The Hindus (45 page)

Far more enduring were Ashoka’s services to Buddhism, which he spoke of not to the people at large but to other Buddhists. He held the Third Buddhist Council, at Pataliputra, and sent out many missionaries. He built a number of stupas and monasteries. His patronage transformed Buddhism from a small, localized sect to a religion that spread throughout India and far beyond its borders. Both Ashoka and his father, Bindusara, patronized not only Buddhists and Jainas but also the Ajivikas, to whom Ashoka’s grandson may have dedicated some caves.
¹⁸
The more general program of
dhamma
continued to support all religions, including Hinduism.

Fast-forward: Myths about Ashoka became current shortly after his own time, when Buddhist texts discoursed upon the Kalinga edict, the confession of cruelty, and the subsequent renunciation of cruelty in favor of Buddhism. This resulted in a fantasy that Ashoka killed his ninety-nine brothers to attain the throne and then visited hell, where he learned how to construct a hell on earth, equipped with fiendish instruments of exquisite torture, which he used on anyone who offended him.
¹⁹
The mythmaking never stopped. In 2001 a film (
Asoka
, directed by Santosh Sivan) depicted a youthful Ashoka (Shahrukh Khan) who, traveling incognito, meets the regulation heroine in a wet sari under a waterfall (Kareena Kapoor). She is, unbeknownst to him, the queen of Kalinga, also traveling incognita. So when he eventually massacres Kalinga and finds her wandering in despair amid the wide-angle carnage, he is very, very sorry that he has killed all those people. And so, after three hours of nonstop slaughter, in the last two minutes of the film he converts to Buddhism.

Despite (or because of) the rise of Buddhism in this period, both Vedic sacrificers and members of the evolving Hindu sects of Vaishnavas and Shaivas (worshipers of Vishnu and Shiva) found new sponsors among the ruling families and court circles.
²⁰
The keystone for the Brahmin establishment was the new economic power of temple cities.
²¹
From about 500 BCE, kings still performed Vedic sacrifices to legitimize their kingship,
²²
but the sectarian worship of particular deities began partially to replace Vedic sacrifice.
²³
As the gods of the Vedic pantheon (Indra, Soma, Agni) faded into the background, Vishnu and Rudra/Shiva, who had played small roles in the Vedas, attracted more and more worshipers. Throughout the
Ramayana
and
Mahabharata
, we encounter people who say they worship a particular god, which is the start of sects and therefore of sectarianism.

Pilgrimage and
puja
are the main forms of worship at this time. Pilgrimage is described at length in the
Mahabharata,
particularly but not only in the “Tour of the Sacred
Tirthas
” (3.80-140). Sacred fords (
tirthas
) are shrines where one can simultaneously cross over (which is what
tirtha
means) the river and the perils of the world of rebirth. As in Ashoka’s edicts, the “conquest of the four corners of the earth” (
dig-vijaya
), originally a martial image, is now applied to a grand tour of pilgrimage to many shrines, circling the world (India), always to the right.
Puja
(from the Dravidian
pu
[“flower”])
²⁴
consisted of making an offering to an image of a god (flowers, fruits, sometimes rice), and/or moving a lamp through the air in a circular pattern, walking around the god, and reciting prayers, such as a litany of the names of the god. Krishna in the
Bhagavad Gita
^fa
says that pious people offer him a leaf or flower or fruit or water (9.26). Sometimes the image of the god is bathed and dressed, and often the remains of the food that has been offered to the god is then distributed to the worshipers as the god’s “favor” or “grace” (
prasada
), a relic of the leftovers (
ucchishta
) from the Vedic sacrifice.

There is rich evidence of the rise of the sectarian gods. The
Mahabharata
includes a Hymn of the Thousand Names of Shiva (13.17), and in 150 BCE Patanjali, the author of the highly influential
Yoga Sutras
, foundational for the Yoga school of philosophy, mentions a worshiper of Shiva who wore animal skins and carried an iron lance. Gold coins from this same period depict Shiva holding a trident and standing in front of a massive bull, presumably the bull that is Shiva’s usual vehicle. In the first century BCE, under the Shungas, artisans produced what is generally regarded as the earliest depiction of the god Shiva: a linga just under five feet high, in Gudimallam, in southeastern Andhra Pradesh. (See page 22.) Its anatomical detail, apart from its size, is highly naturalistic, but on the shaft is carved the figure of Shiva, two-armed and also naturalistic, holding an ax in one hand and the body of a small antelope in the other. His thin garment reveals his own sexual organ (not erect), his hair is matted, and he wears large earrings. He stands upon a dwarf. A frieze from the first or second century CE suggests how such a linga might have been worshiped; it depicts a linga shrine under a tree, surrounded by a railing, just like the actual railing that was discovered beneath the floor in which the image was embedded.
²⁵

The
Mahabharata
tells a story about the circumstances under which Shiva came to be worshiped:

This important myth, retold in various transformations several times in the
Mahabharata
²⁶
and in other texts through the ages, is in part a historical narrative of what did happen in the history of Hinduism: Shiva was not part of the Vedic sacrifice, and then he became part of the Hindu sacrifice. The gods, particularly Daksha (a creator, mentioned in the
Rig Veda
hymn of Aditi [10.72.1-5]), exclude Shiva from their sacrifice because Shiva is the outsider, the Other, the god to whom Vedic sacrifice is not offered; he is not a member of the club of gods that sacrifice to the gods.
²⁷
He appears to Arjuna, in a pivotal episode of the
Mahabharata
, in the form of a naked Kirata, a tribal hunter (3.40.1-5). The myth of Daksha’s sacrifice verifies Shiva’s otherness but modifies it so that Shiva is in fact given a share in some sacrifices, still not part of the Vedic world but the supreme god of the post-Vedic world, at least in the eyes of the Shaivas who tell this myth.
²⁸

In the
Ramayana
, the god Rama is on his way to becoming one of the great gods of sectarian Hinduism. The god Krishna too now enters the world of Sanskrit texts, in the
Mahabharata.
The grammarian Panini, in the fifth century BCE, mentions a Vasudevaka, whom he defines as a devotee (bhakta) of the son of Vasudeva (Krishna), an avatar of Vishnu. This was the time of the beginning of the Bhagavata sects, the worship of Bhagavan, the Lord, a name of Vishnu or Shiva. In 115 BCE, Heliodorus, the son of a Greek from Taxila and himself the Greek ambassador to one of the Shungas,
²⁹
set up a pillar in Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh (not far from the Buddhist stupas at Sanchi), topped by an image of Vishnu’s eagle (the Garuda bird) and an inscription. Heliodorus said he had done this in honor of the son of Vasudeva and that he himself was a Bhagavata.
³⁰
This is significant evidence of the conversion of a non-Indian not to Buddhism but to a new form of Hinduism. These are the early stirrings of communal sects that were beginning to supplement, sometimes to replace, the royal and domestic worship of the Vedic gods.

The
Mahabharata
story may have begun earlier than that of the
Ramayana
, but the text that we have was probably composed in North India between approximately 300 BCE and 300 CE,
^fb
after the Mauryas and before the Guptas. It therefore shares the general chronology of the
Ramayana
,
entre deux empires
, a time of shifting political and economic power.

The two texts have much in common: They are long poems, in Sanskrit (indeed mostly in the same meter), and both are about war. They quote the same sources and tell many of the same stories. But their differences are more interesting. The geographical setting of the
Mahabharata
signals a time earlier than that of the
Ramayana.
The
Mahabharata
is set in and around the earlier capital of Hastinapur,
^fc
already a great city in the age of the Brahmanas, instead of the
Ramayana
’s cities of Rajagriha in Magadha and Kashi in Koshala, which were settled later.
³¹
The
Mahabharata
calls itself the “Fifth Veda” (though so do several other texts) and dresses its story in Vedic trappings (such as ostentatious Vedic sacrifices and encounters with Vedic gods). It looks back to the Brahmanas and tells new versions of the old stories.
³²
Indeed, it looks back beyond the Brahmanas to the Vedic age, and may well preserve many memories of that period, and that place, up in the Punjab. The Painted Gray Ware artifacts discovered at sites identified with locations in the
Mahabharata
may be evidence of the reality of the great
Mahabharata
war, which is sometimes supposed to have occurred between 1000 and 400 BCE,
³³
usually in 950 BCE, the latter being the most reasonable assertion in light of what we know of Vedic history.
^fd

Yet its central plot is really about the building of a great empire far more Mauryan than Vedic. In other ways too it is very much the product of its times, the interregnum between the Mauryan and Gupta empires in the Ganges plain.
³⁴
The text often refers to the quasi-Mauryan
Artha-shastra
, particularly when seeking textual support for hitting a man below the belt or when he’s down (10.1.47). The authors react in nuanced ways to the eddying currents of Ashokan Buddhism and the Brahmin ascendancy of the Shungas, striving somehow to tell the story of the destruction and reconstruction of entire groups or classes of people and, at the same time, to reconcile this political flux with the complex values of the emerging dharmas.

Moreover, according to Indian tradition, the
Ramayana
took place in the second age (right after the Golden Age), when the moral life was still relatively intact, while the
Mahabharata
took place later, at the cusp of the third age and the fourth, the Kali Age, when all hell broke loose. The
Ramayana
imagines an age of order preceding that chaos, while the
Mahabharata
imagines the beginning of the breakdown, the planned obsolescence of the moral world. In keeping with the basic Indian belief that time is degenerative, the
Ramayana
, which is more optimistic and imagines a time of peace and prosperity, is said to precede the
Mahabharata
, which is darker and imagines a time of war and the collapse of civilization.

The
Mahabharata
is generally regarded as having reached its final form later than the
Ramayana
but also to have begun earlier; the
Ramayana
is shorter and in many ways simpler, certainly more coherent, but not necessarily chronologically prior. Both texts were in gestation so long, and in conversation during so much of that gestation period, that each of the great poems precedes the other, like Brahma and Vishnu, or dharma and
moksha
. The
Ramayana
cites the
Mahabharata
from time to time, and the
Mahabharata
devotes an entire long section to retelling the
Ramayana
(3.257-75), a version of the story that is probably later than the one told in the
Ramayana
itself.
³⁵
Characters from each make cameo appearances in the other. Intertextuality here hath made its masterpiece; the two texts may have anxiety (
amhas
) about a lot of things but not about influence.
³⁶
There is a famous Sanskrit poem that can be read, depending upon how you divide the compounds and choose among the multiple meanings of the words, to tell the story of either the
Mahabharata
or the
Ramayana
.
³⁷
In many ways, the two stories are two sides of the same coin.

The
Mahabharata
is a text of about seventy-five thousand verses
^fe
or three million words, some fifteen times the combined length of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or seven times the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
combined, and a hundred times more interesting. (The
Ramayana
is about a third of the length of the
Mahabharata
, some twenty thousand verses against the
Mahabharata
’s seventy-five thousand.) The bare bones of the central story (and there are hundreds of peripheral stories too) could be summarized like this, for our purposes: