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The World in 528 BCE at the Time of the Buddha's Awakening
The Eurasian World underwent great changes during the life of Siddartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. He is reputed to have lived for 80 years from 563 to 483 BCE in the Ganges Valley region of India. Many of these changes have had a profound and lasting effect on the various civilizations of Eurasia and hence the rest of the world that continues down to this day.
Siddartha Gautama, at the age of 35, wandered away from his from forest companions having concluded that asceticism was not the way to achieve enlightenment. He was hungry and weak. A young woman gave him a meal of rice that replenished and strengthened him. He found a pleasant tree by a flowing river and sat under it to meditate, determined to reach enlightenment or die. When the night had passed he had achieved his goal and looked out upon the world as the newly awakened Buddha.
At first the newly awakened Buddha discerned that teaching the Dhamma, the way to enlightenment, would be difficult and hard to understand for most people. He was inclined to inaction. But the God Brahma perceived his thoughts and quickly appeared in front of the him and begged the Buddha to teach the Dhamma to the world. Brahma told the Buddha that there were some people with little dust in their eyes and they would benefit from being taught the Dhamma. The Buddha tells us of his response:
"Heeding the entreaty of Brahma and out of compassion for beings I looked with the eye of the Enlightened One and saw beings with little defilements and with much defilements. Saw beings with sharp mental faculties and weak mental faculties, with good dispositions and weak dispositions. Saw certain ones abiding fearing the other world. Like in a set of blue lotuses, red lotuses and white lotuses, a certain one would be born in the water, grow and develop in the water and would bloom below the level of the water. Some others born in the water would grow, develop and bloom, in level with the water and certain others born in the water, grow and develop and stand right above the water and bloom. In the same manner I saw beings with little defilement and with much defilement, with sharp mental faculties, and weak mental faculties, with good dispositions and weak dispositions and certain ones fearing the other world. Then I replied to Brahma Sahampati saying a stanza.
Brahma, I have opened the doors of deathlessness,
May those who have ears be released through faith,
With practice we will speak words with the perception of non hurting
And the populace will get the exalted Teaching.
Then Brahma Sahampati knowing I have made it possible for the Teaching to be heard, worshipped and circumambulated me and vanished from there it self."
[from Majjhima Nikaya, sutta 26 "The Noble Search" translated by Sister Upalavanna. See: http://www.budsas.org/ebud/majjhima/index.htm]
The newly awakened Buddha would go on to teach the Dhamma for 45 years traveling back and forth in the Ganges valley.
It was springtime in the year 528 BCE. The place was northern India near the Himalaya mountains. What was the world like then as the Buddha surveyed it with his enlightened vision?
In China, the land was divided into a set of seven warring lands that were still nominally part of the decaying Zhou Empire. China was undergoing great cultural and intellectual changes and was just entering a period that was to be called the “Hundred Schools of Thought” and was viewed later as a golden age in the development of Chinese philosophy. In the Duchy of Lu, Confucius (Kung-Fu Tzu) was a young man in his early twenties. In the coming decades, he would begin his quest for the reform of Chinese society, becoming an itinerant teacher of promising young men of all classes. His work would result in one of the great classics of Chinese society, “The Analects of Confucius”, a set of teachings on governmental morality, social conduct, justice and sincerity that would make a great impact on Chinese thinking and would help put their society on a sane and stable course that has lasted even to the present day. The traditional dates for Confucius lifetime are 550-479 BCE.
[Tradition says that nearby in the state of Ch'i, worked another young man Sun Tzu. In a few decades, sometime between 515 and 512 BCE or so he would write down his observations on military affairs in a book that would become known as the Chinese classic “The Art of War“. His thirteen chapter book exerted a great impact on the conduct of Eastern military affairs and is still popular today. After reading his book, King Helu of the state of Wu hired Sun Tzu as his general. Sun Tzu led the army of Wu in conquering the neighboring state of Chu, making Wu the most powerful state in China, but then he mysteriously vanished soon afterwards. However many scholars now think the book was written much later during the "Warring States" period in China.]
An older contemporary of Confucius (according to some scholars), Lao Tzu, was working as a keeper of imperial records. At the age of 80, the founder of Taoism, so legend says, was saddened and disillusioned that men were unable to follow the natural path of goodness, so he set out for the western border of China, going towards Tibet. At the border, a guard, Yin Xi (Yin Hsi), asked Lao Tsu to record his teachings before he left. He then composed, in 5,000 characters, the “Tao Te Ching” (The Way and Its Power), thus leaving behind one of the world's greatest spiritual texts. Taoism and Confucianism, and later Buddhism, became fundamental components of Chinese society. China had a bright future ahead.
India itself was divided into a set of many kingdoms as well. It would be several centuries before they were united into an empire under Chandragupta Maurya. India was, like Greece and China, experiencing a time of great intellectual and philosophical activity when many traditional beliefs were being challenged and much new thinking was in the air. Not far from Siddartha Gautama lived the Indian sage Vardamana Mahavira, the "Great Hero", who, like Confucius, was a young man. Like Siddartha Gautama he was a prince who abandoned his kingdom at the age of 30. He spent 12 years as an ascetic in meditation and silence, disciplining his mind and freeing it of all worldy attachments, finally achieving kevel-jnana or perfect enlightenment. He would go onto to establish the influential sect of Jainism, that advocated nonviolence toward all living things (ahimsa), a doctrine that has been incorporated into modern India's foreign policy. His movement, like Buddhism, accepted men and women from all social classes. Both Jainism and Buddhism rebelled against the Brahmanic tradition based on the Vedic scriptures. Vardamana lived from about 549-477 BCE although Jain tradition says he lived from 599-527 BCE, thus dying one year after the Buddha’s enlightenment. Mahavira’s teachings were compiled by his followers after his death in the Agam Sutras. In the Buddhist oral canon, Mahavira is referred to as Niggantha Nathaputta - 'the naked ascetic of the Jñātr clan.'
On the western borders of India, stood the newly established Persian Empire, the world's greatest empire at the time. It stretched all the way from India to the Aegean Sea and the borders of Egypt. The founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, had just died the year before Siddartha‘s enlightenment, in 529 BCE, fighting tribes in central Asia. Cyrus was renowned for his tolerance and the magnanimous attitude towards those he conquered. Cyrus declared the world's first known charter of human rights
(see http://www.iranchamber.com/history/cyrus/cyrus_charter.php). Cyrus had seized the throne of the Median Empire in 550 BCE and united the Medes and Persians together.
The Lydian kingdom of King Croesus in western Asia Minor was added to the Persian realm in 547 BCE after the Lydians attacked Persia. Croesus is famous for consulting the oracle at Delphi before he went to war against Cyrus and the Persians. He was told that if he did so a great kingdom would fall. Unfortunately, it was his own! By 542 BCE, Persian generals had added the Greek cities of the Turkish coast (Ionia) and the rest of Asia Minor as well as Phoenicia to the Persian Empire.
In 539 BCE, Cyrus conquered the city of Babylon, deposing Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. With that all the rest of the fertile crescent, including Syria and Palestine, came under Persian control. According to the book of Daniel in the Bible (chapter 4), Nabonidus’s son, Belshazzar, had earlier that year been feasting in Babylon when a disembodied hand wrote on a wall the phrase “mene, mene, tekel, parsin”. The Babylonian soothsayers could not fathom the meaning of the phrase. Then the Hebrew prophet Daniel translated it for them as meaning “God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting. Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”
Cyrus passed a decree that allowed the Jews to return from exile in Babylon to their homeland in Palestine. Some 30,000 - 45,000 Jews made the trip. The Jews considered Cyrus a great saviour and nearly a messiah. Work was begun on the second temple in Jerusalem, which was completed in 515 BCE. This story is described in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Old Testament of the Bible.
The second temple replaced the Temple of Solomon that had been destroyed in 586 BCE by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II when he conquered the kingdom of Judah and sent the Jews into exile in Bablyon. Nebuchadnezzar II built the great ziggurat in Babylon that probably inspired the story of the tower of Babel in the Biblical book of Genesis and was the last ziggurat ever built (or rebuilt). Nebuchadnezzar II died in 562 BCE, one year after Siddartha Gautama was born in Lumbini, India. Shortly after their return to Judah from their exile in Babylon, at a rainy assembly in Jerusalem, the Jewish community decided on the policy of marrying only within their own community, a policy of ethnic exclusiveness that undoubtedly preserved Jewish culture and religion over the next few centuries and beyond to the present day as they lived first as vassals under the rule of the Persians, then the Greeks and later the Romans.
Another young man was at work in Babylon at this time, the first Babylonian astronomer known by name, Nabu-rimanni, who lived roughly from (c. 560 BCE - 480 BCE), thus closely matching Siddartha Gautama's lifetime. Nabu-rimmanni compiled an ephemerides (table of positions) for the Moon, Sun and planets, giving their positions at any time based on centuries of observations collected in Babylon. He determined the length of the solar year to be 365 days, 6 hours, 15 minutes and 41 seconds. He also determined the length of the synodic month of the Moon (the duration of the lunar cycle of phases) with an error of 1.56 seconds! Nabu-rimanni collected his work in a book, “Observations of the Moon and Stars“, written in Akkadian, the language that had been lingua franca of the fertile crescent for a thousand years.
The Persians followed the monotheistic religion founded by the prophet Zoroaster, which was alive and well and exerted a considerable influence on Judaism (and hence later Christianity and Islam as well as northern Buddhism). The Persians were tolerant rulers, and that was a great relief to the peoples of the Middle East after suffering for centuries under the domination of the ruthless Assyrians and Chaldeans.
Cyrus expanded the Persian Empire to the east in a series of campaigns, which eventually brought on his death in 529 BCE. After Cyrus died, his son Cambyses ascended the Persian throne and would rule for seven years. Cambyses was succeeded by Darius I in 521 BCE.
Egypt was under the rule of its last great native Pharaoh, Amasis II of the 26th dynasty. Amasis II would die a few years later in 526 BCE. His son, Psammetichus III, would rule for only one year. Cyrus’s son, Cambyses invaded and conquered Egypt in 525 BCE, defeating the Egyptians at the battle of Pelusium. The Egyptian defeat brought 2500 years of Pharonic Egyptian history to a close. Egypt now became another province in the Persian Empire.
On the northwestern border of the Persian Empire, sat Hellas, better known to us as Greece. Greece was starting its cultural and political awakening at this time. Sparta had established a stable form of government by 550 BCE. On the Ionian coast of Asia Minor lived the Greek philosopher Anaximenes, who would die a few years later in 525 BCE. Anaximenes followed in the line of the first natural philosopher, Thales of Miletus (circa 635 - 543 BCE). In the Ionian city of Ephesus lived the natural philosopher Heraclitus who is famous for propagating a doctrine about the constant flux of things epitomized in his phrase “One cannot step into the same river twice”. The Ionian Greeks were the first to attempt natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for phenomena and thus laid the foundations for science. Anaximenes held that the air, with its variety of contents, its universal presence, its vague associations in popular fancy with the phenomena of life and growth, is the source of all that exists.
Athens at this time was under the rule of the tyrant, Pisistratus, who died that year in 528 BCE. Pisistratus started many architectural projects and cultural events in Athens and brought many artists into the city. He commissioned the first standard written editions of Homer's "The Illiad" and "The Odyssey". Greek theatre was just getting started under the Athenian Thespis (from whom the word "Thespian" derives). Pisistratus was succeeded by his sons who would rule Athens rather badly in the next few decades and who would get overthrown in the Athenian revolution. Between 508-502 BCE, under the reforming leadership of Cleisthenes, Athens established the world's first true democracy. The city state was ruled by an assembly of all the free born men, with one vote for each citizen. The Buddha was 55 years old and in the 20th year of his awakening. The first great Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, was born in 525 BCE and would live to the year 456 BCE, writing over 90 plays in his lifetime, of which 7 survive. Aeschylus is the world's first known playwright.
In 490 BCE, when the Buddha was 73 years old, the great battle of Marathon was fought between a Greek army of Athenians and the invading Persian army of King Darius. The Greek cities of Asia Minor (Ionia) had begun an unsuccessful six-year revolt against Persian rule in 502 BCE. In 499 BCE, an army of Athenians and Ionians sacked the city of Sardis. Sardis was the capital of the kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor that had been conquered by Cyrus and was now the Persian provincial capital. Darius had sworn revenge against the Greeks after that. Athens and Greece were spared Persian subjugation by the Athenian victory at Marathon and Athens was set on the path to greatness. Darius died in 486 BCE and was succeeded by his son Xerxes. The Buddha finally passed away at the age of 80 in the year 483 BCE.
Meanwhile, the Persian Great King Xerxes had been preparing the greatest military force ever assembled for another invasion of Greece. As councils of monks gathered to reiterate, confirm, verify and remember the Buddha's teachings, forming the Buddhist oral canon, the Greeks were preparing to fight for their freedom against the Persians. Xerxes invaded Greece with a vast army and navy in 480 BCE and was briefly delayed in his march south at the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylae by the stout resistance of 300 Spartans led by their King Leonidas. The Persians sacked Athens although it had previously been evacuated by the Athenians. The Persian fleet was defeated by the Athenian navy at the battle of Salamis in 480 BCE under the eyes of Xerxes, who watched from a pavilion on a nearby hillside. The Persian army was defeated a year later at the battle of Platea by a Greek coalition of Spartans, Athenians and other Greeks. In the same year, 479 BCE, the Athenians defeated the rest of the Persian fleet at the battle of Mycale off the coast of Asia Minor, thus ending the immediate threat of Persia to Greece. In the following decades, Athens would become a rich city and build the Parthenon and other famous buildings under the leadership of Pericles. The philosophers Socrates and Plato would flourish at the end of the century as Buddhism began to spread in India.
Further west, the Phoenician colony city of Carthage on the north African coast was enjoying a prosperous existence engaged in seaborne trading throughout the Mediterranean. The port of Carthage was a wonder of the world. Carthage was just beginning to dominate the Western Mediterranean and challenge the Greeks for control of Sicily. In 480 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar was defeated at the battle of Himera by the Greeks of Syracuse led by the tyrant Gelon, thus preventing the Carthaginian conquest of Sicily. Greek tradition says that the battles of Salamis and Himera occurred on the very same day, September 20, 480 BCE. So Greeks were fighting Phoenicians and Greek colonists were fighting Phoenician colonists on the very same day for control of the Mediterranean.
In the Greek city states of southern Italy, the great Greek philosopher Pythagoras was said to be at work. Pythagoras reputedly lived from 582 BCE to 496 BCE, living to the age of 86! He was about 19 years older than the Buddha. Pythagoras established the highly influential Pythagorean school of philosophy. Pythagoras and his students believed that everything was related to mathematics, and felt that everything could be predicted and measured in rhythmic cycles. They were the first to work out the mathematics of musical harmony and from them came the idea of the music of the spheres. Pythagoras also taught a doctrine of reincarnation and was an ethical vegetarian. From Pythagoras or his school, comes the Pythagorean theorem, the most important theorem in mathematics.
North of the Italian Greeks sat the small and unimportant city of Rome. Rome was under the rule of its seventh and last King, Tarquinius Superbus, (Tarquin the Proud) who ruled from 534-510 BCE. Under his rule, the Etruscans were at the height of their power, and the authority of the monarchy was absolute. Tarquin repealed several earlier constitutional reforms and used violence and murder to hold his power. His tyrannical rule was despised by the Romans and the final straw was the rape of Lucretia, a patrician Roman, at the hands of Tarquinius’ son Sextius. The Tarquins and the monarchy were cast out of Rome in 510 BC in a revolt led by Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus.
The Roman Senate voted to never again allow the rule of a king and formed a Republic in 509 BCE. Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus went on to become the first Consuls of this new government. The pair of Consuls were the elected leaders of Rome and always ruled for one year. Note that as a republic was being formed in Rome, at almost exactly the same time, the Athenians were establishing their democracy in Greece. Twenty-three centuries later, the Americans created a new form of government that combined the Roman Republican system with that of the Greek democratic system.
North of Rome, Europe lay under the domination of Celtic tribesman who ruled a vast cultural realm that stretched from Ireland and northern Spain through northern Italy and Switzerland to eastern Europe.
Iron working first spread to sub-Saharan Africa at this time. The Nok culture, famous for its terracotta figurines, began to flourish in northern Nigeria and would last for another 700 years or so, before mysteriously disappearing.
In the Americas, the Mayan culture of the Yucatan-Central American region was in the preclassical stage. The Mayans had not yet begun to build pyramids or use writing. But further west, in what is now southern Mexico, hieroglyphic writing was starting to be used by the Zapotecs at their city of Monte Alban.
Thus was the state of the world during the Buddha’s lifetime.
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