The tradition of the Brahmins, a key component of mainstream
Hindu
religion, preserves not just the four Vedas but a great variety of
later Sanskrit texts of diverse content. For example ancient Indian
atomism promotes the idea that matter is made up of atoms. Buddhism
eventually disappeared in India itself, but a large Buddhist literature
originally composed there still survives among Buddhists in Ceylon and
elsewhere in a variety of languages. Jainism, a religious movement of
the same character as Buddhism but slightly older, is today confined to
two widely separated populations in India; one of them has preserved a
literary heritage reaching back into the first millennium B.C. The
documentation for the religious history of ancient India is thus as
rich as that for its political history is poor. What this material
suffers from,is a certain historical disembodiment. For example, the
Buddhist scriptures of Ceylon are in an Indo-Aryan language known as
Pali, which indicates that this must once have been the vernacular
language of real people living in a real place, but we can only guess
where in northern India that might have been.
The survival of Indian Buddhist texts outside India
implies the spread
of Indian civilization to regions beyond the subcontinent. This did not
involve conquest. The northwest, in fact, has always been a gateway
through which foreigners invade India, and never the other way around.
Instead, the process seems to have been rather similar to the reception
of north Indian culture in the south.
The enduring legacy of Indian influence in the Asian
interior was the
spread of Buddhism. This process of borrowing had brought Buddhism
from northwest India around the top of Tibet to the borders of China.
In this region we have evidence from the second century A.D. of
culturally Indianized states among peoples that had previously lacked
literate culture. Several centuries later something similar was to
happen in Tibet.
In roughly the same period, Indian civilization began
to make its
influence felt in parts of Southeast Asia. The precondition for this
was the rapid development of long-distance trade on the Indian Ocean,
dramatically illustrated by the presence of Roman artifacts at Go Oc Eo
in what is now Vietnam (including a gold medallion of the emperor
Antoninus Pius dating from A.D. 152). As in southern India, the process
meant a dramatic increase in employment opportunities for Brahmins of
fortune. A fifth-century Chinese source mentions the presence in one
Southeast Asian kingdom of over a thousand Indian Brahmins, to whom the
local people would give their daughters in marriage. But there seems to
have been less Indianization of society at large. Unlike the peoples
of the Indian south, those of Southeast Asia do not have well-
developed caste systems. So it was primarily the elites and rulers of
the region who had a use for Indian civilization. This use was
nevertheless considerable. Inscriptions attest the emergence of
Indianized states from the third century A.D., and by the end of the
millennium numerous such states had appeared on the mainland and some
of the islands.
We can end this survey by noting an interesting asymmetry
about the
export of Indian culture. It achieved its successes to the east, and
not to the west. To the east, peoples whose geographical locations gave
them a choice between Indian and Chinese culture overwhelmingly chose
Indian. The Tibetans provide a further example of this preference: we
know that they were at one time interested in both cultures, but they
later dropped the Chinese option.
By contrast, there was no such spread of Indian culture
to the west.
The Near East, of course, already had literate culture, just as China
did; but the massive spread of Buddhism in China has no parallel in the
Near East, even though Mani respectfully included the Buddha in hIndia
is a part of the old supercontinent of Gondwana that has joined
Eurasia. India separated from the rest of Gondwana over a hundred
million years ago, and until it collided with Eurasia, about fifty
million years ago, it was an island. This is reflected in that the
Indian subcontinent is a peninsula, not a land bridge. There are
nevertheless some broad physical similarities with the Near East. Like
the southern Near East, India overall is relatively flat. Inland from
the coastal plains of the south there are mountain ranges arising from
the rifting that brought the region into being, and between them are
the highlands of the interior. But there is nothing in the south to
compare in altitude to the combination of mountains and plateau by
which India is closed off to the north. Much as in the northern Near
East, this massive uplifting is the product not of rifting but of
collision. Yet the scale of the uplifting dwarfs anything the Near East
has to show; indeed, there may have been nothing on earth to match it
in the last half billion years. By contrast, it is between the northern
mountains and the southern highlands that India is at its lowest and
flattest, with alluvial plains comparable to those of Mesopotamia.
