For six years he listened to what other sages had to say, but it was not until he put himself into a trance one night that his world was changed. 'The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced...There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One.'117 Buddha 'believed' in the gods that were familiar to him. But he shared with the Israelite prophets the idea that the ultimate reality lay beyond these gods. From his experience of them, or his understanding of them, according to Hinduism, they too were caught up in the vicissitudes of pain and change, in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Instead, Gautama believed that all life was dukkha - suffering, flux-and that dharma , 'the truth about right living', brought one to nirvana , the ultimate reality, freedom from pain.118 Buddha's insight was that, in fact, this state had nothing to do with the gods-it was 'beyond them'. The state of nirvana was natural to humanity, if people only knew how to look. Gautama claimed not to have 'invented' his approach but to have 'discovered' it, and therefore other people could too, if they looked within themselves. As with the Israelites in the age of the prophets, the truth lay within . More specifically, the Buddha believed that man's first step was to realise that something was wrong. In the pagan world this realisation had led to ideas of heaven and paradise, but Buddha's idea was that we can gain release from dukkha on this earth by 'living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately and by refraining from anything like drugs or intoxicants that cloud the mind.'119 The Buddha had no conception of heaven. He thought such questions were 'inappropriate'. He thought that language was ill-equipped to deal with these ideas, that they could only be experienced. But Buddhism, as we shall see, did develop notions of salvation very similar to Christianity (so similar that early missionaries thought that Buddhism was a counterfeit faith created by the devil). Buddhism developed a concept (and a word, parimucyeran ) for being set free from life's ills, and three names for saviour, Avalokitresvara , Tara and Amitabha , who all belonged to the same family. The Greeks are generally known for their rationalism, but this tends to obscure the fact that Plato (427- 346 BC), one of their greatest thinkers, was also a confirmed mystic. The main influences on him were Socrates, who had questioned the old myths and festivals of the traditional religion, and Pythagoras, who, as we have seen, had decided ideas about the soul, and who, in addition, may have been influenced by ideas from India, by way of Egypt and Persia. Pythagoras believed that souls were fallen, defiled gods, now imprisoned in the body 'as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth'.120 Pythagoras, and the Orphics, thought that the soul could only be liberated through ritual purification, but Plato went further. To him there was another level of reality, an unchanging realm of the divine, which was beyond the senses. He accepted that the soul was a fallen divinity but believed that it could be liberated and even regain its divine status through his own form of purification-reason. He thought that, in this higher unchanging plane, there were eternal realities-forms or ideas, as he put it-fuller, more permanent and more effective than anything we find on earth, and they could only be fully understood or apprehended in the mind. For Plato there was an ideal form which corresponded to every general idea we have-justice, say, or love. The most important of the forms were Beauty and Good. He didn't dwell much on god, or the nature of god. The world of the forms was unchanging and static and these forms were not 'out there', as the traditional gods were, but could only be found within the self.121 His own ideas, outlined in The Symposium and elsewhere, were to show how love of a particular beautiful body, for example, could be 'purified and transformed' into an ecstatic contemplation ( theoria ) of ideal Beauty. Plato thought that the ideal forms were somehow hidden in the mind and that it was the task of thinking to discover and reveal these forms, that they could be recollected or apprehended if one considered them long enough. Human beings, remember, were fallen divinities (an idea resurrected by Christianity in the Middle Ages) and so the divine was within them in some way, if only it could be 'touched' by reason, reason understood as an intuitive grasp of the eternal realm within. Plato didn't use the word nirvana but his pattern of belief is recognisably similar to that of the Buddha, leading men back
within themselves. Like Zarathustra, for Plato the object of the spiritual life was concentration on abstract entities. Some have called this the birth of the very idea of abstraction. The ideas of Aristotle (384-322 BC) were no less mystical, even though he was a much harder-headed scientist and natural philosopher (aspects of his thought which will be considered in the next chapter). He realised there was an emotional basis of religious belief, even though he thought of himself as a rationalist. This is why, for example, Greek theatre, in particular its tragedies, started life as part of religious festivals: theatrical tragedy was for Aristotle a form of purification (he called it katharsis ) whereby the emotions of terror and pity were experienced and controlled. Whereas Plato had proposed a single divine realm, to which we have access via contemplation, Aristotle thought there was a hierarchy of realities, at the top of which was the Unmoved Mover-immortal, immobile, in essence pure thought though he was at one and the same time the thinker and the thought.122 He caused all the change and flux in the universe, all of which stemmed from a single source. Under this scheme, human beings were privileged, in that the human soul has the gift of intellect, a divine entity, which puts man above the animals and plants. The object of thought, for Aristotle, was immortality, a kind of salvation. As with Plato, thought was itself a form of purification but again theoria , contemplation, did not consist only of logical reasoning, but of 'disciplined intuition resulting in an ecstatic self-transcendence'.123 Confucius (Kongfuzi, 551-479 BC) was by far the least mystical of all the prophets/religious teachers/moral philosophers to emerge in the Axial Age. He was deeply religious in a traditional sense, showing reverence toward heaven and an omnipresent spiritual world, but he was cool towards the supernatural and does not seem to have believed in either a personal god or the afterlife. The creed he developed was in reality an adaptation of traditional ideas and practices, and was very worldly, addressed to the problems of his own times. That said, there are uncanny parallels between the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, Plato and the Israelite prophets. They stem from a similarity in the wider social and political context. Even by the time of Confucius' birth, the Chinese were already an ancient people. From the middle of the second millennium BC, the Shang dynasty was firmly established and, according to excavations, appears to have comprised a supreme king, an upper ruling class of related families, and a lower level of people tied to the land. It was a very violent society, characterised, according to one historian, by 'sacrifice, warfare and hunting'. As with ancient Hindu ideas, sacrifice underlay all beliefs in early China. 'Hunting provided sacrificial animals, warfare sacrificial captives.'124 Warfare was itself considered a religious activity and before battle there took place a ritual of divination, prayers and oaths. In early China there were two kinds of deities-ancestors and sky gods. Everyone worshipped their ancestors, whose souls were believed to animate living humans. But the aristocracy also worshipped Shang Di, the supreme god who ruled from on high, together with the gods of the sun, moon, stars, rain and thunder. Shang Di was identified with the founder-ancestor of the race and all noble families traced their descent from him.125 The hallmark was eating meat. There were three forms of religious functionary: the shih , or priest-scribes, whose duty was to record and interpret significant events, which were regarded as omens for government; the chu , or 'invokers', scholars who composed the prayers used in the sacrificial ceremonies-they became 'masters of ritual', making sure that the correct form of sacrifice was preserved (just like the Brahmans in the Buddha's India); the third group of religious figures were the experts in divination, the wu , whose duty was to communicate with the ancestor spirits, usually by way of the so-called 'Dragon bones'.126 This practice-'scapulimancy'-was not discovered until the end of the nineteenth century, but some 100,000 bones have now been collected. The wu would apply a hot metal point to the shoulder blades ( scapulae ) of a variety of animals, and interpret the resulting cracks as advice from the ancestors. The soul was represented on these bones either by kuei , a man with a large head, or a cicada, which became the accepted symbol of immortality and rebirth. Around the time of Confucius, the idea developed that everything there is, is the product of two eternal and alternating principles, yin and yang , and that within each person there are two souls, the yin -soul and the yang -soul, one deriving from heaven, the other from earth.127 The yin was identified with kuei , in other words the