6.3 — The Sixteen Kingdoms, the Buddha and Mahavira

By 600 BCE the eastern Ganges plain had something it had not had a few centuries earlier: cities, coins, kings, standing armies, merchants, debt, and enormous inequality. It also had a large number of people walking away from all of it.

The texts call them shramanas — strivers — wandering ascetics who had left households and villages to work out, by argument and by practice, what a person should do about suffering and death. They debated in public, competed for followers, and challenged the priestly establishment openly. Two of them founded traditions that are still alive.

And the reason there were so many of them at that moment is economic, which is the connection this chapter makes.

The second urbanisation

India's first cities were the Indus (Chapter 4.3), and after their decline there were no cities in South Asia for roughly a thousand years. From around 600 BCE they reappear, in a completely different place — the middle and lower Ganges valley — and for a different reason.

Iron is the enabling technology (Chapter 3.12). The Ganges valley was dense forest on heavy soil, which neither stone nor copper tools could clear efficiently. Iron axes cleared it and iron ploughshares broke it.

And the soil, once cleared, is extraordinary — alluvium from the Himalaya (Chapter 1.9), with reliable monsoon rain in the east. Rice cultivation on that soil produces very large surpluses per hectare.

Surplus produced everything else. Non-farming populations, so towns. Trade in the surplus, so merchants. Merchants needing a medium of exchange, so coinage — India's earliest coins, punch-marked silver pieces, appear in this period, independently of the near-simultaneous invention in Lydia and China (Chapter 9.1). Towns needing protection and roads and administration, so states. States competing, so armies and taxes.

Sixteen major states — the mahajanapadas — are named in Buddhist and Jain texts, ranging from Gandhara in the northwest to Anga in the east. They were of two kinds, and the difference matters.

Monarchies, mostly in the fertile eastern plain — Magadha, Kosala, Vatsa, Avanti — with hereditary kings, standing armies and systematic taxation.

Republics, or more precisely oligarchies, mostly in the Himalayan foothills and the northwest — the Vajji confederacy, the Shakyas, the Mallas. These were governed by assemblies of the leading clan's heads, meeting in halls, deciding by discussion and vote. The Buddha was born into one of them, the Shakyas, and Buddhist texts describe the Vajji assembly's procedures with evident approval — meeting regularly, deciding in concord, honouring elders, protecting women, respecting shrines.

The monarchies won. Magadha absorbed the republics one by one over the following two centuries, and Chapter 6.4 continues that. The reason is straightforward: a monarchy with a standing army and a bureaucracy can mobilise more force faster than an assembly that must debate. This is the same result as in the ancient Mediterranean, and Chapter 13.2 draws the general lesson.

Why Magadha won

Magadha, in what is now Bihar, had specific advantages and its kings used them ruthlessly.

Iron ore in the nearby hills of what is now Jharkhand, giving weapons and tools.

Elephants from the forests to the south — India's distinctive military asset, and one the northwestern powers lacked.

The Ganges, giving transport and a defensible position; the capital moved to Pataliputra, at the junction of the Ganges and the Son, a site so strong that it remained India's political centre for a thousand years.

Extremely fertile rice land, giving the tax base.

And rulers who were not constrained by convention. Bimbisara expanded by conquest and marriage alliance. His son Ajatashatru is recorded as having imprisoned and killed him, and then destroyed the Vajji confederacy — Buddhist texts say by sending a minister to spend three years sowing division among the clans before attacking. Indian political literature is unsentimental about this, and Chapter 6.4 introduces the Arthashastra, which discusses such methods as technique.

The intellectual crisis

The new world produced new questions and the old answers did not fit.

Vedic religion was a ritual system operated by hereditary specialists for the benefit of patrons. Its great sacrifices were enormously expensive, required hundreds of animals, and were performed by and for kings and the wealthy. In a village society this was the community's religion. In a city with merchants, artisans, debtors and slaves, it served a shrinking fraction of the people.

The Upanishads (Chapter 4.8) were already turning inward within the Vedic tradition, arguing that knowledge of the self mattered more than ritual. The shramana movements went further and rejected Vedic authority entirely.

Six named teachers appear in Buddhist sources as the Buddha's contemporaries, and their positions are recorded, if unsympathetically. Ajita Kesakambali taught materialism: a person is the four elements, there is no afterlife, no karma, and morality is meaningless. Makkhali Gosala taught strict determinism: everything is fixed by fate and no effort changes anything. Sanjaya refused to commit to any position at all, and his followers reportedly included two men who later became the Buddha's chief disciples.

This is a society arguing seriously about metaphysics, ethics and free will in the fifth century BCE, and Buddhism and Jainism are the two positions from that argument that survived.

Mahavira and Jainism

Vardhamana, called Mahavira, the great hero, was the twenty-fourth tirthankara — ford-maker — of a tradition Jains regard as far older, and the historical evidence supports at least one predecessor, Parshvanatha, a couple of centuries earlier.

He was born into a kshatriya family in the Vajji region, renounced at about thirty, practised extreme asceticism for twelve years, and taught for about thirty more. The traditional dates are 599–527 BCE; scholarly dating tends somewhat later.

Jain teaching in its essentials. The universe is eternal and uncreated; there is no creator god. Every living thing has a soul, jiva, and souls are bound by karma, which Jainism treats as an actual subtle material substance that adheres to the soul through action. Liberation comes from stopping the influx of new karma and burning off the old, by austerity and by non-harm.

Ahimsa, non-violence, is taken further than in any other tradition. Not merely refraining from killing, but minimising harm to all life including insects and plants and, in Jain cosmology, beings in earth, water, fire and air. Jain monks sweep the path before them, strain water, and avoid eating at night to reduce the chance of harming insects. Farming is problematic because ploughing kills organisms, which is a substantial reason Jain communities concentrated in trade and finance — an occupational pattern that persists.

Anekantavada, many-sidedness, is the philosophically most interesting doctrine (Chapter 4.8): reality is complex and any assertion captures only one aspect from one standpoint, so dogmatic certainty about metaphysics is unwarranted. The blind men and the elephant is the Jain illustration of it.

Jainism has never been large — roughly 4 to 5 million people today, mostly in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Karnataka — and its influence has been far out of proportion. Its emphasis on ahimsa entered the broader Indian religious vocabulary, and Chapter 6.21 shows Gandhi, who grew up in Gujarat among Jain influences, drawing on it directly.

The Buddha

Siddhartha Gautama was born in the Shakya republic at Lumbini, in what is now Nepal. The traditional dating puts his death around 483 BCE; most current scholarship favours somewhat later, around 400 BCE.

The traditional biography is a teaching narrative and should be read as one. A prince sheltered from all suffering, who leaves the palace and encounters an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic — the four sights — and renounces. Whether it happened that way is unknowable; what it communicates is the structure of the teaching, that suffering is universal and unavoidable and that some people respond by seeking a way out.

What follows in the account is more historically textured. He studied under two meditation teachers, mastered what they taught, and found it insufficient. He practised extreme austerity for years, nearly died of starvation, and rejected it — which is a direct and pointed rejection of the Jain and broader shramana method. He then formulated the middle way, between indulgence and self-torture, and taught for about forty-five years.

The four noble truths are structured as a diagnosis (Chapter 4.8): there is dukkha, usually translated as suffering but better rendered as unsatisfactoriness; it arises from craving; it can cease; and there is a path to its cessation.

Three doctrines are worth stating precisely because they are usually misdescribed.

Anicca, impermanence. Nothing persists unchanged; everything is a process.

Anatta, no-self. There is no permanent unchanging essence in a person. What we call a self is a bundle of physical and mental processes, continuously changing, with no core. This directly contradicts the Upanishadic atman (Chapter 4.8), and it is the sharpest philosophical break in Indian thought.

Paticca-samuppada, dependent origination. Everything arises in dependence on conditions and ceases when they cease. This is why the Buddha declined metaphysical questions — asking whether the universe is eternal assumes there are things with independent existence to be eternal.

The eightfold path covers understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration — grouped as wisdom, ethical conduct and mental discipline. It is a practice programme, not a creed.

And there is a social dimension that mattered enormously for its spread. The sangha, the monastic community, admitted people regardless of varna. The Buddha taught in the local spoken language rather than Sanskrit, so ordinary people could understand. He rejected the sacrificial system and the claim that birth determines spiritual worth — a well-known passage argues that one is a brahmin by conduct, not by birth.

Women were admitted as nuns, after initial reluctance recorded in the texts, making the Buddhist order one of the earliest organised religious communities anywhere to include women formally. The rules subordinating nuns to monks are also in the texts, and both facts belong in an honest account.

Why these movements spread when they did

The economic connection is direct and it is the payoff of this chapter's opening.

Merchants funded them. Traders and bankers were wealthy, and had no place in the Vedic hierarchy above the third rank, and their occupation involved lending at interest, which brahmanical texts disapproved of. A tradition that judged people by conduct rather than birth, that was not run by a hereditary priesthood, and that had no objection to commerce was attractive to exactly this class. Buddhist and Jain donative inscriptions are overwhelmingly from merchants, guilds and artisans.

Kings funded them too, for a related reason: a religion whose authority did not rest in a hereditary priestly class was less of a rival to royal power, and its ethical universalism suited a ruler governing many different communities.

And the new cities were full of people cut loose from village and clan — migrants, traders, artisans, the poor — for whom a voluntary community was worth a great deal.

The monasteries then became institutions. Located on trade routes, they offered travellers shelter, and they accumulated donations, land and eventually enormous wealth. The Buddhist monastery is the reason Buddhism travelled the Silk Roads (Chapter 5.7): it was a network of guest-houses staffed by literate people with an interest in spreading the teaching.

Where this shows up in your life

Buddhism became the religion of much of Asia — Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia — and around half a billion people follow it. It largely disappeared from the land of its origin, for reasons Chapter 6.9 examines, and was reintroduced to Indian public life in the twentieth century, most consequentially when Ambedkar converted with hundreds of thousands of followers in 1956 (Chapter 6.24).

Meditation practices now used in secular medicine — mindfulness-based stress reduction and its relatives — are stripped-down versions of Buddhist techniques, and the clinical evidence for some applications is real and for others is overstated. Volume VI assesses it.

And the intellectual habit is worth taking. The Buddha's response to metaphysical questions — that some questions do not help, and that the right move is to work on the problem in front of you — is a genuinely useful disposition, and it is the same instinct that Chapter 4.4 found in Confucius and Chapter 16.4 recommends generally.

What the next page covers

Within two centuries of the Buddha's death, one of those sixteen kingdoms had swallowed the rest and built an empire covering almost the whole subcontinent, run by a treatise on statecraft as cold as anything Machiavelli wrote, and then handed to a grandson who conquered Kalinga, saw what he had done, and spent the rest of his reign carving remorse into rock. Chapter 6.4 covers the Mauryas, and it examines Ashoka on the evidence of his own inscriptions rather than on the legend — including what he actually did and did not renounce, and why India took his lion capital as its national emblem.