What then unified/cohered Buddhism? Was it Indianness?

Its Indian ideas, as developed both in India and further afield, is the first answer. So what are its Indian ideas? The idea of karma is one. The earliest Indian Buddhists attempted to understand and write about Buddhism in a context of Indian ideas. They sought to produce a ‘higher’ dharma (religion), an abhidharma (an overarching philosophy).

No split comparable to the split between religions like Christianity and Islam and Western philosophy occurred in India in a comparable period. Another word for religion in India today besides dharma is darsana which literally means “view” and may also mean any reasoned philosophical view. I will seek to explain how Buddhist philosophy is a version of Indian social and political philosophy in these posts (and also note its connections today to international non-harm and environmentalist movements). In its earliest centuries Buddhism was a ‘view’ that existed along with at least six major orthodox Hindu ‘views’ (i.e. views that accepted the Veda as authorities) and other unorthodox views such as the views of the grammarians, the Jaina, the materialists and the sceptics.

Was Siddhartha a reformer of Hinduism, the religion? There is some truth to this claim but we mustn’t confuse the Hinduism of today with the Hinduism of his time and we must understand what the idea of Hinduism is and was. The major gods of Hinduism today (e.g. Vishnu and Shiva) were not well known in his time, if at all. A major popular Hindu scripture of today, the Bhagavad Gita, introduced Krishna for the first time after the death of Siddhartha. Much of today’s Hindu philosophy hadn’t been developed and the temples, pilgrimage and iconography of today weren’t yet part of so-called Hinduism while Siddhartha lived. Moreover the very idea of Hinduism as one religion is really a 19^th Century British invention.

There can be said to have been two streams within the ‘Hinduism’ that Siddhartha would have known if we can define it as the sum of his indigenous Indian religious milieus.

The Bramana stream (Brahmanism) was a stream dominated by a caste and class of Brahmin priestly families and concerned with propitiation of the gods and the promotion of worldly harmony by rituals. Divine forces or powers (called devas) were said to need this harmonisation by humans. The families handed down this knowledge (Veda) as scriptures. The one that originated earliest was called the Rgveda. Devas could exist in our minds, our bodies, in fires (fire devas were called Agni), in winds, in the moon, the stars and the planets, in fact, anywhere, and in movements that were both actual and arguably metaphorical. The proper regulation of society (done by the Brahmans) was called rta.

The Sramana (Strivers) stream sought a transcendental overcoming of this life. They were the renunciates that most interested Siddhartha. They sought to get away from the rta and from society and its Brahman values and strove for liberation (moksa) from the world itself.

Generally corresponding with this division were two attitudes to the cosmos but especially to the world and the world of humanity, the Pravriti (engagement – turning towards) of the Bramana stream and the Nivriti (disengagement – turning away) of the Strivers. It was also possible, however, to be of the Bramana stream and yet still cultivate Nivriti. It was accepted that these streams and attitudes could all coexist in Indian thought. Both views also survived into Buddhism.

In essence, the first view held that the earth was basically a good thing. It was divinely created and divinely inhabited, after all. The devas had also pronounced that society was good. As a result, humans owed a debt of gratitude from birth as their lives were deemed things of value and they were thus obliged to be good people and contribute to society as required by the priests for the betterment of the world order.

In the second view, the earth was nothing but a thing of repeated death and rebirth, the domain of the ravages of time, decay, suffering, illusions, destruction and other bad things, to be overcome in some way if possible. It naturally dwelt on the idea of reincarnation and its meanings.

The second answer to how Buddhism cohered in its earliest context is its canonical ideas (and those ideas drew on Hindu ones especially of the Nivriti persuasion). Prominent among these is the idea from the three major canons (in Pali, Chinese and Tibetan) that all Buddhists accept: the idea of the Four Noble Truths, samudaya, dukkha, nirvana and marga (path or road), that happen to roughly correspond with the mainly Nivriti ideas of karma, samsara, moksa and yoga.

Karma (samudaya) is the idea that the universe operates under a law of moral cause and effect. The idea is sometimes expressed with a metaphor, actions being seeds for results which are ‘germinated’ when conditions are right. The results may arrive in a future life or in the current life of the actor. Rebirths as punishments such as being born in a hellish realm or as ghosts or unfortunate dumb animals or creatures are features of this view of the cosmos.

Good karma alone was held to not be sufficient to end the reincarnation cycle; it could lead to achievement of blissful godhead or deva-head, though, but even those ended in death eventually, often after millions of years. Buddhist literature details how devas come to die, not aware until the last moment of their impending death (preceded by the fading of flowers around them, the development of body odour and being consequently shunned by other devas equally blissfully unaware that this will one day be their own fate also).

Buddhist thought given to what else could be done to achieve a final end besides good karma led to the conclusion that humanity is best placed of all beings to achieve it: the gods are too self-satisfied, ghosts and those in hell realms are too preoccupied with being tormented and animals are too unintelligent and dumb. It’s thus achieved in part by apprehending a reality not accessible to the other classes of being, becoming aware of reality. Humans thus have, or are at least able to cultivate, agency brought about by this cultivated awareness that allows them the opportunity to eventually overcome their karmic habits and thereby karma itself.

Samsara (dukkha) is the cycle of birth and rebirth itself that karma causes (and its enveloping cosmos that the Nivriti generally despise so). As mentioned, it’s really up to humans to end it, according to Buddhists (by the Buddhist marga).

Yoga (marga for Buddhists) is the name given to any spiritual discipline designed to cultivate the awareness that can ultimately lead to this end of samsara, Moksa or nirvana.

Moksa (liberation from samsara) - Nirvana for Buddhists - is the end of samsara itself for the soul concerned.

So the renunciates already had these ideas down and yoga (marga) and moksa (nirvana) was their goal, too, but of course had subtly different beliefs and hence also subtle differences in their aims.

Buddhists focused on the idea that suffering in some form is what leads to rebirth, karma (samudaya) was its cause, samsara (dukkha) was the experience of it (even when serenely lying on a beautiful beach the reality that we will not always be there is a form of suffering), yoga (marga, or the Buddhist eightfold method or path) was the path to ending it and moksa (nirvana) was its end.

Bad karma is said to be either the result of greed, hate/aversion or delusion and in the related cosmology the place and form of rebirth is believed to be directly related to the balance between these attitudes in the current life. Karma is thus defined by intention so inadvertent killing of an ant, for example, receives a lesser penalty than deliberately killing one (provided due care is taken not to kill ants, of course).

Some Context and an Overview

So now let’s begin with some context for what came to be the Buddhist worldview, its cosmology, and its metaphysics. This is in some ways central to Buddhist philosophy as the inner workings of the human are often regarded by it as microcosmic of th
ese universal “realities” (in other ways arguably not, as this was not a focus of Siddhartha at all, but it was certainly a context of his thoughts and of course of the thoughts of later Buddhist philosophers).

To do that context provision, here now begins a history of Indian religion and the historic Buddha’s place in it. In overview, Siddhartha propounded his ideas in a relatively narrow space (if still significant) of the Ganges valley and Nepalese civilisation areas. He had first joined a renunciate movement that argued that an end to all suffering was possible to renunciates. Upon realising what came to be the tenets of Buddhism, at Bodhigaya, he taught widely in north-east India after some apparent hesitation. At first he taught others of the renunciate movement as he naturally expected them to share more of his understanding and thus worldview but he eventually encouraged a large following of both religious orders (both monks and nuns) as well as laypeople. He taught (mainly to monks (Bhikkhus) and nuns (Bhikkhunis)) for the remaining 45 odd years of his life.

Around the time of his death, several of his major followers sought to collect all of his teachings together in one place. This was not in written form but a somewhat systematic oral collection in the form of an organised recitation (because of the conditions, literacywise, of the time).

Buddhism was first really widely popularised in India by a king Asoka, the first major Buddhist king, in the 3^rd Century BCE – around two centuries after Siddhartha ‘died’ (as a non-Buddhist I would say died but the meaning of his ‘death’ is not necessarily seen as straightforward within Buddhism). Asoka first converted to Buddhism and then united most of India under his rule and proselytised for Buddhism as far as Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Even during this time no comprehensive written version of any major collection of Buddha’s teachings was made (the first accepted written canon was compiled in the Pali language in Sri Lanka two centuries later in the 1^st Century BCE.

Sri Lankan Buddhism eventually came to be known as Theravada. Theravada means “elders’ doctrine” (so- called on account of claiming to have the oldest universally accepted written versions of Buddhist ideas as its basis, as mentioned above). It spread to Southeast Asia including parts of Vietnam and possibly southern China.

What later came to be the dominant Indian form is today known as Mahayana (meaning “great vehicle” for reasons I will explain later – early practitioners called it vaipulya – expanded). This spread to Afghanistan and via the Silk Route as far as Korea and Japan (and from there also to parts of Vietnam). Important archaeological written artefacts buried near Dun Huang in both Sanskrit and Tibetan reveal how the transfer of views along the Silk Road and from Tibet occurred:The major orthodox Mahayana canon that we have today was eventually written in Chinese. This form of Buddhism was dominant in India until at least the 4^th and 5^th Centuries CE. An additional variation is a form of Mahayana called Vajrayana that achieved popularity especially in Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. It appears to have spread there in two main waves from India in the 7^th and 11^th Centuries when Buddhism was under particular threat there (first from Islamic and then from Hindu fanaticism). A Tibetan canon appears to have been translated from Sanskrit writings not part of any other canon. There is also a Mongolian canon but it is substantially the Tibetan canon translated into Mongolian.