Icons of Civilisation
On the day these words are written (Monday 13 January 2025) India’s Maha Kumbh Mela is beginning at Prayagraj (formerly known as Allahbad), the most sacred of Hinduism’s four sacred sites on the Ganges River. The Maha Kumbh Mela is a pilgrimage that takes place every three years, rotating among the four sites, the one held every twelfth year at Prayagraj being the most significant. These pilgrimages are comparable to the Haj at Mecca and (less dramatically because held more often and in far smaller numbers) the Pope’s Christmas and Easter blessings in Rome’s (more accurately, the Vatican City’s) St Peter’s Square.
A striking, indeed telling, contrast is offered by the fact that on this same day preparations are in progress in the street outside this writer’s window for another gathering, involving very different people – preparations consisting in the hanging of huge paper lanterns from the trees in the street, and a swarm of busy-ness at a famously chic florist shop arranging massive bouquets to be distributed not just in the neighbourhood but around the city. The gathering in question, starting in seven days from his writing, is Paris Fashion Week.
This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela is being advertised as the largest ever gathering of human beings; four hundred million people are expected to attend over the pilgrimage’s six week duration. An enormous temporary tent city has been built to house them or at least some of them, with all the attendant facilities. Many of the many will combine pilgrimage with vending and hawking among the huge crowds. Commentators note that the ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP government is investing lavishly in the festival as part of its project of asserting Hindu traditions over Islamic influences in the country.
Pilgrims will bathe in the Ganges’ waters – a double act of faith, given the river’s profound pollution in which faeces, urine and corpses are only three of the components – and hear preaching from holy men. This latter is the spur for this article, because thinking about the long tradition of such gatherings in India leads to a reflection on how it is that certain individual iconic figures in the great traditions of three civilisations – Indian, Chinese and Western – came to have the salience they do. Matters are as follows (taken from my History of Philosophy):
It would seem that there is a recipe for being a great civilization-dominating figure such as the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Jesus. It is this: Write nothing. Have devoted disciples. Be lucky. Note that this recipe does not include: Be original or Be profound. None of these figures were either of these things, though in the Be Lucky department they had followers who were both, and who made from the remembered fragments of their sayings, and the legends that embroidered memory of their persons, whole systems of thought and practice which they themselves might not have recognized or even perhaps approved.
If these seem to be disparaging things to say, as a kind of lèse-majesté against the greatest and most iconic of names, note this. Each of these figures was, in his own time, one among many – very many – who were doing what he was doing: teaching or preaching, gathering followers, variously borrowing from and disagreeing with others and with earlier teachings. In the case of some it was decades, in the case of others centuries, before the teachings attributed to them were written down. In each case the followers of their followers soon began to disagree and split from each other, the schisms and quarrels forming different versions of the legacies thus surviving.
Take Siddhartha Gautama – he who came to be known as the Buddha – as an example. Legend makes him the son of a king who led a life so sheltered and opulent that when he first encountered a sick man, an old man and a corpse in the world outside the palace walls he was shocked, and therefore abandoned his station and family and set off as a mendicant wanderer in search of release from the sufferings of life. He tried deep meditation at the feet of the yogis, he tried severe self-mortification after the fashion of the ascetics, seeking by these means to secure release from the endless cycles of pain that constitute existence. Neither worked. But one day, seated in thought under a Bodhi tree, he found enlightenment: he became the Buddha, ‘the enlightened one’, and was released; and spent the rest of his life teaching disciples.
This fabulized and abbreviated account makes Gautama seem as if he were unique, as if he appeared from nowhere with a great and transforming revelation to offer the world. But what of the yogis and ascetics with whom he first studied? In fact he arose out of a period in the history of India that was tumultuous in the tens of thousands of seekers and mendicants, of yogis and ascetics, of teachers and preachers, who congregated in huge crowds in great public debating halls and in parks in the cities of the Ganges, where they argued among themselves, lectured the public and taught their followers. It was common currency that acts of charity would help towards a more fortunate reincarnation in a next life, and therefore these swarms of mendicants were able to rely on being fed and clothed by the communities through which they passed. Nothing was more helpful to fostering the abundance of philosophy and religion in the India of that time than the coupled ideas of reincarnation and karma.
The teachings of the Buddha began to be written down three to four centuries after his death. The two oldest sources of what he is believed to have taught are the Suttapitaka (the ‘Basket of Discourses’) and the Vinayapitaka (the ‘Basket of the Disciplinary Code’). They were gathered from memorized oral transmission of the teachings, an approximate canon of which had been formed by about a century after his death. The oral nature of this first record introduced formulaic and repetitive expressions required for memorization of oral recitations, and variations in the eventual texts made from them are in part attributable to the vagaries of memory. But there were certainly also misunderstandings, interpolations and reinterpretations of the material passed down too, adding to the variability of the written versions. Moreover, whatever language the Buddha spoke in his native land among the Sakya people, who lived in what is now the border area between India and Nepal on the northern slopes of the Ganges basin, it was not Pali, Sanskrit or one of the Pakritic dialects, and the transmission of Buddhist teachings through these languages, and later through other south Asian languages and Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese, introduced many differing additions and changes.
Reflecting on the Maha Kumbh Mela reminds us to people the past and to remember how time buries most of those who lived, acted, taught and - more numerously still - believed. The few survivors into later memory are invested with significance created by their epigones, and we take these latter on trust. It is interesting, perhaps troubling, that what gets passed down is what it was easiest for epigones to use and recall; perhaps there were thinkers and teachers whose idea were so profound, so complex, that they have been lost because such successors as they had simplified, or did not understand, what they said. This prompts us to ask: from the tumult of great gatherings, is it whole loaves or only crumbs that are carried away? And (mixing metaphors here) through the filters of Chinese Whispers, are the crumbs still bread when they reach a destination remote in place or time?