Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country. Peter Stanford
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so far as they were seen to buttress the existing political order by giving it a divine stamp of approval, the Upanishads came under attack. Moreover, because they taught that reaching the point of absorption into the Great Self was extremely rare, and that, even when achieved, it was a divine status that could easily be lost, with the consequent return to death and rebirth, their core message became, for many, a depressing and pessimistic one. Samara was part of an eternal grind of Sisyphean proportions.
Two movements arose simultaneously to challenge this bleak prospect. Mahavira (c. 540–468 BC), the most revered figure among the Jains, and Siddhartha Gautama Buddha (c. 563-c. 483) both suggested that karma should be seen as an exclusively spiritual quality which could not be directed to the practical end of propping up the caste system: no matter what level of society you were born into, you could still be a good spirit and grow and develop towards the ultimate within yourself inside that one lifetime. Mahavira advocated an asceticism, which included veganism, nudity and celibacy, and nonviolence towards all living creatures as the key to salvation from the cycles of reincarnation. His was a rigorous self-help credo, placing as a realisable goal liberation from the flesh and the world into a realm of mental and spiritual bliss called Isatpragbhara or Kevala at the top of the universe.
Jainism was a fundamentalist version of mainstream Hinduism and continues to thrive today with around two million adherents. Much more widespread, however, are the 350 million Buddhists worldwide (though very few are now in India itself). Buddhism took a gentler, less extreme course. Siddhartha Gautama was born in the sixth century BC, the son of a king in the foothills of the Himalayas in the north of India. His legend tells that when he was a young man he married, but he was afflicted by a strange malaise. He abandoned his prosperous family and his life of pleasure and indulgence, embarking instead on fasting, asceticism and meditation on sacred texts, finally achieving release from earthly desires and suffering under a Bodhi tree in his Great Enlightenment. Life on earth could be miserable, he taught, and each must seek liberation in this life, not by the self-denial of the Jains, or the resignation of the Upanishads, but rather by searching after knowledge of spiritual truths. There were, he said, Four Noble Truths which demonstrated that misery was caused by craving which in its turn could be cured by means of the Noble Eightfold Path. This led to the breaking of samsara and, ultimately, to nirvana – a mental state of blessedness. The eight steps on the path concerned growing in understanding and spiritual wisdom, living a moral life, and cultivating the mental discipline to prepare for nirvana. In Sanskrit, the word nirvana means ‘extinguished’ and for Buddha – the ‘enlightened one’ – it was a place for the extinguishing of human misery and cravings by self-knowledge.
While Buddha accepted the cycle of reincarnation and karma taught by the Upanishads, he offered as a release from samsara an achievable nirvana. Part of that nirvana was the knowledge of a deity, but, unlike Judaism, Buddha focused not on a personal god but on individual and internal enlightenment. This could, Buddha warned, be a long time coming. One of the most popular books in Buddhism is the Jatakas – birth-stories – which contains some 550 accounts of previous births of the Buddha in various human and animal forms.
Nirvana was not supernatural. ‘He did not rely,’ writes his biographer, the distinguished religious historian, Karen Armstrong, ‘on divine aid from another world, but was convinced that nirvana was a state that was entirely natural to human beings and could be experienced by any genuine seeker. Gautama believed that he could find the freedom he sought right in the midst of this imperfect world. Instead of waiting for a message from the gods, he would search within himself for the answer, explore the furthest reaches of his mind and exploit all his physical resources.’
From the third century BC, Buddhism began to spread, notably to China. Legend tells that in the first century BC a Han emperor sent envoys along the Silk Route to India. They returned with written versions of Siddhartha Gautama’s teachings which so impressed their readers that Buddhism immediately took root in China. The truth is more complex. Whereas in other parts of southeast Asia Buddhism had quickly and easily assimilated with existing beliefs, in China it stood in stark contrast to the two dominant ideologies, Confucianism and Taoism, both much more perfunctory in their attitude to the afterlife and transcendence. There was, therefore, a clear choice and a long period of conflict and competition.
Confucianism was a decidedly worldly creed which discouraged any great emphasis on either the hereafter or the mystical, and promoted instead practical imperatives on social responsibility, collective action, family values and hard work. Confucius (551–479 BC) was the codifier of an existing but ill-defined system of natural justice, someone who took received wisdom and moulded it in a robust package of beliefs. He was notably inhospitable to any supernatural concepts, but he did appeal to the individual to develop their intellectual powers and to act fairly in terms of following ‘the way of heaven’. This led all, whether high-born or low-born, ultimately to the reward of Tian, a paradise for virtuous souls governed by a ‘supreme spiritual presence’. This supreme being was later to be confused by Confucians with the person of the Emperor of China, in an effort to shore up political authority, but it was an understandable mistake for Confucius had great respect for the instruments of government (though he did not regard rulers as divine per se). The supreme spiritual being was ill-defined and vague, certainly not a Western-style god of judgement, and a force seldom active on earth.
Tian was not, characteristically, an original idea of Confucius’s. Meaning ‘sky’ it had been a part of Chinese thought for several thousand years before the philosopher annexed it to his code of ethics as a reward for good behaviour. Traditionally, Tian was ruled over by the god Tianshen and those who joined him there after death would be nobles or kings. Some Chinese tombs discovered by archaeologists, thought to belong to rulers dating back to before 1000 BC, include the remains of dogs, horses and servants, all apparently sacrificed so as to assist their master on his passage to Tian.
For the lowly-born, the only chance of entry was as a vassal or a scribe, keeping records by which Tianshen could judge the lives of those who came before him. Confucius, however, rejected such a system and attempted instead to make Tian a more democratic place, open to all on the basis of their earthly virtue and industry rather than rank and the arbitrary judgement of a deity. He was also less enthusiastic about the ancient Chinese practice of ancestor worship, believing it a distraction from current needs, but, again, his teachings have evolved down the years and have been interpreted as making a clear connection between heaven and earth. Hence sacrifices were offered in his name to dead emperors, various nature gods and even to Confucius himself.
Taoism, founded by Lao-tzu in the fifth century BC, was more open than Confucianism to supernatural ideas, but was still fundamentally wary of them. It was a much less worldly credo, rejecting institutions and politics and advocating instead a return to simplicity and harmony with nature in line with Tao – the hidden principle of the universe. The ideal was ‘wu wei’, non-doing or non-action, and in this passive belief system the notion of working to earn some sort of reward in an afterlife was anathema. With such an essentially blank canvas, as the historian Geddes Macgregor writes in Images of Afterlife, Taoism was ‘as much directed towards the this-worldly as has been the philosophy of Confucius. True, as Taoism grew into a popular religion that accommodated all sorts of emotional influences, it became capable of hospitality to almost any sort of practice, including magical techniques for the attainment of immortality, but such developments have tended to be peripheral to the mainstream from the Chinese outlook.’
Taoism is, by its very passivity, something of a jumble of ideas which has been imposed on the vague and amorphous founding principle over the centuries, and therefore at different stages has embraced both a deity – a holy trinity of Three Pure Ones, including Lao-tzu – and an approach to paradise, Mount K’unlun. This nine-level hill leads up through various disciplines to the gateway to eternal bliss which stands at the summit. Those who enter come under the protection of Hsi Wang Mu, a queen with power over the mortality and destiny not only of the dead but also of the living. Her powers are so great that one Tao legend teaches she can dispense a magic potion to her favourites which allows them to experience eternal bliss without having to die first – similar to the dream-like journeys of apocalyptic literature. The focus in the Taoist legend, though, is not so much on what is seen but on plots to steal the potion. Immortality,