THE PREBUDDHIST BACKGROUND

　　We are going to begin today with a consideration of the pre-buddhist situation in India. Normally Buddhist studies courses begin with a study of the life of the Buddha. We are going to begin before the life of the Buddha. Personally I feel this is quite important as I feel it helps one to understand the life and teachings of the Buddha in their broader historical and conceptual context and to understand and appreciate better the nature of Buddhism and perhaps Indian thought as a whole.

　　I do not know how many of you have visited India. We have in the North of India two great rivers — one is the Ganges and the other is the Yamuna. These two great rivers have separate sources in the Himalayas and they flow separately for a good proportion of their lengths. They unite in the north eastern region of India. From there they flow on together to the Bay of Bengal. In a way the geography of these two great rivers is a symbol of the origin and development of Indian religion, philosophy and thought because in Indian religion too we have two great rivers which were originally quite distinct and had separate origins and which for a considerable length of time were separate but which at a certain point of time merged and flowed on united right to the present day. Perhaps as I go into the prebuddhist history of India, we can keep in mind the image of these two rivers originally separate and at a certain point merging and flowing together to the sea.

　　When we look at the very early history of India, we find that there existed in the 3rd Millennium B.C. a very highly developed civilization in the Indian subcontinent. This civilization is as old as those which are called the cradles of human culture, civilizations like those of Egypt and Babylon. This civilization existed approximately between the year 2800 B.C. and 1800 B.C. It was known as the Indus Valley Civilization or it is sometimes called the Harappa Civilization, and it extended from what is now Western Pakistan, south to a point which is near Bombay and eastward to a point which is in the neighborhood of what is now Simla in the foothills of the Himalayas. If you see a map of India, you will realize that this is a very considerable extent. Not only was this civilization stable for a thousand years, it was also a very highly developed civilization both materially and spiritually. Materially the civilization was an agrarian one. They were skilled in irrigation and the planning of towns. In addition, they had a very highly developed spiritual culture. This is clear from the archaeological evidence that has been discovered at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. There is also evidence of the fact that they were literate. They had developed a script which unfortunately we are not able to decipher.

　　The peaceful life of this civilization was unfortunately interrupted in about the year 1800 or 1500 B.C. by an invasion that came from the North West. The invading people were known as the Aryans and this is a term that designated a people of Eastern Europe. The origin of the Aryans was in the grassy region extending from Poland to Western Russia. The Aryans were very different from the people of the Indus Valley Civilization because they were generally nomadic and pastoral. They did not have a highly developed urban civilization. They were a warlike expanding pioneer civilization that lived in large part from the spoils and plunder that they gathered from the peoples they conquered in the course of their migration. When the Aryans arrived in India, they very quickly destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization succumbed very quickly to the military might of the Aryans. What existed in India after the invasion was an Aryan dominated civilization.

　　Here we h…

《Pre-Buddhist Backgound》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…