Welcome to Cosmographia. This post is part of our Cartography of Networks series. For the full map of posts, see here.
According to legend, Siddhartha Gautama was born a prince in the middle of the 6th century BC. Upon his birth, a prophecy was told: the boy would be either a powerful king or a great spiritual leader. The boy’s father, keen to avoid the second outcome, forbid the child to ever leave the confines of the royal palace, fearing his exposure to the sufferings of the world would lead him down a spiritual path. But forbidden fruit is always too tantalising to resist, and so one day Siddhartha snuck out into the city, where he glimpsed what Buddhists call the Four Signs: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a religious ascetic.
With horror the young man realised that he too would one day grow old, get sick, and die. He understood that continuing to live as he was would only ensure that his suffering was inevitable, and so he decided to give up his station and all its privileges to live the life of a religious ascetic. He left his home, his wife, and his son, to follow a succession of different teachers and disciplines before finally one day attaining enlightenment while sitting beneath a pipal tree. Thereafter he was known as the Buddha (“enlightened one”), and spent the rest of his forty-five years of life teaching his ‘Middle Way’ across Northern India. He is said to have breathed his last breath in a forest grove near Kuśinagara, uttering as he died: “Things that arise from causes will also decay. Press on with due care.”
Distinguishing truth from legend in the traditional stories of the Buddha’s life (there are several versions) is of course all but impossible. What we can say is that the historical figure of Siddhartha Gautama was almost certainly born in Lumbini (in modern-day Nepal) somewhere around the year of 563 BC. He was self-evidently a hugely influential spiritual leader, but he was far from the only one of his time. Indeed, he was near contemporaries with Mahavira, the founder of a non-violent, severely austere movement that in time grew to become Jainism.
The Buddha and Mahavira both lived during a period of great change, with new technologies like the iron plough transforming traditional nomadic pastoral communities across Eurasia. As India urbanised in response to these changes, the old belief systems centred around animal sacrifice became ever more elaborate, with hundreds of animals slaughtered at a time in expensive ceremonies. Many seem to have wanted to move away from the blood and fire sacrifices of Hinduism and the early Vedas (by this time nearly a thousand years old), preferring instead to pursue practices based on good conduct. At the same time, the caste system and ideas of racial purity were just then beginning to solidify, further enhancing the social discontent. In response, perhaps as many as sixty-six new belief systems emerged in India around the time the Buddha was teaching his Dharma; he was but one among many wandering yogis teaching something new.
Buddhism is today the world’s fourth largest religion, with some 500 million adherents making it the majority faith in seven different countries. This then raises the question: why did the Buddha’s teachings spread while so many others fell into oblivion? A Buddhist would probably say its success is due to the truths inherent to the doctrine. But I’d argue networks played a role too.
The first two centuries of Buddhism are almost a complete black hole in the historical record. There are no written texts, no stone inscriptions; the only evidence for the cult’s existence are a tiny number of sites in the same plains of northeast India and Nepal where the Buddha himself preached. One such site discovered by archaeologists at Lumbini showed signs of having been dug into as early as the 3rd century BC, presumably to extract the relics within. The man who had ordered this ancient excavation of a very early stupa must have been none other than the Emperor Ashoka.
Ashoka’s grandfather, Chandragupta Maurya, had met, and supposedly fought alongside, Alexander the Great during his time in India. After winning a great battle against Porus, King of the Punjab, and his armoured elephants along the banks of the Hydaspes River, the story has it that Alexander intended to continue on into the subcontinent, but his soldiers, exhausted from years of conquest far from home, refused to go a step further. The Macedonians turned back, leaving a power vacuum behind in India. One which Chandragupta was only too happy to step into.
By 320 BC, the new king had carved out an empire extending from the Gangetic plain in the east all the way to the provinces of India’s northwest, the latter traded for by Alexander’s successor, Seleucus, for the price of 500 war elephants and Chandragupta’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Twenty-three years later, the Maurya dynasty’s founder abdicated his throne to become a Jain monk, leaving the kingdom to his son, Bindusara. But it was Chandragupta’s grandson whose name would be celebrated in the annals of Buddhist history.
Under Ashoka, the Mauryan Empire grew to become the largest empire India had then ever seen, with its capital, Pataliputra, boasting as many as 200,000 inhabitants — making it the largest city in the world at the time. But it still wasn’t enough for Ashoka.
In 261 BC, the great emperor waged war against his most formidable enemy yet — the Kalinga kingdom. He invaded their prosperous coastal territories and fought a war so ruinous it changed Ashoka forever. Though he did eventually win, the human cost of his prideful ambition haunted the emperor, and he swore to never again take up arms in conquest. Now with an empire larger than would be seen in the subcontinent until the rise of the British Raj, some two millennia later, Ashoka turned to the teachings of the Buddha for solace.
Before this moment, Ashoka had shown a degree of curiosity in nascent Buddhist thought, but now he took a serious interest. He visited various sites associated with the Buddha’s life and began letting the faith guide his policies. In stone inscriptions all around India, he began carving edicts professing his new beliefs:
On conquering Kalinga, the Beloved of the Gods [Ashoka] felt remorse, for when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death, and deportation of people is extremely grievous: all suffer violence, murder, and separation from their loved ones... Today if a thousandth part of those people who died when Kalinga was annexed were to suffer similarly, it would weigh heavily on him. The inscription of the dharma has been engraved so that any sons or grandsons that I may have should think of gaining new conquests... They should think only of conquest by dharma to be a true conquest.
This and many other inscriptions like it found all over India, are the first surviving written references to Buddhism in history. They paint a remarkable picture of Ashoka: he comes across as a remorseful, humane, even philosophical ruler. It is rare even today, let alone in the ancient world, to find a ruler willing to admit a mistake and be strong enough to say “I’m sorry,” to his subjects. The contrast between him and his contemporaries in Persia, who liked to boast of their crushing victories and declare themselves the “King of Kings,” is nothing short of remarkable.
From this moment on, Ashoka shunned war and shows of strength, preferring instead to use his power to encourage his subjects to live more moral lives. He had always maintained a pluralistic empire, allowing creeds and sects of all kinds to practice their doctrines within his borders. His conversion to Buddhism — supposedly due to a conversation with a beggar by the side of a road — didn’t change this fact. Rather than forcibly converting the populace, he practiced what he preached by only gently encouraging the people to live their dharma. To do so, he began an immense program of building, constructing stupas all over India. He also began excavating older Buddhist relics — including the aforementioned stupa in Lumbini. He sent what he called ‘dharma ministers’ to spread Buddhist thought throughout India and beyond. These missionaries travelled to every point on the compass: south to the island of Sri Lanka; east to the lands of Southeast Asia; westwards to the Hellenic states; and northwards up into the Central Asian steppes.
Under Ashoka, Buddhism grew from a minor regional sect into a major movement within India, and the beginnings of one beyond it. However, in the long history of Buddhism, this top-down transmission of the faith was the exception rather than the rule; the spread of the faith owes much more to networks than to rulers.
Ironically for a doctrine that rejects material wealth, Buddhism was mostly spread by merchants.