The State in Ancient India: A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times c10.2

Language: English

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The literary productions of the Brâhmaṇas—the Dharma Sûtras, the Epics and later, the Dharma Śâstras—studiously ignore the heretical movements which had arisen or were flourishing contemporaneously. Each school follows its own tradition in a cloister or grove. None can be taken as an exact reflection of the totality of political circumstances in any given epoch. The Brahmanic data are usefully supplemented by Buddhist tradition. The faith of Gautama Buddha whose career lay between the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ first took root in Magadha. There as in some neighbouring districts Brahmanic influence was less strong than anywhere else in North India. In the orthodox computation, Kâśi and Magadha are excluded from Brahmarṣideśa. Manu includes Magadhas and Videhas in his list of mixed castes.¹ In the course of a few centuries the Buddhists had produced a literature which challenges comparison with that of the Brâhmaṇas. The word of the Buddha, according to the orthodox tradition, is contained in the Tripiṭaka or the Three Baskets: (1) Sutta, comprising the five Nikâyas or collections, (2) Vinaya, giving rules of monastic life for monks and nuns in five works, the Pâtimokkha, Mahâvagga, Cullavagga, Suttavibhaṅga and Parivara and (3) Abhidhamma, comparatively inferior, which discusses metaphysics in seven compendiums.

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This extensive canon exists in two versions: (1) in Pâli, the hieratic language of the Buddhists of Ceylon, Siam and Burma, and (2) in Sanskrit or ‘mixed’ Sanskrit, the sacred idiom of Buddhism in Nepâl, Tibet, and, in a way, also China and Japan. The dates of these works, however, are as doubtful as those of the Brahmanical Sûtras or Epics. Rhys Davids, who relied chiefly on the Pâli canon and tradition, worked on the hypothesis that the four Nikâyas—the Dîgha or Long, the Majjhima or Middle, Saṃyutta or Miscellaneous and Aṅguttara or Numerical—representing the sayings of the Buddha, were put together, “out of older material at a period about half-way between the death of the Buddha, and the accession of Aśoka,” that is, in the fourth century B.C. Other sayings, ascribed mostly to the Buddha’s disciples, were put into a supplementary fifth Nikâya, the Khuddaka or minor collection, to which additions were made as late as the reign of Aśoka. On the whole, both Rhys Davids and Oldenberg referred the Vinaya and Sutta Piṭakas to about the fourth century B.C. But the scheme is no longer accepted. The dates of the Buddhist councils themselves, including that of the third one believed to have been held under the auspices of Aśoka about 247 B.C., have been called in question.¹ The chronology of the Ceylonese tradition is now almost entirely set aside.

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It is argued that the whole Buddhist canon is posterior to Aśoka and could not have taken shape prior to the second or first century before Christ. Sylvain Lévi and others have shown that the Pâli idiom itself, in which the southern canon is composed, did not arise till sometime after Aśoka. The great Mauryan emperor does not use it in his Edicts. The Buddha as well as his contemporary Mahâvira, the founder or renovator of Jainism, must have preached in some Prâkṛit language, Mâgadhî or Ardha-Mâgadhî. It is impossible to assign any more specific dates to Buddhist scriptures. It is certain that they do not represent the work of a single mind or generation. It is also certain that the Pâli version is earlier than the Sanskrit.¹ The political data which this literature can be pressed to yield have therefore to be used with the utmost caution. Generally, they fall into two classes, either furnishing the names of old states, kings or ministers and recording their deeds, or incidentally reflecting the working of institutions. Facts of the former character are best reserved for treatment in connection with regular political history. The inferential data must be dealt with like those of the Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyaṇa. They are particularly abundant in that portion of the Khuddaka Nikâya which gives the Jâtakas, the 547 stories of the Buddha’s previous births and which is one of the noblest monuments of Buddhist literature.

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Tradition will have it that these stories were taken by the royal missionary Mahinda to Ceylon during the reign of Aśoka in the third century B.C. They were translated from the Pâli into Simhalese and back into Pâli by Buddhaghośa in the fifth century A.D. It is in this translation of a translation that the Jâtakas have come down to us. In accordance with the tradition they were long believed to mirror the thought and conditions which prevailed before the time of the Buddha. Richard Fick assigned them, as a whole, to the age of Buddha, remarking that "many of the Jâtakas are undoubtedly very old and belong, so far as their origin is concerned, to the pre-Buddhistic period."' Rhys Davids inclines definitely to the pre-Buddhistic period.² In the last generation of scholars, Max Müller alone perceived that for the text of the Jâtakas we must, strictly speaking, be satisfied with the time of Vattagâmani, 88—76 B.C.³ In the light of the latest researches, the position may be summed up in the words of Keith: "The Jâtaka book is a strange conglomeration of old and new verses with new prose; some of its tales, as we know from Buddhist sculpture and a stray citation or two, go back to the Aśokan epoch or shortly after; as folklore its contents are often of undeniable age, but as Buddhist fables their antiquity is uncertain."⁴ So, the Jâtaka material is to be treated as partly pre-Mauryan and partly post-Mauryan.

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It pertains primarily to Magadha, and the districts round Benares, though, incidentally, it throws light on