Thinkers, Beliefs and Buildings (Cultural Developments

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XII (Themes in Indian History Part I), Chapter 4.

Why does a small railway station keep a great stupa safe?

Take a train from Delhi to Bhopal and look up as it nears the little station of Sanchi. A mound of stone crowns a hill, and you are looking at one of the best preserved monuments of early India. It nearly did not survive. In the nineteenth century the French asked Shahjehan Begum, the ruler of Bhopal, for permission to carry its best gateway to a museum in France, and some Englishmen wanted the same. Both were satisfied with plaster-cast copies, and the original stayed where it was built.

That one decision opens the chapter's main idea. A monument is a source, like a text. To understand it you need three things together: the texts that explain what its images mean, the inscriptions that tell you who paid for it, and the story of its discovery that tells you what was lost. This chapter follows all three, starting with the world of ideas in which Buddhism and Jainism were born.

The background: sacrifices, questions and debates

The middle of the first millennium BCE is often seen as a turning point in world history. Zarathustra in Iran, Kong Zi in China, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece, and Mahavira and Gautama Buddha in India were all trying to understand existence and the link between human beings and the cosmic order. In the Ganga valley, new kingdoms and cities were changing social and economic life, and thinkers tried to make sense of that too.

Why the old religion raised questions. The early Vedic tradition, known from the Rigveda (compiled c. 1500 to 1000 BCE), was built around sacrifice. Its hymns praise Agni, Indra and Soma, and people prayed for cattle, sons, health and long life. At first sacrifices were collective. Later, heads of households performed some for their own families, and chiefs and kings performed grand ones like the rajasuya and ashvamedha, which needed Brahmana priests. A religion centred on costly rituals led some people to ask what sacrifice really achieved.

Buddhist texts mention as many as 64 sects or schools of thought. Teachers travelled from place to place and debated in a kutagarashala (literally a hut with a pointed roof) or in groves where wandering mendicants halted. If a philosopher won over a rival, the rival's followers became his disciples, so support for a sect could rise and fall.

Mahavira and the Buddha both questioned the authority of the Vedas and stressed individual agency: men and women could strive for liberation. This contrasted with the Brahmanical position that a person's existence was fixed by birth into a caste or gender.

Why we know the Ajivikas and Lokayatas only second-hand. Their own texts have not survived. We know them from the works of other traditions, such as the Sutta Pitaka's account of King Ajatasattu repeating what Makkhali Gosala and Ajita Kesakambalin had taught him. The labels "fatalist" and "materialist" were given by rivals, which is why the textbook itself asks whether they are fair.

Two views. For the exam: the Ajivikas are the fatalists and the Lokayatas the materialists. Another reading: because no Ajivika or Lokayata text survives, historians caution that these labels come from opponents and may flatten what the two groups actually taught. Reconstructing a school of thought from its critics always carries this risk.

Jainism: the message of Mahavira

The basic philosophy of the Jainas already existed in north India before the birth of Vardhamana, called Mahavira, in the sixth century BCE. By Jaina tradition he was preceded by 23 other tirthankaras, a word meaning those who guide men and women across the river of existence. So Mahavira is the 24th and last, not the founder.

The central idea is that the entire world is animated: even stones, rocks and water have life. So non-injury (ahimsa) to living beings, especially humans, animals, plants and insects, is central, and the principle has left its mark on Indian thinking as a whole. The cycle of birth and rebirth is shaped by karma, and only asceticism and penance can free a person from it. That needs renouncing the world, so monastic life is a necessary condition of salvation.

Jaina monks and nuns took five vows:

Mahavira's teachings were recorded by disciples, often as stories that appealed to ordinary people. The Uttaradhyayana Sutta, in Prakrit, tells of Queen Kamalavati urging her husband to give up the world, saying that only dhamma would save him when he died. Jainism spread to many parts of India. Jaina scholars wrote in Prakrit, Sanskrit and Tamil, and manuscripts were preserved in libraries attached to temples. Some of the earliest stone sculptures linked to religious traditions are of tirthankaras and have been found across the subcontinent.

The Buddha: from palace to enlightenment

We rebuild the Buddha's life partly from his teachings and partly from hagiographies, biographies of a saint that praise his achievements and may not be literally accurate. Many were written at least a century after his time. They matter because they show what his followers believed.

According to these traditions, Siddhartha was the son of a chief of the Sakya clan and grew up sheltered in a palace. One day he persuaded his charioteer to take him into the city and was shaken to see an old man, a sick man and a corpse. He understood that decay and death are unavoidable. He also saw a homeless mendicant who seemed to have found peace, and decided to follow the same path. He left the palace, tried extreme bodily mortification that brought him close to death, gave up such methods, meditated for several days and attained enlightenment. From then on he was the Buddha, the Enlightened One, and taught dhamma, the path of righteous living, for the rest of his life.

Four places in his life. Each came to be regarded as sacred, and about 200 years after the Buddha's time Asoka put up a pillar at Lumbini to mark his visit.

What the Buddha taught

His teachings come mainly from stories in the Sutta Pitaka, told in the language ordinary people spoke. Some stories mention miracles, but others show him persuading by reason, as when he gently helped a grieving mother accept that death is certain instead of bringing her son back.

The world is transient (anicca) and constantly changing. It is soulless (anatta) because nothing in it is permanent. Within it, sorrow (dukkha) is part of human existence. People can rise above these troubles by following the middle path between severe penance and self-indulgence. In its earliest form, whether god existed was irrelevant to Buddhism.

The Buddha treated the social world as the creation of humans, not of divine origin, so he advised kings and householders (gahapatis) to be humane and ethical. Individual effort and righteous action could end the cycle of rebirth and lead to nibbana, the extinguishing of ego and desire. Buddhist tradition records his last words to his followers as an urging to be lamps unto themselves and work out their own liberation. Fellow feeling (metta) and compassion (karuna), especially towards those weaker than oneself, and the stress on conduct over birth, drew many people who were unsettled by rapid social change.

Pause and predict: the Buddha advised a wealthy householder named Sigala on how a master should treat servants, and how clansmen should treat renouncers. What does this tell you about how he saw society?

Check your answer: that he saw it as made by humans and improvable by ethical conduct. Rules for how people treat each other make sense only if relationships are human choices, not divine orders.

The sangha: who joined and how it ran

The Buddha founded a sangha, an order of monks who also became teachers of dhamma. They lived simply with only the essentials, such as a bowl for the food given once a day by lay people. Because they lived on alms they were called bhikkhus.

At first only men were admitted. Later women were too, through the mediation of Ananda, one of the Buddha's dearest disciples, who persuaded him. The Buddha's foster mother, Mahapajapati Gotami, was the first woman ordained as a bhikkhuni. Many women who joined became teachers of dhamma and theris, respected women who had attained liberation.

Followers came from kings, wealthy men and householders, and also from workers, slaves and craftspeople. Inside the sangha all were regarded as equal, having shed earlier social identities. It ran on the traditions of the ganas and sanghas, where decisions were reached by discussion and, if that failed, by vote.

The Therigatha, part of the Sutta Pitaka, is a collection of verses composed by bhikkhunis. In it Punna, a dasi (slave woman) who fetched water for her master's house, challenges a Brahmana who bathes in the cold to wash away sin, asking whether then all frogs and turtles would go to heaven. The Vinaya Pitaka gives rules for monks and nuns, for example limits on how much food a bhikkhu may accept at a household.

How the Buddha's words reached us

The Buddha taught orally, and none of his speeches was written down in his lifetime. After his death (c. fifth to fourth century BCE) his disciples compiled his teachings at a council of senior monks at Vesali (Pali for Vaishali, in present-day Bihar). These compilations were called the Tipitaka, literally "three baskets". They were first handed down orally, then written and classified by length and subject.

As Buddhism reached Sri Lanka, regional chronicles such as the Dipavamsa (chronicle of the island) and Mahavamsa (great chronicle) were written. Some of the oldest texts are in Pali, later ones in Sanskrit. Pilgrims such as Fa Xian and Xuan Zang came from China in search of texts and took them home to be translated, while Indian teachers carried texts abroad. Monasteries across Asia preserved manuscripts, and modern translations come from Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan texts.

Stupas: where the Buddha's presence was kept

People had always held some places sacred: special trees, unusual rocks, spots of natural beauty, often with small shrines called chaityas. The word may also come from chita, a funeral pyre, and so by extension a funerary mound. Buddhist literature mentions several chaityas and the places tied to the Buddha's life.

Places holding the Buddha's relics, such as bodily remains or objects he used, were also sacred. These mounds were stupas. The custom of raising stupas may be older than Buddhism, but they became linked to it, and since they held relics the whole stupa came to be honoured as an emblem of the Buddha and Buddhism. According to the Ashokavadana, Asoka divided the Buddha's relics among every important town and ordered stupas built over them. By the second century BCE, stupas stood at Bharhut, Sanchi and Sarnath.

Who paid for them. Inscriptions on stupa railings and pillars record donations. Some came from kings such as the Satavahanas, some from guilds, such as the ivory workers who funded part of a gateway at Sanchi, and hundreds from ordinary women and men who named themselves, their home place, their trade and their relatives. Bhikkhus and bhikkhunis gave too. The Buddha's own words, as recorded in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, tell Ananda to build a stupa at the crossroads for the Tathagata, so devotion at a stupa had his sanction.

The stupa began as a plain semicircular mound of earth and grew into a structure that balances round and square shapes.

Early stupas at Sanchi and Bharhut were plain apart from the railings, which looked like a bamboo or wooden fence, and the carved gateways. Worshippers entered by the eastern gateway and walked round the mound clockwise, keeping it on their right, imitating the sun's path through the sky. Later stupas had the mound itself richly carved, as at Amaravati and Shah-ji-ki-Dheri in Peshawar (Pakistan).

The structure in one line: anda (mound) → harmika (balcony) → yashti (mast) → chhatri (umbrella), all ringed by a vedika and entered through four toranas.

Discovering stupas: why Sanchi lived and Amaravati died

Every stupa has a history of its building and a history of its discovery. In 1796 a local raja who wanted to build a temple stumbled on the ruins of the Amaravati stupa. He decided to use its stone, and thought treasure might lie inside what looked like a hill. Some years later the British official Colin Mackenzie visited, found sculptures and made detailed drawings, but his reports were never published. In 1854 Walter Elliot, commissioner of Guntur, took several sculpture panels to Madras (they are called the Elliot marbles) and found the remains of the western gateway. By the 1850s slabs were being carried to Calcutta, Madras and even London, and new officials kept removing sculptures because earlier officials had.

The archaeologist H.H. Cole thought this policy "suicidal and indefensible", and argued that museums should hold plaster-cast copies while originals stay where they were found. He lost the argument for Amaravati, but his plea for preservation in situ (on the spot) was accepted for Sanchi.

Pause and predict: a French team asks the Begum of Bhopal for Sanchi's eastern gateway. What compromise saved the original?

Check your answer: carefully made plaster-cast copies were sent to satisfy the French and the English, and the original stayed at the site, which was part of the Bhopal state.

The rulers of Bhopal, Shahjehan Begum and her successor Sultan Jehan Begum, provided money for preservation. Sultan Jehan funded the museum built there and the guesthouse where John Marshall lived while writing his volumes on Sanchi, and she also paid for their publication, so he dedicated them to her. The site survived through wise decisions and also through good luck in escaping railway contractors, builders and collectors for European museums. Today it stands as an example of successful restoration by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Timeline: religious change and the discovery of monuments

Reading the stone: how sculpture speaks

Sculptors told stories in stone, much as wandering storytellers showed scrolls (charanachitras) and pointed to pictures. Something that looks like a village scene with thatched huts and trees on the northern gateway at Sanchi was identified, by comparing it with texts, as a scene from the Vessantara Jataka: a generous prince gave away everything to a Brahmana and went to live in the forest with his family. Art historians first had to learn the hagiographies and Jatakas to read the carvings.

Symbols instead of a human Buddha. Many early sculptors did not show the Buddha in human form. They showed his presence through symbols, which cannot be read literally.

Popular traditions at Sanchi. Not every image comes from Buddhist teaching, which shows that people who turned to Buddhism enriched it with older and non-Buddhist beliefs.

Two views. For the exam: the woman with lotuses and elephants is identified by some historians as Maya and by others as Gajalakshmi, and devotees may have seen her as both. Another reading: it is also possible that devotees who looked at the sculpture saw both Maya and Gajalakshmi in the one figure, so the image could carry two meanings at once.

Two views. For the exam: James Fergusson, one of the earliest modern art historians, called Sanchi a centre of tree and serpent worship. Another reading: he had no access to Buddhist literature, since most of it was still untranslated, and judged the images on their own. Later scholars, who read the texts, saw Buddhist symbols and Jataka stories there, with popular motifs alongside.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the paintings of Ajanta (Maharashtra) are the best known cave paintings, showing Jataka stories and scenes of court life, procession, work and festival, with shading to give depth. In reality: wall paintings survive far less often than stone, which is why stone sculpture is the evidence historians reach for first.

New religious traditions

Mahayana. By the first century CE, Buddhist ideas and practices were changing. Early Buddhism stressed self-effort and saw the Buddha as a human being who reached nibbana by his own effort. Gradually the idea of a saviour emerged, along with the Bodhisatta, a deeply compassionate being who gathered merit but used it to help others instead of leaving the world for nibbana. Worship of images of the Buddha and Bodhisattas became important. This was called Mahayana, the "great vehicle", and its followers named the older tradition Hinayana, the "lesser vehicle". The older school's followers called themselves Theravadins, those who follow the path of the old, respected teachers, the theras.

Puranic Hinduism. The idea of a saviour appears in traditions now counted as Hinduism too. Vaishnavism worshipped Vishnu as chief deity and Shaivism worshipped Shiva, with growing emphasis on a chosen deity and a bond of love and devotion, or bhakti, between devotee and god. In Vaishnavism, cults grew around the ten avatars (incarnations) Vishnu takes to save the world whenever evil threatens it. Different avatars were probably popular in different regions, and treating each local deity as a form of Vishnu helped build a more unified tradition. Shiva was shown through the linga, though sometimes in human form, and sculptors used head-dresses, ornaments, ayudhas (weapons or auspicious objects held in the hands) and postures to convey ideas.

To read such images, historians use the Puranas, compiled by Brahmanas by about the middle of the first millennium CE. They are in simple Sanskrit verse, meant to be read aloud to everyone, women and Shudras included, who had no access to Vedic learning. Their stories grew through exchange among priests, merchants and ordinary travellers. Vasudeva-Krishna, for instance, was an important deity around Mathura, and his worship spread over the centuries.

Temples. As stupas such as Sanchi were taking their present form, the first temples to house images were also being built. The early temple was a small square room, the garbhagriha, with a single doorway for the worshipper. A tall shikhara was later raised over the central shrine, and walls were decorated with sculpture. Later temples added assembly halls, huge walls and gateways, and arrangements to supply water.

Some early temples were hollowed out of huge rocks as artificial caves, an old tradition. Some of the earliest, at Barabar (Bihar), were made in the third century BCE on Asoka's orders for renouncers of the Ajivika sect. The tradition culminated in the eighth century in carving an entire temple, Kailashnatha (a name of Shiva), at Ellora (Maharashtra). A copperplate inscription records the chief sculptor's amazement after finishing it: "Oh how did I make it!"

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Kailashnatha at Ellora is carved from a single piece of rock. In reality: it was cut downward from the top of a hillside, so there was no room for error, because stone removed cannot be put back. This is why the sculptor's astonished cry feels so fitting.

Can we "see" everything? Limits of the evidence

When nineteenth-century European scholars first saw sculptures of gods and goddesses, some were horrified by figures with many arms and heads or human and animal forms. They compared them with the Greek sculpture they knew. They found early Indian work inferior, but were excited by Buddha and Bodhisatta images that were clearly based on Greek models, found mostly in the north-west at Taxila and Peshawar, where Indo-Greek rulers had set up kingdoms in the second century BCE. As these were closest to Greek statues, they were judged the best of early Indian art. The scholars were doing what we all do: using familiar yardsticks to make sense of the unfamiliar.

Texts help, but not always. A huge rock-cut panel at Mahabalipuram (Tamil Nadu) clearly tells a story, but which one?

Two views. For the exam: art historians are sharply divided over the Mahabalipuram panel. Another reading: some see the descent of the river Ganga from heaven, with the natural cleft in the rock as the river. Others see Arjuna's penance on a river bank to gain weapons, pointing to the central ascetic figure. Both identifications come from the Puranas and the epics.

Many rituals, beliefs and daily practices were never recorded in a lasting form at all, so the monuments we study are only the tip of the iceberg.

Key people and terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Kinship, Caste and Class shows the Brahmanical social order that the Buddha and Mahavira questioned, and Kings, Farmers and Towns covers Asoka and the Ganga valley cities that fed these new ideas.
• Next: Through the Eyes of Travellers moves to outsiders' accounts of India from the eleventh century onwards.
• Later link: Bhakti-Sufi Traditions takes the devotional idea that began with Vaishnavism and Shaivism into the medieval period, and An Imperial Capital shows how later temples grew into elaborate complexes.