A key development in the northeast around the fifth
century B.C. was
the emergence of Buddhism. Like other movements of the day that have
left less of a mark on history, Buddhism was at heart a philosophy
meant for ascetics who-like the Buddha himself-had renounced the world
and wished only to be rid of it. For now we can leave aside the
doctrinal content of this philosophy. What needs saying here is that
the history of Buddhism (and not only Buddhism) highlights the fact
that renouncing the world can be an effective technique for flourishing
in it. In the first place, Buddhist ascetics were not, for the most
part, loners. Instead, the founder left behind him a community of monks
(to which he was persuaded, much against his better judgment, to add
nuns). The community failed to hold together in the centuries after his
death, despite a series of councils; but the various sects into which
it split conformed to the same basic organizational pattern. Just as in
Christianity, the existence of monks led to monasteries, and
monasteries with some embarrassment became centers of wealth and power.
What generated the wealth and power was the success with which the
monks engaged the world they had renounced. They were adept at securing
the patronage of rulers, who for a millennium found Buddhist monks no
less eligible than Brahmins as providers of the religious endorsement
without which it is hard for a king to look good. At the same time they
ministered to the religious needs and wants of the laity, which was in
no more hurry to renounce the world than its rulers were. In these
respects the Buddhists were not so much different from their
competitors (the Jainas, for example) as more successful; already at
the second council, according to tradition, the main issue was whether
monks could accept donations of gold and silver.
The Buddhists also did something their competitors
did not do: they
exported their religion beyond the frontiers of India. Anyone who
renounces the world is free to disentangle himself from the parochial
loyalties of the society he professes to abandon. Renouncers were thus
under no obligation to respect ties of caste, ethnicity, or language.
It was the Buddhists who made effective use of this freedom; to spread
their religion, they first translated the massive literature they
transmitted into several Indo-Aryan languages, and in due course they
rendered it into such exotic tongues as Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongol.
The Buddha, it was later said, could express everything he wished in
any language whatever. At the same time the Buddhist missionaries had
no quarrel with the native gods of the societies into which they moved.
Hence, as we will see, Buddhism played a prominent role in the export
of Indian civilization.
The culture that emergence in the northeast was conservative.
It
perpetuated the Aryan tradition of the northwest, as is clear from the
prevalence of Indo-Aryan The Aryan heritage, filtered through the urban
civilization of the Gangetic plains, was now set to become the dominant
cultural tradition of the entire subcontinent.
