Karma

Chapter 2: Karma in and after Greater Magadha Jainism - Ajivikism - Knowledge of the Self - Buddhism

ChaPter 2 Karma in and after Greater magadha The region east of the Vedic homeland, that is, east of the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna, in the eastern Ganges plane, may conveniently be called Greater Magadha. It saw the appearance of a number of religious currents during the centuries around the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. We will consider—after some introductory remarks about Greater Magadha—Jainism, Ajivikism, those who saw in knowledge of the self the key to the highest goal, and Buddhism. Magadha was the name of a kingdom in the eastern Ganges valley. In the fourth century B.C.E. it became the center of an empire that at its height unified most of the Indian subcontinent, but Magadha and its surrounding regions—jointly to be referred to as Greater Magadha—was characterized by its own culture even before the creation of this empire and for some time after its collapse. It was in this area that urbanization took off again from approximately 500 B.C.E. onward (after the disappearance of the so-called Indus civilization more than a thousand years earlier). The culture of Greater Magadha was in many respects different from Vedic culture, whose heartland was situated to its west. The two cultures could not but come in close contact, especially when the rulers of Magadha expanded their kingdom and included the Vedic heartland and much else into their empire (which reached its greatest extent under the Maurya emperor Ashoka). The resulting confrontation and sometimes assimilation of the two cultures constitutes the background against which much of the subsequent history of Indian culture has to be understood. 8 karma One of the most distinctive features of the culture of Greater Magadha was the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution. This explains why the religious movements that were based on this belief originated here. The best known of these religious movements are Jainism, Buddhism, and Ajivikism. The way in which this belief came to be adopted in Brahmanism, in spite of resistance that took many centuries to dissipate, will be explained in a later chapter. Note here that this belief came to be thought of in the Brahmanical tradition (and in modern scholarship until recently) as an inherent and inseparable part of it. The cyclic vision of time—in which creations and destructions of the universe succeed each other in a beginningless and endless sequence—is another notion that originally belonged to Greater Magadha, only to be subsequently adopted and claimed as its own by Brahmanism. This vision is to be distinguished from the belief in a beginningless and endless sequence of births and deaths of sentient beings, but the parallelism between the two is easy to see. Funerary practices, too, opposed the culture of Greater Magadha to Vedic culture. The inhabitants of Greater Magadha built round funerary tombs for their dead; it is possible that dead bodies were placed in those tombs, without prior incineration, but this is not certain . The custom survives in the stupas of the Buddhists and Jainas, and in the so-called samadhis (funerary constructions) built for certain Hindu saints until today. Brahmanism absorbed in due time the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution (see below) but never accepted the funerary practices of its eastern neighbors, except in the exceptional case of certain Hindu saints. There are good reasons to assume that Ayurveda, the classical form of Indian medicine, had its roots in the culture of Greater Magadha. Unlike the Vedic medical tradition, which heavily relied on sorcery, spells, and amulets, the medical tradition prevalent in Greater Magadha prepared and used drugs, often in ointments and plasters. What is more, the idea of restoring the balance of bodily fluids, central to classical Ayurveda, also appears to derive from the culture of Greater Magadha. As in the case of other cultural features (think of rebirth and karmic retribution), the medical tradition of Greater Magadha found its way into Brahmanical medicine and lived Karma in and after Greater Magadha 9 on as part of Ayurveda, whose very name (note the part -veda) bears testimony to the unjustified Brahmanical claim that this tradition was originally theirs. The influence of Greater Magadha on the subsequent cultural and religious history of South Asia is hard to overestimate and may include many more features than the ones here enumerated. Unfortunately this culture left us virtually no textual sources apart...