Class 12 NCERT history Chapter -4

             Thinkers, Beliefs And Buildings 

                           Culture Developments

                           (c. 600 BCE - 600 CE ) 

A Glimpse of Sanchi 

• 19th century Europeans were very interested in the stupa at Sanchi .
• French sought shahjehan Begum's Permission to take away the eastern gateway, which was the best preserved , to be displayed in a museum in France .
• The rulers of Bhopal , Shahjehan begum and her successor sultan Jehan Begum , provided money for the preservation of the ancient site . No wonder then that john Marshall dedicated his important volumes on sanchi to sultan jehan .
• she funded the museum that was built there as well as the guesthouse where he lived and wrote the volumes .
• she also founded the publication of the volumes 
• The discovery of Sanchi has vastly transformed our understanding of early Buddhism .

The Background : 
Sacrifices and debates

• The mid - first millennium BCE is often regarded as a turning point in wold in wold history : It saw the emergence of thinkers such as Zarathustra in Iran , Kong Zi in China , Socrates Plato and Aristotle in Greece , and Mahavira and Gautama Buddha , among many others, in India 
• They tried to understand the mysteries of existence and the relationship between human being and the cosmic order .

The sacrificial tradition 

• There were several pre - existing traditions of thought , religious belief and practice , including the early Vedic tradition, known from the Rigveda , compiled between c. 1500 and 1000BCE. 
• The Rigveda consists of hymns in praise of a variety of deities , especially Agni , Indra and Soma .

New Question 

• Many ideas found in the Upanishads show that people were curious about the meaning of life , the possibility of life after death, and rebirth .
• Thinkers were concerned with understanding and expressing the nature of the ultimate reality .
• The vedic tradition , asked whether or not there even was a single ultimate reality.

Debates and discussions 

• Teachers travelled from place to place , trying to convince one another as well as laypersons, about the validity of their philosophy or the way they understood the wold .
• Debates took place in the kutagarashala - literally , a hut with a pointed roof - or in groves where travelling mendicants halted .
• Many of these teachers, including Mahavira and the Buddha , questioned the authority of the Vedas .

Beyond worldly pleasures the message of Mahavira

• The basic philosophy of the Jainas was already in existence in North India before the birth of Vardhamana , who came to be known as Mahavira . 
• According to jaina tradition , Mahavira was preceded by 23 other teachers or tirthankaras - literally , those who guide men and women across the river of existence .
• According to jaina teaching , the cycle of birth and rebirth is shaped through karma.
• Asceticism and penance are shaped through karma .
• Jaina monks and nuns took five vows :to abstain from killing , stealing and lying ; to observe celibacy ; and to abstain from possessing property .

The spread of Jainism 

• Jaina scholars produced a wealth of literature in a variety of languages - Prakrit , Sanskrit and Tamil .

The Buddha and the quest for enlightenment

• One of the most influential teachers of the time was the Buddha .
• Over the centuries ,his message spread across the subcontinent and beyond - through central Asia to china , Korea and Japan , and through Sri Lanka , across the seas to Myanmar , Thailand and Indonesia.
• According to these traditions, Siddhartha , as the Buddha was named at birth ,  was the son of a chief of the Sakya clan .
• One day he persuaded his charioteer to take him into the city .His first journey into the world outside was traumatic .
• Siddhartha explored several paths including bodily mortification which led him to situation of near death .

The Teachings of the Buddha 

• The Buddha's teachings have been reconstructed from stories , found mainly in the Sutta pitaka .
• According to Buddhist philosophy , the world is transient and constantly changing : it is also soulless as there is nothing permanent or eternal in it .
• within this transient world , sorrow is intrinsic to human existence .
• The Buddha regarded the social world as the creation of humans rather than of divine origin .
• He advised kings and gahapatis to be humane and ethical .
• The Buddha emphasised individual agency and righteous action as the means to escape from the cycle of rebirth and attain self- realisation and nibbana , literally the extinguishing of the ego and desire - and thus end the cycle of suffering for those who renounced the world .
• According to Buddhist tradition , his last words to his followers were:" Be lamps unto yourselves as all of you must work out your own liberation ". 

Followers to the Buddha 

• According to Buddhist texts , this was made possible through the mediation of ananda, one of the Buddha's dearest disciples , who persuaded him to allow women into the sangha .
• The Buddha's foster mother , Mahapajapati Gotami was the first woman to be ordained as a bhikkhuni .
• Buddhism grew rapidly both during the lifetime of the Buddha and after his death, as it appealed to many people dissatisfied with existing religios practices and confused by the rapid social changes taking place around them .
• The importance attached to conduct and values rather than claims of superiority based on birth .

Stupas 

• from earliest times, people tended to regard certain places as sacred .
• These included sites with special trees or unique rocks , or sites of awe inspiring natural beauty .
• These sites, with small shrines attache to them , were sometimes described as chaityas .
• Buddhist literature mentions several chaityas .
• It also describes places associated with the Buddha's life - where he was born , where he attained enlightenment , where he gave his first sermon and where he attained nibbana .

Why were stupas built

• There were other place too that were regarded as sacred. This was because relics of the Buddha such as his bodily remains or objects used by him were buried there. these were mounds known as stupas .
• According to a Buddhist text known as the Ashokavadana , Asoka distributed portions of the Buddha's relics to every important town and ordered the construction of stupas over them. 

How were stupas built 

• Inscriptions found on the railings and pillars of stupas record donations made for building and decorating them.
• Bhikkhus and bhikkhunis also contributed towards building these monuments .

The structure of the Stupa 

• The stupa originated as a simple semi- circular mound of earth , later called anda .
• Arising from the harmika was a mast called yashti often surmounted by a chhatri or umbrella.

Discovering" stupas the fate of amaravati and sanchi

• Each stupa has a history of its own as we have just seen, some of these are histories of how they were built .
• In 1796 , a local raja who wanted to build a temple stumbled upon the ruins of the build a temple stumbled upon the ruins of the stupa at Amaravati 
• Some year later, a british official named Colin Mackenzie visited the site 
• In 1854 , Walter Elliot , the commissioner of Guntur , visited Amaravati and collected several sculpture panels and took them away to Madras .
• By the 1850 s , some of the slabs from Amaravati places : to the Asiatic Society of Bengal at Calcutta , to the India office in Madras and some even to London .
• perhaps Amaravati was discovered before scholars understood the value of the finds and realized how critical it was to preserve things where things where they had been found instead of removing them from the site .
• When Sanchi was "discovered " in 1818 , three of its four gateways were still standing , the fourth was lying on the spot where it had fallen and the mound was in good condition .

Sculpture 

Stories in stone 

• At first sight the sculpture seems to depict a rural scene , with thatched huts and trees .
• The sculpture at Sanchi identify it as a scene from the Vessantara Jataka .This is a story about a generous prince who gave away everything to a Brahmans, and went to live in the forest with his wife and children .

Symbols of worship 

• Art historians had to a acquire familiarity with hagiographies of the Buddha in order to understand Buddhist Sculpture .
• According to hagiographies , the Buddha attained enlightenment while meditating under a tree .
• The empty seat was meant to indicated the meditation of the Buddha , and the stupa was meant to represent the Mahaparinibbana .
• The tree does not stand simply for a tree, but symbolizes as event in the life of the Buddha .
• In order to understand such symbols , historians have to familiarise themselves with the traditions of those who produced these works of art .

Popular traditions 

• Other sculptures at sanchi were perhaps not directly inspired by Buddhist ideas .
• These include beautiful women swinging from the edge of the gateway, holding onto a tree .
• The  Shalabhanjika motif suggest that many people who turned to Buddhism enriched it with their own per- Buddhist and even non Buddhist beliefs, practices and ideas .
• There are other images as well . for instance , some of the finest depictions of animals are found there. these animals included elephants , horses , monkeys and cattle .
• Some historians identify the figure as Maya , the mother of the Buddha, other identify her with a popular goddess , Gajalakshmi - literally  the goddess of good fortune - who is associated with elephants .
• One of the earliest modern art historians , James Ferguson , considered Sanchi to be a centre of tree and serpent worship .

New Religious Traditions 

The development of Mahayana Buddhism 

• By the first century CE. there is evidence of changes in Buddhist ideas and practices .
• Early Buddhist teachings had given great importance to self - efforts in achieving nibbana .
• Bodhisattas were perceived as deeply compassionate beings who accumulated merit through their efforts but used this not to attain nibbana and thereby abandon the world , but to help others
• The worship of images of the Buddha and Bodhisattas  became an important part of this tradition.

The growth of puranic Hinduism 

• These included Vaishnavism and Shaivism , in which there was growing emphasis on the worship of a chosen deity .
• In such workship the bond between the devote and the god was visualised as one of love and devotion , or bhakti.
• In the case of Vaishnavism , cults developed around the various avatars or incarnations of the deity .
• Ten avatars were recognised within the tradition 

Building temples 

• Around the time that the stupas at sites such as Sanchi were acquiring their present from, the first temples to house images of gods and goddesses were also being built .
• The early temple was a small square room, called the garbhagriha , with a single doorway for the worshipper to enter and offer worship to the image .
• A tall structure, known as the Shikhara , was built over the central shrine . 
• Temple walls were often decorated with sculpture .
• One of the unique features of early temples was that some of these were hollowed out of huge rocks as artificial caves .
• The traditions of building artificial caves was an old one .

Grappling with the unfamiliar 

• When 19th century European scholars first saw some of the sculptures of gods and goddesses , they could not understand what these were about .
• They were horrified by what seemed to them grotesque figures , with multiple arms and heads or with combinations of humans and animals forms .
• These early scholars tried to make sense of what appeared to be strange images by comparing them with sculpture with which they were familiar, that from early ancient Greece .