Peace (13 page)

To his family's dismay, he deserted the palace and began practicing in the most ascetic veins of Hinduism, through which he discovered that denying the spirit, mind and body can be as detrimental to inner peace as indulging them. The “middle path” between these two extremes he followed from then on was the basis of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path and the Three Jewels that govern much of Buddhist life. These he began to preach after becoming Buddha, or “enlightened one,” which is said to have occurred in one night as he meditated under a tree. His first disciples quote him saying that the Truths together lead “to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment.”
³
Dukkha, the central tenet of these Truths, is usually reduced in English to suffering, but is more insightfully understood as the deeper meaning of Siddhartha's three sights: a needless inhibition of inner and social peace. In sum, the Truths are: Dukkha is universal and is entangled in humanity's materiality, sensory perception, cognition, habits and experience, the five aggregates; Dukkha's origins lie in expectations and attachments, to the five aggregates or anything else of this world; the cessation of Dukkha, or the state of enlightened peace Buddha reached (Nirvana), is possible for all; and the way to the cessation of Dukkha is the Eightfold Path. The Truths are principles more than prescriptions, like the Eightfold Path, which represents the Buddhist perspective on pacific wisdom, conduct and discipline.

Each of Path's eight elements are qualified as
samyanc
, usually translated as “right,” but which more accurately combines the meanings of
completeness and perfection, in the sense of both a state of being and a process:

1.  
Understanding
of the Four Noble Truths and of the impermanence of Dukkha;

2.  
Intention
, a commitment to non-violence and the pursuit of enlightenment;

3.  
Speech
, to abstain from lying and divisive discourse, as well as idle chatter;

4.  
Action
, specifically to refrain from killing, stealing and intoxicants;

5.  
Livelihood
, not engaging in a profession that is violent or dishonest;

6.  
Effort
, to always show goodwill and positivity while rejecting their opposites;

7.  
Mindfulness
, being alert, clear- and open-minded to one's being in the world around; and

8.  
Concentration
, the practice of meditation both as an activity and as a way of life.

Of all the overtly peaceful religious tenets ever proposed, the Path is among the simplest and most directly applicable in everyday life. It requires tremendous dedication but, like the Socratic Methods of peace, is democratic in that anyone can follow it – which in Buddha's time meant regardless of caste, a radical religious move. Yet, the Path has not once been used to justify war or conflict. Although individual and groups of Buddhists have participated in wars, its internal logic and external remedies preclude it from being so abused. The Path is also the cornerstone of Buddhism's Three Jewels: the Dharma or “teachings,” the Buddha who originally taught them, and the Sangha or sodalities of enlightened who have ever since provided guidance to Buddhist individuals and the societies in which they lived.

Buddhism's pacific power is nowhere more evident in the Ancient East than in the life of Emperor Ashoka (
c
. 304–232 BCE), who came to rule lands that stretched from modern Iran to Bengal. However, had he not lived past middle age, he certainly would not have been granted the honorary title Beloved of the Gods. His father, ruler of the largest empire in Indian history, was nicknamed Slayer of Enemies, and emulating him Ashoka's abilities as a warrior-statesman made him popular throughout the empire. When, seeking his embarrassment, his elder brother and heir to the throne sent him to govern a region ripe for war, fighting ceased upon his arrival. But as it resumed, Ashoka ordered an all-too successful suppressive massacre, for which he was ostracized, a form of counter-dominant behavior also practiced by Ancient Greeks. Called back from exile to quell a rebellion against his father, who died soon after, Ashoka
was injured and taken into hiding so as not to be killed by his brothers. The care he received from a Sangha was his first exposure to Buddha's peaceful principles. They did not leave an immediate impression, for when he was well enough he led another massacre, this time of the city in which his brothers lived (modern Patna), killing them off one by one. Ashoka, now Emperor by default, subjected peoples and lands beyond even his father's dreams, enriching the Empire but also earning him the moniker Chandashoka, the Cruel. These campaigns culminated in the Kalinga War (
c
. 265 BCE), a kingdom which refused to submit to Chandashoka. His army butchered 100,000 Kalingians and displaced as many. Amidst the ruins, he realized all the suffering he had caused, screaming the adage “What have I done?” in horror. Tormented, he went sleepless for days – until he recalled the benevolence the Sangha once bestowed.

From that day on, he committed himself not only to the Eightfold Path as his personal way of life, but also adopted it as his public policy. Chandashoka soon came to be known as Dharmashoka, the Good Teacher. The basis of his policy was
ahimsa
or non-violence towards humans and animals, a Hindu concept adapted by Janaism, Buddhism and Gandhi in the twentieth century. Dharmashoka prohibited outright as well as structural violence, abolishing slavery, outlawing discrimination based on caste and promoting vegetarianism. Reinvigorating the unity in diversity of Ancient Indian polytheism, he set up networks of free hostels for pilgrims of all faiths. He founded institutions of higher learning for agriculture, handicraft and spiritual studies, and secured the basic needs by sanitation, hospitals and roads, as did the partnership-modeled Vedic societies of old. He also built thousands of Stupas, temple-mounds of earth around which Buddhist devotees are meant to walk in meditation (as at Sanchi) as well as Viharas, housing for the Sangha who had put him on the Path of non-violence for the rest of his reign. These peaceful objectives and achievements, to which archaeological remains attest, are also described in Ashoka's eminent Edicts, which harken back to Hammurabi. Inscribed in languages from Pali to Aramaic on columns scattered across and beyond his vast empire, his Edicts are one of the earliest and widest known multilingual disseminations of universal isonomic law. To spread the Dharma, he sent diplomatic missions as far as Greece and Egypt in the West and modern Sri Lanka and Thailand in the East, the first ruler in recorded history to do so on such a scale. When the modern Indian state gained independence from Britain in 1949, the symbol of Ashoka's transformation from feared warmonger to beloved peacemaker, an octagonal crest representing the Eightfold Path placed atop an Edictal column, was adopted as the emblem on its flag.

Buddhism's peaceful proliferation can also be attributed to Ashoka, but requires a brief retrogression to be understood. Shortly after Buddha
passed, a First Council of the Sangha was held to establish his teachings. A Second Council of this still small, regional religion was held a century later to determine the Sangha Code's applicability. The principal point of contention was whether it should be relaxed to attract more lay practitioners; the Council held that it should not, originating the subsequent schism between the Mahayana (“Greater Vehicle”) schools which successfully spread Buddhism by contravening the Second Council's decree, and the Hinayana (“Lesser Vehicle”) schools which did so by following it, each non-violently to the other and converts. The Ashoka-sponsored Third Council (250 BCE) sought to reunite the growing number of schools, write the Dharma down for the first time, and organize missions to spread Buddhism around the known world. All Ashoka's goals, except reunification, were achieved. A benefit of remaining rifts was that priests propagated their own schools instead of a centrally determined one, allowing for localizations that would have otherwise been limited or prohibited. Thanks to a commitment to non-violence, these Councils were peaceable despite their disputed resolutions, an example their delegates abroad followed. For centuries after Ashoka's peaceful proselytizing, Buddhism flourished in almost as many forms as places reached. Hinayana sects like Theravada spread west to modern Iran and Turkey, and Southeast to Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. Mahayana sects were slower-moving but reached even farther east, including to Korea and Japan, then annexes of Imperial China.

Harmonies and Antinomies of Ancient China

Ancient China's demographic diversity and geographical immensity made harmony and authority two necessary peace principles of its political systems from their earliest days, but also made them so difficult to implement. Family and community were always and everywhere the bedrock of Ancient Chinese societies; it is only with the development of imperial political and administrative infrastructures that various peace-oriented codes came to compete for individual adherents as for social and collective control. The
Records of the Grand Historian
, attributed to second century BCE historiographer Sima Qian, and the
Bamboo Annals
, an anonymous chronicle of a slightly later date, present peace as central to the origins of Ancient China. Their historicity, like that of the records of early Rome, is questionable at best, and of less import than the ideas about peace they conveyed to those influenced by them. According to these works, the world was at first ruled by the Three Sovereigns, demigods who in their infinite insight presided over a period of universal
harmony between all the cosmos' constituents: the Heavenly Sovereign, the Earthly Sovereign, and the Human Sovereign. They not only ruled benevolently in their own realms but together kept a perfect balance between them.

Among the gifts they gave to humanity were fire, fishing, agriculture and writing, the last two being of special relevance to the history of peace. Archaeologists date the first of these developments to
c
. 7000 BCE. The words for agriculture and rice cultivation are synonymous in old Chinese script, suggesting that rice was a long-time staple. More than other crops, cultivating rice in nutritional quantities for small or large societies required cooperation, coordination, social cohesion and hydrological expertise, which is why Confucius later wrote that “from agriculture social harmony and peace arise.”
⁴
Thus, while warfare seems to permeate Ancient Chinese history, continuity in rice cultivation is a strong reminder that general populations not only needed peace to survive, but in large measure helped create, recreate and sustain it. That rice spread throughout Asia and India before the times of the Ancient Greeks is also a sign that vast trading, political and other cooperative networks must have existed, although little about them is known. Chinese ideograms developed from inscriptions on bones used in wizards' divinations for, among other purposes, war and peace. The modern Mandarin characters for social peace, the etymologies of which can be traced back to these times, are shown on the following page. The left character (
hé
) on its own means: together with, harmony or union. The right one on its own (
píng
) means: flat, level, equal, to make the same score or to tie. The character for peace in another sense is
n
, meaning content, calm, still, quiet or to pacify, ideas as challenging to trace historically as their characters can be for foreigners to write.

The time of the Three Sovereigns passed when the Five Emperors came to power halfway through the third millennium by Qian's account. They were not demigods but sage kings who were patrons of medicine, music, calligraphy, astronomy and hydrology, all of which were practiced in and for peace. Armed conflicts occurred in this period, but the wisdom of the Five Emperors prevented as well as resolved them. Legends surrounding the Yellow Emperor, first of the Five and the mythical founder of the future Han Dynasty, relate that he used fog to fight aggressors, in which he found their leader with a special compass, sparing the soldiers. Early commentators claim that he limited warfare to achieve lasting victories and fostered peace to make his people prosperous and obedient. Emperor Shun, the last of the Five, is said to have met hostility from his family and subjects, yet continued to love and care for them until the day he died. Above all, later commentators considered the Five Emperors to be moral models for current heads of states. Later political treaties on the Yellow
Emperor's rule prescribe that “Only in case of necessity will [sage rulers like him] undertake military actions,” as warfare harms the economy, making people discontent and reproachful of their rulers.
⁵
However, these treaties also emphasize that a state without a strong army will not be able to survive. Tradition has it that the Fifth Emperor abdicated in favor of his best civil servant, Yu. Succeeding where his father had failed, Yu had expertly diverted floods for years, saving many lives and livelihoods. As a Qing emperor three thousand years later paid homage: