The History of the Renaissance World (21 page)

This marked an enormous departure from the past. Buddhist monarchs had always acted as the protectors and patrons of Buddhist monasteries, giving them grants of land and wealth, looking out for their survival. In Buddhist tradition, the monarch was both
cakravartin
(the king through whom
dharma
, all that is good and right, will spread across the universe) and
bodhisattva
(a manifestation of the Buddha himself, an enlightened one who had chosen to remain in the world in order to bring it salvation).

But Parakrama Bahu now claimed a much more pragmatic right. He removed many of the monks from the monasteries altogether and declared them laypeople. Then he ordered all ordinations to the Buddhist priesthood to take place in the capital city; that way, he could supervise them, and block any too-ambitious candidates from even entering the monasteries. And he himself would regulate their behavior.
⁹

Divided and leaderless, the monastic orders could not resist the whirlwind reforms. Within the decade, Buddhist monasticism had been transformed into a powerful attractant force, inclined to pull the country together rather than throw it apart. And the practice of Buddhism itself had been made part of the framework of the new state: transformed, by its royal supervisor, into a secular force.

W
HILE
S
RI
L
ANKA
coalesced into a single nation, the Chola empire was falling apart. For at least a thousand years, India had been a land of many minor kingdoms; for at least a thousand years, attempts to corral them into one fold had yielded temporary, illusory unity, followed by disintegration.

The enormous Chola realm of the twelfth century had been bordered, on the north and the east, by two related dynasties known as the Chalukya. The Eastern Chalukya had been conquered and forced into the empire two centuries before; their cousins, the Western Chalukya had been persuaded and bribed into alliance. But right around the time of Vijaya Bahu’s rebellion, the younger brother of the Western Chalukya king attacked his older sibling and took away his throne by force. Immediately, he broke the tradition of alliance and began to fight against the Chola instead.

A hundred years of warfare followed, and the constant drain of men and money opened gaps in the walls of both empires. A handful of vassals made successful bids for independence: the Hoysala and Seuna, Kakatiya and Kalachuri, all fighting for control of their own lands.

In 1157, the Kalachuri king Bijjala II scored a great victory, capturing the Western Chalukya capital Kalyani and forcing the Western Chalukya king himself to flee. Like Parakrama Bahu to the south, Bijjala II now governed a fragmented kingdom that encompassed more than one previous kingdom. Unlike Parakrama, he was unable to use religion to build a fence around it.

Not long after the conquest of Kalyani, Bijjala II’s trusted prime minister Baladeva died. Following the minister’s own dying recommendation, Bijjala II recruited Baladeva’s nephew as the new prime minister over the freshly expanded kingdom. This nephew, still only in his midtwenties, had already gained a reputation for both piety and intelligence. His name was Basava, and after considering the pros and cons of the appointment for some time, he decided to accept it and moved to Kalyani.
¹⁰

Bijjala had no idea that he had recruited a zealot. According to Basava’s later biography, the
Basava purano
, Basava took the position only because it would give him the power to spread his own particular message. He was a devotee of Shiva; and not just a devotee, but a fanatic. To Basava, Shiva was the
only
deity, sustaining all the world, equally present with and gracious to all men and women. He had gathered around him a sect of like-minded worshippers, all of whom wore a tiny
lingam
suspended from a cord around their necks or left arms. Nicknamed
lingayats
,
lingam
wearers, these disciples devoted themselves to finding a greater love for God; for them, all of their labor in the world was worship of Shiva, who had created the material world and was honored by their work within it. As one follower wrote,

16.2 The Disintegration of the Chola

Let it be only a
kare
leaf,

If it come from dedicated work,

Is worthy to be offered to Linga . . .

For, as work is worship,

God is present in the work which we perform.
¹¹

Simple though it was, the philosophy of the lingayats clashed dangerously with the political realities of twelfth-century India.

Like the Buddhist monasteries of Sri Lanka, the Hindu temples of central India were supported by royal grants of cash and tax-free farmland. The Brahman priests who served in them accepted the king’s money and land; in return, they supported the king’s policies. They held themselves apart in their own caste, marrying within their own kind and keeping their priestly lands inside their own class. But the Brahmans were powerful not only through wealth but also through the temple service itself. They presided over a system of Hindu worship that was complicated and inflexible, and yet was the only way to reach the divine presence. Without Brahman guidance, the Hindu worshipper was lost.
¹²

But the philosophy of Basava and the other lingayats did away with the Brahmans. For them, each worshipper came to Shiva alone, on his own terms, in a personal encounter that was inward and mysterious and needed no temples, no sacrifices, and no Brahmans. The only service Shiva required was dedicated manual labor—the very activity that Brahmans, by law, were to shun. Even more worrying, lingayatism did away with all sorts of other barriers and divisions within Hindu society. Women and men were equally welcome. In the worship of Shiva, there was no class privilege or shame. The lowest ranks of Indian society—those who worked with their hands—were honored rather than shunned. Lingayatism spread rapidly through Bijjala’s kingdom; and it threatened both the Brahman monopoly and the royal authority that the Brahmans spent their lives shoring up.
¹³

Basava short-circuited his own success by getting reckless with the king’s treasury. He spent a good deal of Bijjala’s money on feeding, supporting, and entertaining his fellow lingayats. Around 1167, Bijjala II became aware of the theft. He retaliated by blinding two of the most prominent lingayats, an indirect and unproductive punishment that ultimately killed both the king and his minister. There are at least four different versions of what happened next, but it seems that Bijjala was assassinated by one (or more) indignant lingayats; Basava fled, but Bijjala’s son and successor, Someshvara, sent troops to pursue him. Basava was captured and executed (or, possibly, died accidentally while on the run).

The sect, however, survived. Its disciples became known as
Virasaivas
, and for centuries Virasaivas would challenge the traditional castes and classes of Hinduism.

R
ELIGIOUS REFORM NOTWITHSTANDING
, neither kingdom lasted for long.

In 1186, Parakrama Bahu died after thirty-three gloriously successful years. A string of successors to his throne were, in fairly short order, assassinated, imprisoned, blinded, and exiled; the careful unity Parakrama had constructed fell apart again, and the island lay open to occupation and conquest once more.
¹⁴

Bijjala’s sons Someshvara and Sankama, ruling his kingdom one after the other, kept their father’s dominion together a little longer. But after Sankama’s death, in 1181, two more young sons of Bijjala rose to the throne; and slowly, their inexperience weakened the country beyond repair. The Western Chalukya king Somesvara IV recaptured the old capital of Kalanyi, and the Kalachuri kingdom was reabsorbed into the Western Chalukya; but its days too were numbered. In 1187, Somesvara IV was killed in battle against the former vassal kingom of the Hoysala, and within two years the Seuna and Hoysala and Kakatiya had divided the corpse of the old Chalukya dominon among themselves.
¹⁵

Chapter Seventeen

Conquest of the Willing

Between 1150 and 1202,
the Hindu dynasty of the Sena overthrows the Buddhist kingdom of the
Palas and, in its zeal, accidentally opens the door to Islam

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY
, a subject prince in northeastern India named Vijay Sen finished throwing off the restraints of his masters.
*

This was nothing new. For at least a thousand years, the kingdoms of the subcontinent had preserved a family likeness in the manner of their rising and falling. A warrior would conquer himself a kingdom by beating the nearby clan leaders into submission; he would found a dynasty, and his sons and grandsons would rule the stitched-together realm by continually persuading, bribing, and bashing the restless chiefs under them to fall back into line. The kingdom would expand; the king would hand over more and more governing power to his deputies in the far-flung areas of his land; and, inevitably, one of those deputies would rebel against his distant overlord and conquer himself a kingdom by beating the nearby clan leaders into submission.

As often as not, the new dynasty was a cousin of the old; and so sharp lines of distinction between them are hard to draw. More often than not, the new kingdom shared its language, its customs, its religion, and its stories with its predecessor. But Vijay Sen gave the ancient pattern a tweak.

His overlord was Ramapala, king of the Pala empire. The Palas had ruled in the eastern Ganges delta (an area often given the geographical name of “Bengal”) since the eighth century. Tradition held that the dynasty’s founder, Gopala, had been elected by his fellow commoners to bring peace and justice to the delta; it had been, says an inscription commemorating Gopala’s reign, a state ruled only by “the Law of the Fishes,” with the large and powerful devouring the weak in a sea of chaos.
¹

Gopala was a devout Buddhist and spent a good part of his twenty-five-year rule building temples and establishing religious schools to guide his people into the right path. The Buddhism of the Palas was wide and flexible. Like the classical Buddhism of earlier centuries, it taught that all physical things are transient, and that only enlightenment could reveal the physical world as the unreal and passing thing it is.
*
But the Palas also followed teachings and practices from several different strands of Buddhist thought, made use of sacred scriptures written in many different languages, and drew rituals from Hinduism into the circle of their Buddhist orthodoxy.
²