. It was an age of intellectual glory. Yet it is significant that these profound thinkers first left their everyday world and retreated into forest hermitages before they made their solitary ascent. Despite their high level of civilisation, all was not well in those great kingdoms. And when that age culminated in the spiritual splendour of the enlightenment of Gautama Buddha, the supreme fact which impressed the keenest observer of his age was the overwhelming ubiquity of suffering in man’s life. The Enlightened One ministered unto his fellow men, and his teaching has moulded the destiny of man more profoundly than man cares to admit.