Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

13

Hindu Numerals, Sanskrit, Vedanta

In the year AD 499 the Hindu mathematician Aryabhata calculated pi as 3.1416 and the length of the solar year as 365.358 days. At much the same time he conceived the idea that the earth was a sphere spinning on its own axis and revolving around the sun. He thought that the shadows of the earth falling on the moon caused eclipses. One wonders what all the fuss was about when Copernicus ‘discovered’ some of the above nearly a thousand years later. Indian thought in the Middle Ages was in several areas far ahead of European ideas. Buddhist monasteries in the India of the time were so well endowed that they acted as banks, investing surplus funds in commercial enterprises.¹ Such details as these explain why historians refer to the reunification of north India under the Guptas (c. 320–550) as a golden era. Their dynasty, combined with that of Harsha Vardhana (606–647), comprises what is now regarded as India’s classical age. Besides the advances in mathematics, it saw the emergence of Sanskrit literature, new and enduring forms of Hinduism, including Vedanta, and a brilliant temple architecture.

Like the Mauryas before them (see above, Chapter 8), the economic base of the Guptas lay in the rich vein of iron in the Barabar hills (south of modern Patna, in Bihar). Chandra Gupta I, who was no relation to the Chandragupta who had founded the Mauryan dynasty, celebrated his coronation at Pataliputra in February 320 by striking a coin and taking the Sanskrit title Maharajadhiraja, or ‘Great King of Kings’. By means of a series of conquests, and marital alliances, Chandra Gupta – or his son Samudra, ‘skilled in a hundred battles’ – routed nine kings of northern India, eleven more in the south, and made another five, on the periphery of empire, pay tribute: twenty-five rival clans were subdued. The highpoint of Gupta classicism, however, came in the reign of Samudra’s son, Chandra Gupta II (c. 375–415). His most spectacular deed, if it ever happened, was recorded in a Sanskrit play composed later, possibly in the sixth century. This drama tells of how Chandra’s elder brother Rama, a weak man, agreed to surrender his wife to a Shaka king who had humiliated him in battle. The cunning Chandra dressed as the wife and, as soon as he was admitted to the Shaka harem, killed the king and escaped. There may be something in the story, for the coins struck at the time show that the Shakas were indeed defeated by the Guptas in 409 (i.e., during Chandra Gupta II’s reign), after which they had control over the ports on the west coast of India, which gave access to the lucrative trade of the Arabian Sea. More political marriages followed, so that Gupta territory – direct rule, tributary or influence – extended for all of modern India, save for the extreme south-west and the extreme north. In terms of territory controlled, the Guptas were probably the most successful Indian dynasty of all time.²

The second Chandra Gupta’s reign is better documented than most. He was written about in an important inscription, displayed on a pillar in the city of Allahabad; there also exists a vivid, detailed diary from that era kept by a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Faxian; in addition, Kalidasa, ‘the Indian Shakespeare’, probably wrote his plays and poems at that time; and finally, a new aid to historians appeared around then.

To take the last first, there emerged in the early centuries AD a corpus of land charters which evolved into what was virtually a literary form. To begin with they were written on palm leaves, but since these were hardly durable the charters began to be engraved, sometimes on cave walls, but more and more on copper plates. These charters, or sasanas, recorded the gift of land, usually donated by the king. That made them precious, which is why they were kept. Some were kept hidden, some were built into the fabric of a mansion or a farm, much as early deities had been encased in walls in the first civilisations of the Middle East. Where they were unusually complicated, the charters were recorded on several plates, which were held together by a metal ring.³ But what made them historically important was the fact that they were more than just commercial dockets. They would begin with an elaborate panegyric to the royal donor and, even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, these panegyrics became valuable historical records, listing which kings lived when, and incorporating other political and social details from which history could be reconstructed. They would end threatening dire penalties for anyone who went against the charter – for example, the penalty for overruling sasanas was commonly equated with that of killing 10,000 Varanasi cows, ‘a sacrilege of unthinkable enormity’.⁴ Without the copper plates we should know much less about the Guptas than we do.

Turning to the Allahabad inscription, this is probably the most famous in all India. It is written in a script known as Gupta Brahmi, but composed of Sanskrit verses and prose.⁵ The earliest evidence for the alphabet in India comes from the third century BC, when two forms, Kharosthi and Brahmi, appear fully developed in the Ashokan inscriptions. The Kharosthi alphabet, written from right to left, was confined to north-west India, areas that had once been under Persian domination. It was an adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet and died out in the fourth century AD. The Brahmi alphabet, written from left to right, is the foundation of all Indian alphabets and of those other countries which came under Indian cultural influence – Burma, Siam, Java. It is derived from some form of Semitic alphabet but the exact evolution is unknown.⁶ Until the invention of printing, Sanskrit was written in regional alphabets but with the adoption of type the north Indian alphabet known as Devanagari became standardised. The commonest writing material, to begin with, was palm leaf, which meant that most ancient manuscripts have perished. Thus the bulk of Sanskrit literature is preserved in manuscripts belonging to the last few centuries.⁷ Chandra Gupta, it seems, intended the Allahabad inscription as an addition to the Edicts of Ashoka (see Chapter 8). Now in Allahabad, it is likely that the pillar was removed down-river from Kausambi, an ancient and architecturally distinguished city in the Ganges basin where some of the earliest examples of the arch have been found. It is through these pillar inscriptions that we know about Gupta campaigns and conquests and how Chandra distributed 100,000 cows as gifts to his Brahman supporters.⁸ After the inscription was translated into western languages in the nineteenth century, he was labelled ‘the Indian Napoleon’.

To Faxian, a Buddhist pilgrim from China, visiting India at the very beginning of the fifth century, around the time of the final defeat of the Shakas, Gupta territory seemed little short of perfect. He records how he was able to travel the length of the Ganges in absolute safety, as he visited all the sites associated with the Buddha’s life.⁹ ‘The people are very well-off, without poll tax or official restrictions . . . The kings govern without corporal punishment; criminals are fined according to circumstance, lightly or heavily. Even in cases of repeated rebellion they only cut off the right hand. The king’s personal attendants, who guard him on the right and on the left, have fixed salaries. Throughout the country the people kill no living thing nor drink wine, nor do they eat garlic or onions . . .’¹⁰ He found highly influential guilds, which governed the training of craftsmen, the quality control of goods, pricing and distribution.¹¹ The leaders of the various guilds met regularly, like a modern chamber of commerce.¹² He found, however, that Kapilavastu, the Buddha’s birthplace, was abandoned, ‘like a great desert’, with ‘neither king nor people’. Ashoka’s palace at Pataliputra was likewise in ruins.¹³ Yet Buddhism still had huge popular support in India. Faxian counted hundreds of stupas – some colossal – together with well-endowed monasteries, housing thousands of monks. Though Ashoka’s palace might be abandoned, at Pataliputra Faxian witnessed an impressive annual festival, marked by a procession with some twenty wheeled stupas, lined with silver and gold.

It was now that Sanskrit came into its own. It was the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit in the eighteenth century, and its relation to other languages, such as Latin and Greek, that began the whole enterprise of comparative philology. This is considered more fully below, in Chapter 29, but a few examples will show the overlap between Sanskrit and other ‘Indo-European’ languages. The Sanskrit word deva, ‘god’, lives on in the English words ‘deity’ and ‘divinity’. The Sanskrit for ‘bone’, asthi, was echoed in the Latin os. ‘In front of’ = anti in Sanskrit, ante in Latin. ‘Quickly’ is maksu in Sanskrit, mox in Latin. ‘Sneeze’ = nava in Sanskrit, niesen in German.

More than most languages, Sanskrit embodies an idea – that special subjects should have a special language. It is an old tongue, dating back more than three thousand years. In its earliest period it was the language of the Punjab, but then it spread east. Whether the authors of the Rig Veda were Aryans from outside India, or indigenous to the area, as was discussed in Chapter 5, they already possessed a language of great richness and precision and a cultivated poetic tradition.¹⁴ As was also described in Chapter 5, the custodians of this liturgical poetry were the families of priests, who eventually evolved into the Brahman/Brahmin caste. This poetry was developed in the centuries before about 1000 BC, after which the main developments were in prose, devoted to ritual matters. This prose form of Sanskrit was slightly different from the poetic, showing traces of Eastern influence. For example, the use of ‘l’ replaced the use of ‘r’, a sound-shift that also occurred in China. But both the poetic and prose literature was entirely oral at that time. It had changed a little, inevitably, but the families whose task it was to preserve the material had performed amazing feats of memory and so the language had changed far less than might be expected, and far less than the vernacular languages spoken by the rest of the population. Pre-classical Sanskrit literature is divided into the Samhitas of the Rig Veda (1200–800 BC), the Brahmana prose texts, mystical interpretations of the ritual (800–500 BC), and the Sutras, detailed instruction about ritual (600–300 BC).¹⁵

Then, some time in the fourth century BC, there came Panini and his Grammar. The importance of the grammarians in the history of Sanskrit is unequalled anywhere else in the world. The pre-eminence of this activity arose because of the need to preserve intact the sacred texts of the Veda: according to tradition, each word of the ritual had to be pronounced exactly. Almost nothing is known of Panini’s life save for the fact that he was born at Salatura in the extreme north-west of India. His Astadhyayi comprises four thousand aphorisms. These describe in copious detail the form of Sanskrit in use by the Brahmans of the time. Panini was so successful in his aim that, uniquely, the Sanskrit language as described by him was fixed for all time, and was ever after known as Samskrta (‘perfected’).¹⁶ Panini’s achievement lay not only in his great efforts to describe the language completely but in the effect this had on language evolution in India. Even by then, the ‘Aryan’ language existed in two forms. Sanskrit was the language of learning, and ritual, reserved to the Brahman caste. On the other hand, Prakrit was the language of everyday intercourse. These actual terms did not come into use until much later, but the distinction had been there even by the times of the Buddha and Mahavira, and from Panini’s time, as a result of his Grammar, normal linguistic evolution took place only in the vernacular tongue. It was a curious situation, highly artificial, and paralleled nowhere else. Even more curiously, although the gap between Sanskrit and Prakrit grew larger as the centuries passed, Sanskrit did not suffer. If anything, the opposite was true. For example, during Mauryan times, as can be seen from the inscriptions of Ashoka’s reign, the language of administration was Prakrit. Over the following centuries, however, it was gradually replaced by Sanskrit, until by Gupta times it was the only tongue used for administrative purposes. An equivalent change took place among Buddhists. Originally, according to the Buddha himself, the texts and scriptures were to be preserved in the vernacular languages, a form of Middle Indo-Aryan known as Pali. But, in the early centuries AD, the northern Buddhists turned away from Pali: the old scriptures were translated – and new ones written – in Sanskrit. Exactly the same thing happened with the Jains, though at a much later date.¹⁷ The ‘modern’ languages of India – Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi – only begin to be recorded from about the end of the first millennium AD.¹⁸

General literacy began in India about the time that Panini compiled his Grammar. After this, for about two hundred years, most written Sanskrit texts were religious, but secular poetry, drama, scientific, technical and philosophical texts began around the second century BC. At that stage, all men of letters had to know the Astadhyayi by heart. This was a prolonged process but it showed they were educated.¹⁹ As time passed, the rules Panini had set out were enforced more strictly – this was in an attempt to keep the language of learning and of sacred subjects pure. As sometimes happens, this strictness encouraged rather than hindered creativity, helping to stimulate the golden age of Sanskrit literature, which flourished in India between AD 500 and 1200, beginning with the most famous name of all, Kalidasa. It is important to add that the classical tradition in India is in essence secular. Religious scripture (agama) and scholarly writing (sastra) are usually distinguished from ‘literature’ (kavya).²⁰

Kalidasa’s origins are no more certain than Panini’s. His name means ‘slave of the goddess Kali’, which to some has suggested a birth in southern India, though Kali, a consort of Shiva, had a strong following in what became Bengal. At the same time, certain features of Kalidasa’s writing hint that he was a Brahman from Ujjain or Mandasor (many details betray a close acquaintance with the fertile Narmada valley, in the region of Malwa). As with the plays of Sophocles, seven of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit classics have survived. First and foremost, he was a lyric poet, but he composed epics and dramas as well. His most familiar work is the poem Meghaduta, ‘Cloud Messenger’, in which a lover attempts to send his beloved a message by means of a passing cloud at the beginning of the rains. During the course of this narrative, the cloud passes from the Vindhyas, the holy mountain range north of the Deccan plateau, to the Himalayas, floating above a landscape that changes and brings out the cloud’s feelings – beautiful rivers, impressive mountains, elaborate palaces. But Kalidasa’s most evocative drama is Shakuntala, about King Dushyanta, who comes across a beautiful nymph one day while he is out hunting. So captivated is he that he deserts his wife and court and consummates a union with the bewitching nymph. Eventually he returns to his court and in time forgets her. Later, when the king’s son by Shakuntala appears in the capital, he at first refuses to recognise the boy. What stands out in this story, which is, after all, a simple plot, is the deceptive reality of Kalidasa’s dialogue, the mutable humanity of his characters, the way he finds beauty everywhere. It was in particular Kalidasa’s understanding and depiction of character, the way it can grow and develop – or deteriorate – that prefigured Shakespeare.²¹

The Guptas had their own theory about drama, described by Bhamaha (fifth century?), the earliest literary critic/theoretican there is evidence for, though he was adapting a much older tradition, the Natyasastra of ‘Bharata’ (the mythical first ‘actor’). According to the Natyasastra, drama was invented to describe the conflicts that arose after the world declined from the golden age of harmony.²² The main idea in the Natyasastra was that there are ten types of play – street plays, archaic plays about the gods, ballets, etc. – which explore the eight important emotions: love, humour, energy, anger, fear, grief, disgust and astonishment. It was the purpose of the drama, on this reading, to imitate the main events of the world and to give the audience various types of aesthetic appreciation (it was not the dramatist’s aim simply to induce the audience to identify with the characters). The drama ‘should show the audience what it meant to be sensitive, comic, heroic, furious, apprehensive, compassionate, horrified, marvellous’. Drama was to be enjoyable but the theatre should be instructive too. Bhamaha extended this analysis to literature as a whole.

The advanced brilliance of Indian literature at this time is reinforced by the fact that its ideas and practices spread throughout south-east Asia. Gupta-style Buddhas are found in Malaya, Java and Borneo.²³ Sanskrit inscriptions, which are first seen in Indo-China in the third and fourth centuries, are thought to indicate the beginnings of literacy there, ‘nearly all the pre-Islamic scripts of south-east Asia being derivatives of Gupta Brahmin’.²⁴

It was under Gupta rule that the Hindu temple emerged as India’s classical architectural form. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Hindu temple. The world owes a great debt to Indian art, especially in China, Korea, Tibet, Cambodia and Japan, but in the West too. Philip Rawson, of the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, describes it this way: ‘Certain symbols and images which appear in later historical art first showed themselves in the miniature sculptures, in the seals and the sealings of the Indus Valley. Examples are the ithyphallic deity seated with knees akimbo as “lord of the beasts”, the naked girl, the dancing figure with one leg lifted diagonally across the other, the sacred bull, the stout masculine torso, the “tree of life”, and innumerable modest types of monkeys, females, cattle, and carts modelled in terracotta.’²⁵

Historically, Hinduism did not stipulate any permanent structure for its rituals. Hindus were free to make offerings anywhere in the countryside where the gods chose to reveal their presence.²⁶ During the second century AD, however, Hinduism started to reflect an alliance with the Indian theory of kingship, under which individual deities were adored by kings in order that they might associate themselves with the god’s supernatural power. As a result, the evolution of Hindu stone architecture and temple carving took place at scattered – but highly elaborate – single sites which were for a time the capital cities of dynasties. The Brahmans used these sites in their sacred texts – the Puranas – to create legends which attracted pilgrims, many of whom built other temples. In this way temple complexes became a feature of Indian religious/architectural life.

As was true in classical Greece, the Hindu temple was understood as the home of a deity, with an icon inside, where people could offer gifts and pray. Every building was dedicated to a specific god – often some manifestation of Vishnu, Shiva and so on. (As in epics, the major gods tended to be accretions, of other cults, local deities, nature-spirits etc.) The design of the early temples was divided into three. On the outside was a porch, often decorated in sculpted reliefs showing the deity in various mythological scenes. Inside was a large, square hall, the ambulatory or mandapa, where the faithful could assemble and, sometimes, dance. This led to the third area, the sanctuary (the shrine-room, garbha-griha, means ‘womb-house’). The temples were usually built of stone blocks, fitted together without mortar, and the entire complex was raised on a paved rectangle, intended to represent the cosmos in miniature, thus making the temple analogous to heaven. From such simple beginnings, the temples grew into flamboyantly ornate structures, some into entire cities. Many temples were later surrounded by concentric rings of enclosures with huge gates, and each was conceived as ‘an axis of the world’, symbolically representing the mythical Mount Meru, the central feature in the Hindu sacred cosmology.²⁷ Associated with the temple complexes were architectural schools.

The iconography of Indian temples obviously stems from different assumptions from Christian art, but it is no less closely conceived and no less interlocking. In general Hindu images are far more archaic than Christian ones, and in many cases older even than Greek art. The myths of the great gods – Vishnu and Shiva – which feature in the carvings, are repeated every kalpa – i.e., every four billion, three hundred and twenty million years. All the gods are customarily accompanied by or associated with vehicles – Vishnu by a cosmic serpent or snake (symbol of the primaeval waters of creation), Brahma by a gander, Indra by an elephant, Shiva by a bull. The gander was chosen, for example, because it exemplifies the two-fold nature of all beings: it swims on the surface of the water but is not bound to it.²⁸ The breathing noise of the gander is what the practitioners of yoga seek to attain – in fact, the rhythm of yogic breathing is known as ‘the inner gander’.²⁹ The elephant, which traditionally supports Indra, is called Airavata, the celestial ancestor of all elephants and symbol of the rain-bestowing monsoon-cloud.³⁰ Because elephants are the vehicle of Indra, king of the gods, elephants belong to kings.³¹

The basic and most common object in Shiva shrines is the lingam or phallus, a form of the god that goes all the way back to stone worship in the Neolithic period (see above, Chapter 3). There are elaborate myths in Hindu legend about the origins of the great lingam, which rises up from the ocean and then bursts open, to reveal Shiva inside. This is faintly reminiscent of the Aphrodite legend in Greek myths.

One of the most familiar figures from Indian art is that of Shiva represented as a dancing god, Nataraja, with four arms, surrounded by a ring of fire. This is a good example of the way Indian iconography works. Shiva, the divine dancer, lives on Mount Kailasa with his beautiful wife Parvati, his two sons, and his bull, Nandi. This is a form of family life, worshipped through the lingam. As the divine dancer, Shiva’s steps will both dance the universe out of existence and create a new one.³² (Dance in Indian tradition is an ancient form of magic, which can induce trance. But it is also an act of creation that can ‘summons’ the dancer to a higher personality.³³) The upper right hand of Nataraja usually carries a drum, for the beating of rhythm. This evokes sound, the vehicle of speech, through which revelation will be obtained. Sound in India is associated with ether, the first of the five elements, out of which the others arise. The upper left hand holds a tongue of flame, the element of destruction and a warning of what is to come. The second right hand displays a ‘fear not’ gesture, while the second left hand points down to the foot that is raised, symbolising release from the earth and, therefore, salvation. The entire figure is dancing on a demon, not merely to show victory, but to show man’s ignorance, because the attainment of true wisdom stems from the conquest of the demon. The ring of flames is not only fire but light, symbolising the potentially destructive forces abroad on earth but also the light of truth. This does not in any way complete the many meanings of this figure (the actual pose, for example, symbolises the ‘whirligig of time’), but it conveys the interlocking nature of Indian iconography without which the temples of India cannot be understood.

A few dozen temples from the Gupta era survive, at Sanchi, Nalanda, Buddh Gaya and other sites in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. But it is at Aihole and Badami, 200 miles south-east of modern Mumbai, that a ‘feast of architecture and sculpture’ marks the real arrival of the new form. At Aihole, the seventy or so temples are embellished with inscriptions of the poetry of Ravikirti, in one of which there is the first dated reference to Kalidasa. These were followed by the great stone-cut temples at the Pallavas’ main port, Mamallapuram, half-way down the eastern coast (the Pallavas were a later dynasty – we are now in the late seventh/beginning of the eighth century). Carved out of granite hillocks, the ‘seven pagodas’ of Mamallapuram are among the finest examples of south Indian sculpture-cum-architecture. Much of the art of Cambodia and Java, including Angkor and Borobudur, was Hindu-Buddhist.³⁴

A slightly later dynasty, the Rashtrakutas, patronised the site at Ellora (220 miles north-west of Mumbai). Here there is an exposed rock face two kilometres from end to end which had for long been dotted with cave temples. Out of this rock face, Krishna I, the Rashtrakuta king, began to carve what became without question the most impressive rock-cut monument anywhere in the world. Kailasa, so-called, was carved out of the rock until it was an entirely free-standing excavation, a temple the size of a cathedral, containing individual cells for monks, staircases, shrines, precincts and gateways all cut from the raw rock. As John Keay rightly says, this may appear to be architecture, but it is in fact sculpture. Local inscriptions hint that even the gods were impressed and the sculptor himself was emboldened to remark ‘Oh, how was it that I created this?’ The sculpture/temple also throws light on the motivation of the Rashtrakutas. Mount Kailasa, in the Himalayas, is considered to be the earthly abode of Lord Shiva. In being hewn from the living rock, the Kailasa temple at Ellora was intended to reposition the holy mountain within Rashtrakuta territory, to bring the sacred geography of India inside their province.³⁵

The subcontinent’s largest concentration of temples, however, occupies Bhuvaneshwar, the capital of Orissa. Orissa and Khajuraho never fully succumbed to Islam, and at the latter site, twenty-five temples remain out of eighty, grouped around a lake.³⁶ Some have dance rooms separate from the main temple, and all have elaborate figure sculpture cut in deep relief, many in erotic postures and all profoundly sensual. It is important to say that, iconographically, the erotic carvings are intended to represent the delights awarded by celestial girls – called apsaras – after this life (though this is a big subject, very controversial, with much scholarship attached). Many critics regard these figures as the finest achievement of Indian art. In addition to the elaborate sculptures, the temples were covered in paintings, wall hangings and encrusted with jewels, most of which have been looted.

The temples at Orissa are probably the most impressive of all: they comprise two hundred but were once many more. The earliest were built in the seventh century, the latest in the thirteenth. Densely packed, vaguely egg-shaped, with large vertical flutes and many horizontal vanes, the concentration of buildings is intended to overwhelm the spectator, and the very idea of the complex may have been a response to the Islamic invasion of India. These complexes appear to have been spared by the invading Muslims only because they were so remote, and so soon abandoned to the jungle. They were rediscovered in the nineteenth century by a certain Captain Burt, who ‘found the site choked with trees and its elaborate system of lakes and watercourses overgrown and already beyond reclaim. Like Cambodia’s slightly later Angkor Wat when it was “discovered” by a wide-eyed French expedition, the place had been deserted for centuries and the sacred symbolism of its elaborate topography greedily obliterated by jungle.’³⁷ Since then, analysis of the inscriptions has resurrected some Chandela history, and exploration of the iconography has shown how important the sites were for Shiva worship.

For many people, the most impressive as well as the most beautiful single temple in all India is that built at Tanjore by the Chola kings in the early eleventh century. The Cholas were a Dravidian (south Indian) people who had occupied the Kaveri delta since prehistoric times. Kaveri underwent a revival beginning in 985 with King Rajaraja I, who decided, towards the end of his reign, to memorialise his achievements by building a temple in Tanjore. Erected over about fifteen years, it may well be the tallest temple in India, nearly 200 feet high and crowned by an eighty-ton domed capstone.³⁸ It bears an important inscription and is decorated with rare Chola paintings, showing Shiva mythology and celestial female dancers. There is a huge lingam in the main shrine, showing that Tanjore is dedicated to Shiva. The temple was the centre of a huge complex, with perhaps five hundred Brahmans and the same number of musicians and dancing girls taking part in the ceremonies. For hundreds of miles around, people donated money and land to the temple, as did villages, offering tithes.³⁹ The Chola produced famous bronzes, many of the kind considered above, with Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, surrounded by a circle of flame.

The Hindu temples of India are one of those self-evident glories that have never broken through in the West as artistic and intellectual equivalents of, say, classical Greek architecture. Yet they are easily on a par with the Hellenic achievements, being, like them, as much sculptural as architectural in conception.⁴⁰ The main thing to grasp is that both temples and sculpture reflect a set of ideal canons of form. The assumptions underlying these canons are not Western but they follow sacred principles and proportions which were handed down from generation to generation. On top of this, Western notions of ‘classicism’ do not incorporate the sensual, erotic exuberance that is such a central ingredient of Indian classicism. But we should never forget that this sensual nature of Indian art is not worldly. It is meant to remind the faithful of what awaits them in heaven, of the inadequacy of beauty here on earth, and the inconstancy of earthly pleasures. In a sense, this is what Plato was driving at – nevertheless, Indian art and architecture challenge the very idea of what classicism is.

The success of the Guptas was not confined to India. Embarking from the port of Tamralipti in Bengal (then called Vanga), Indian ships exported in the main pepper but also cotton, ivory, brassware, monkeys and elephants as far as China, bringing back silk, musk and amber. (Neither tea nor opium were yet traded.) But India, which had already exported Buddhism, now exported Hinduism and Sanskritic culture. The Hindu kingdom of Fu-nan, now Vietnam, was ruled by the Brahman Kaundinya, and Bali, parts of Sumatra and Java also became ‘islands of Hindu’. It is likely that literacy reached these parts of the world with the arrival of Sanskrit.⁴¹

But Gupta dominance didn’t endure. The fifth generation of the dynasty, Skanda Gupta, was the last. Soon after his accession in 455, the Hunas (or Huns) massed on his north-west frontier and the cost of resistance drained the Gupta treasury. After Skanda’s death in 467, the empire declined rapidly and, just before 500, Toramana, the Huna leader, took the Punjab, while his son later absorbed Kashmir and the Gangetic plain. By the middle of the sixth century Gupta glory had entirely faded. Half a century of fragmentation followed until, in 606, a line of later Guptas, not related to the imperial clan, emerged. The most remarkable of these was the first, Harsha Vardhana, who sought once again to unify all of north India. Like Chandra Gupta I, his brilliance was recognised and recorded at the time, once by a Brahman courtier, Bana, who wrote a hagiographical life of Harsha, Harsha Carita, as well as a more discerning record, by yet another visiting Buddhist pilgrim from China. This was Xuan Zang, whose journey, In the Footsteps of the Buddha, took him to Harsha’s India between 630 and 644.

Harsha expanded his empire, but we remember him now as much for the fact that he was a poet as well as a warrior, for the fact that he rescued his sister as she was about to follow her husband on to the funeral pyre, and most of all for the important innovations in religious and philosophical ideas that occurred during his reign. It was under Harsha’s rule that Hinduism grew so much in popularity, at the expense of Buddhism, taking on its ‘classical’ form of worship, or puja. This entails the faithful bringing offerings – fruit, candies, other delicacies – to the sculptures or other images of the gods in the temples, together with the performance of certain secret rituals, all having to do with ‘female power’, or shakti, which have come to be known as Tantric. Tantrism is almost certainly a very old form of worship, associated with the ancient mother goddess, but just how and when its orgiastic nature began isn’t clear. The basic beliefs of Tantrism are very different from either orthodox Hinduism or Buddhism and their very popularity, say some scholars, must attest to the fact that the ideas are very ancient. The basic belief was that true worship of the mother goddess could be achieved only by sexual intercourse (maithuna). In time this led to group intercourse, often performed at so-called ‘polluted’ cremation grounds. These episodes were also associated with the breaking of other taboos, such as eating meat and drinking alcohol.⁴²

Tantrism affected (some would say infected) Buddhism as well, leading in the seventh century to a third form, after Hinayana and Mahayana. This was Vajrayana (‘Vehicle of the Thunderbolt’), which introduced as its most powerful divinities a number of female saviours, known as taras, who were the consorts of ‘weaker’ Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.⁴³ In other words, Tantric Hinduism and Tantric Buddhism both exalted the female principle, regarding this as the highest form of divine power.

Tantric worship became secret and secretive because its practices were unacceptable to many of the orthodox, but its intimate connection with yoga added to its popularity. Yoga was practised because control of breathing and the body were essential components for the proper performance of maithuna. And yoga, as a system of thought, now emerged as a more codified organisation of beliefs, with the ‘eight-fold’ path of ‘royal yoga’, raja yoga. These eight paths were: self-control, the observance of proper conduct, the practice of correct posture (asana), breath control (prana), organic restraint, mind steadying, the perfect achievement of deep meditation (samadhi), and the absolute freedom of kaivalya.⁴⁴

But yoga was only one of six schools of classical Hindu philosophy which emerged at the time of Harsha Vardhana. These six were generally grouped in three couplets. Yoga, for instance, was coupled with Samkhya, or the ‘Numbers School’, which may also be of ancient origin. According to the Samkhya philosophy, the world consists of twenty-five basic principles, all but one of which are ‘matter’ (prakriti), the other being purusa – man, spirit or self. In this system there is no creator, nothing divine, all matter is eternal, un-caused. But all matter has three qualities in varying degrees – it is either more or less truthful, more or less passionate, more or less dark. The mix of these qualities determines how virtuous or noble something is, how inert, cruel, strong or bright and so on.⁴⁵ The twenty-four forms of matter show some measure of evolution, in that they begin with prakriti, which ‘brings forth’ intelligence (buddhi), from which arises what we would call ego-sense (aham kara), giving rise to mind (manas). From mind the five senses emerge, and from them the five sense organs and the five organs of action. Underneath all matter lie the five elements – ether, air, light, water, earth. Purusa, the sense of being an individual, with one’s own spirit, carries with it the idea that all people are equal but at the same time all are different. Salvation is achieved only when a person realises the basic separation between purusa and prakriti, which enables the spirit to cease suffering and attain complete release. These very mystical ideas clearly overlap with Platonism and Gnostic beliefs from Greece and Alexandria.⁴⁶

The other two couplets of classical Hindu philosophy are Nyaya/Vaisesika and Purva-mimansa/Vedanta. The Nyaya philosophy (or vision, darshana in Hindi) means ‘analysis’ and it teaches salvation through knowledge of sixteen categories of logic. These categories include syllogism, debate, refutation, quibbling, disputation and so on. Coupled with Nyaya, Vaisesika means ‘individual characteristics’ and is known as India’s ‘atomic system’ since its basic premise is that the material universe emerges from the interaction of individual atoms that make up the four elements – earth, water, fire and air. Vaisesika also envisages non-atomic entities (dravyas), such as soul, mind, time and space. Once again, perfect knowledge leads to salvation, when the ‘self’ is released from matter and therefore from the cycle of death and rebirth. Nyaya, like yoga, is a system of behaviour, or way of thinking, whereas Vaisesika, like Samkhya, is a set of explanations as to how matter and mind are organised and are different from one another.⁴⁷

Purva-mimansa (‘early inquiry’) was a form of fundamentalism, which took the Rig Veda as literal truth and therefore insisted that salvation could only be achieved by precise re-enactment of the Soma sacrifice.⁴⁸ The emphasis on ritual, and the absence of new ideas, seems to have ensured that Purva-mimansa lost adherents as time went by. In strong contrast, Vedanta (‘end of the Vedas’, and sometimes called ‘later inquiry’, Uttara-mimansa), has become India’s most influential philosophical system, developing many subsidiary forms that have appealed to a wide range of thinkers and intellectuals down the ages, and not only in India. Again in contrast to Purva-mimansa, Vedanta takes its starting point from the speculations of the Upanishads, rather than Rig Vedic sacrifice, and seeks a synthesis of all seemingly contradictory Hindu scripture. It posits the existence of the ‘Absolute Soul’ in all things.

The most successful Vedanta teacher, and the second most-revered person in Indian history, after the Buddha himself, was Shankara (c. 780–820). He was a Brahman who, during his short career, wandered from his Kerala home to the Himalayas developing his idea that our world is an illusion (maya), and that the one reality was Brahman, or Atman, the world-spirit or soul.⁴⁹ Shankara’s most famous doctrine was Advaita (literally, ‘no second’, or, as we would say, monism). In Advaita, Shankara maintained that nothing in the phenomenal universe is real, everything is a secondary emanation from the one ‘ultimate, absolute being’, the ‘impersonal neuter entity’ known as the Brahman, which had three attributes, being (sat), consciousness (chit) and bliss (ananda). Brahman, for Shankara, was unchanging and eternally stable and for Westerners sounds very mystical, like a cross between Plato’s The One and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.⁵⁰ Everything else in the universe, because it was at some level unreal, was subject to change. In humans, this takes the form of samsara, transmigration.

In one of his poems, Kalidasa mentions a revolving water-spray, for cooling the air. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, Hindu ingenuity was second only to Chinese, reflected also in the fact that, by the first century AD, Hindu doctors had perfected twenty kinds of knives for different surgical procedures. At the same time, their mathematicians conceived the notion of the rasi, a ‘heap’ of numbers, which recalls an ancient Egyptian idea that may be regarded as the ancestor of the algebraic concept of x, for an unknown quantity.

In India, as in Egypt, mathematics appears to have begun with temple-building, where a system of ropes of different lengths was used for the laying out of holy sites, for the construction of right-angles and for the correct alignment of altars. This lore was set down in a series of Sulvasutras, sulva referring to the ropes or cords used for measurement, and sutra meaning a book of rules or aphorisms relating to a ritual or science.⁵¹ Three versions of the Sulvasutras, all in verse, are extant, the best-known bearing the name of Apastamba. They are dated to anywhere between the eighth century BC and the second century AD. For that reason, we cannot be certain whether the ideas were originally worked out in India, or taken from Mesopotamia or the Hellenistic world. But Indian arithmetic certainly began in the temple: sacred formulas were conceived, for example, for the number of bricks to be used on altars.⁵²

More reliably dated are the Siddhantas, ‘systems’ (of astronomy), of which there are five versions, all written around the turn of the fifth century, and which were early examples of the Sanskrit revival. Here too Hindu scholars insist that the ideas in the Siddhantas are original, whereas others see definite signs of Greek influence.⁵³ Whatever the truth of this, it was in the Siddhantas that the Hindus refined and expanded the trigonometry of Ptolemy. In the opinion of H. J. Winter, ‘Hindu mathematics is undoubtedly the finest intellectual achievement of the subcontinent in medieval times. It brought alongside the Greek geometrical legacy a powerful method in the form of analysis, not a deductive process building upon accepted axioms, postulates, and common notions, but an intuitive insight in the behaviour of numbers, and their arrangement into patterns and series, from which may be perceived inductive generalisations, in a word algebra rather than geometry . . . The quest for wider generalisation beyond the limits of pure geometry led the Hindus to abandon Ptolemy’s methods of reckoning in terms of chords of a circle and to substitute reckoning in sines, thereby initiating the study of trigonometry. It is to the philosophical mind of the Brahman mathematician engrossed in the mystique of number that we owe the origin of analytical methods. In this process of abstraction two particularly interesting features emerged, at the lower end of achievement the perfection of the decimal system, and at the higher the solution of certain indeterminate equations.’⁵⁴ Ptolemy’s trigonometry had been based on the relationship between the chords of a circle and the central angle they subtended. The authors of the Siddhantas, on the other hand, adapted this to the correspondence between a half of a chord and half of the angle subtended by the whole chord. And this was how the predecessor of the modern trigonometric function known as the sine of an angle came about.⁵⁵

The second innovation of the Indians was the invention/creation of Hindu numerals. This was primarily the work of the famous Indian mathematician Aryabhata, introduced at the beginning of this chapter. In 499 he produced a slim volume, Aryabhatiya, written in 123 metrical verses, which covered astronomy and, for about a third of its length, ganitapada, or mathematics.⁵⁶ In the latter half of this work, where he is discussing time and spherical trigonometry, Aryabhata uses a phrase, in referring to numbers used in calculation, ‘from place to place each is ten times the preceding’. ‘Local value’ had been an essential part of Babylonian numeration but they didn’t use a decimal system. Numeration had begun in India with simple vertical strokes arranged into groups, a repetitive system which was retained although the next move was to have new symbols for four, ten, twenty and one hundred. This Kharosthi script gave way to the so-called Brahmi characters, referred to earlier, which was similar to the Ionian Greek system, as follows:

From this arrangement two steps are needed to arrive at the one we use today. The first is to grasp that under the positional system only nine ciphers are needed – all the others, from I onwards in the above table, can be jettisoned. It is not certain when this move was first made but the consensus of mathematical historians is that it was taken in India, perhaps developed along the border between India and Persia, where remembrance of the Babylonian positional system may have sparked its use with the Brahmi alternative, or on the border with China, which had a rod system:

This may also have suggested the contraction to nine ciphers.⁵⁷

The earliest literary reference to the nine Hindu numerals is found in the writings of a Syrian bishop called Severus Sebokt. It will be recalled from Chapters 11 and 12 that Justinian had closed the Athenian philosophical schools in the sixth century, whereupon some of the Greek scholars decamped to Syria (while some went to Gondeshapur). It may be that Sebokt was irritated by the fact that these Greeks looked down on learning elsewhere for ‘he found it expedient to remind those who spoke Greek that “there are also others who know something” ’.⁵⁸ To underline his point, he went on to refer to the Hindus, their discoveries in astronomy and in particular ‘their valuable methods of calculation, and their computing that surpasses description. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs.’⁵⁹

Note the mention of nine signs, not ten. At that point, evidently, the Hindus had not yet taken the second crucial step to the modern system – notation for the zero symbol. According to D. E. Smith, in his history of mathematics, ‘the earliest undoubted occurrence of a zero in India is in an inscription of 876’ – in other words, more than two centuries after the first mention of the use of the other nine numerals. It is still not certain where the zero was first introduced, and the concept of nought, or emptiness, was independently arrived at by the Mayans, as we shall see in a later chapter. Joseph Needham, the Cambridge-based historian of Chinese science, favoured China as a source of the zero. ‘It may be very significant’, he wrote, ‘that the older literary Indian references simply use the word “sunya” – emptiness, just as if they are describing the empty spaces on Chinese counting boards.’⁶⁰ A Cambodian inscription of 683 uses the dot or bindu to represent zero, while an inscription on Bangka island (off the coast of Sumatra) of 686 shows the closed ring.⁶¹ But this is no doubt the result of Hindu influence, and it does seem that it was the Indians who first used all three of the new elements which are the basis of our counting system: a decimal base, a positional notation, ciphers for ten, and only ten, numerals. And this was in place by 876.

Nowadays, we use the simple goose egg, 0, for zero. At one stage it was assumed that the zero originally derived from the Greek letter omicron, the initial letter of the word ouden, which means ‘empty’. This is no longer accepted – sometimes a dot was used, sometimes an upside-down version of our letter h.⁶²

The final important innovation introduced by Indian mathematicians is the system known as gelosia multiplication and long division. Gelosia is an Italian word. After the system – also called lattice multiplication – was invented in the twelfth century, it was taken to China and the Arab world, from where it entered Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The lattices appeared to resemble the gratings, or gelosia, used on Venetian windows. Here is an example of lattice multiplication:

In this example, 456 is multiplied by 34, to produce the answer, 15,504. The single digits are multiplied, those along the top by those down the left-hand side, and the product written in the squares, divided by a diagonal. There is thus nothing more onerous in one’s head than multiplying single digits. Then one simply adds the diagonal lines, beginning top right and carrying over, to get the final result.⁶³

India was unaware of the advent of Islam until the early eighth century, and might have remained so for much longer but for an incident in AD 711, when the plundering of a richly laden Arab ship as it passed the mouth of the Indus so incensed the Umayyad governor of what is now Iraq that he launched a military expedition of six thousand Syrian horses and the same number of Iraqi camels against the rajas of Sind.⁶⁴ This force soon conquered Brahmanabad, where the infidels the Muslims found there had to convert or be killed. This early ferocity didn’t last. The Arabs soon realised there were too many Hindus to exterminate, and second, Muslim scholars studied the extensive Hindu religious literature, and as a result allowed Hindus dhimmi status, a protected belief system alongside Judaism and Christianity (provided of course they paid the special tax, the jizya).⁶⁵

Islam had conquered the Middle East so rapidly that it might have been expected to have the same effect in India, but it did not, as is revealed today by the existence of Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh alongside Hindu India where, however, there are also several million Muslims. The military side of the Muslim conquest of northern India falls outside the scope of this book. It is enough to say that, over the centuries, Turks and Afghans were more involved than Arabs, and that the main forms of Islam in India were Sunnis and Sufis. Sufism received a boost in 1095 when al-Ghazali resigned from the chair of divinity at the Nizamiyah academy in Baghdad, to lead the life of a Sufi (though poetry also made Sufism popular). By the twelfth century, Sufis were divided into several different silsilas (orders), each led by a pir or preceptor and each centred on a khanqah or hospice, which attracted men from all over who were seeking the spiritual life.⁶⁶ To begin with, the khanqahs subsisted on charity but, as with Buddhist monasteries in China, many evolved into very prosperous communities.

Sind, the Punjab and Bengal became the main centres of Sufism, the two most important orders being known as Suhrawardi and Chisht, the former named after the author of a manual on Sufism and the latter after the name of the village where the order began. Chishti Sufis led a life of poverty and asceticism, and practised a number of devices to assist concentration – pas-i-anfas (control of breath), chilla (forty days of hard exercises in a remote location) and, most extraordinary of all, chilla-i-makus (forty days of exercises performed with one’s head on the ground and the legs tied to the branch of a tree). These practices shocked more orthodox Muslims – and there were several unsuccessful attempts to stamp them out. Just as Buddhism was Sinicised in China, so Islam was Hinduised in India.⁶⁷

Throughout 1,500 years in India, Buddhism and Hinduism had co-existed peacefully, borrowing ideas and practices from each other. Following the Islamic invasions, however, the number of Buddhist centres – Nalanda, Vikramasila, Odontapuri – was much smaller and suppression correspondingly more successful. Buddhism in India died out and was not resurrected until the middle of the nineteenth century.⁶⁸

The eastward diffusion of religious ideas, from Mesopotamia to India, and from India to south-east Asia and Japan, was matched, of course, by the westward movement of Christianity and Judaism. The radiation of these big ideas from such a small area of the globe, is, in terms of lives influenced, probably the greatest shift in thought throughout history.