Peace (12 page)

The anarchic third century exposed the fatal weaknesses of the Pax Romana's internal/external infrastructure, leading to its decline and fall as well as that of the Roman Empire itself. Internal peace was periodically broken by revolts against despotic Emperors, derailing the economic prosperity and destabilizing the socio-political structures by which it was maintained. Dozens of “Soldier-Emperors” came to and stayed in power such as Vespasian, while not even universal citizenship for imperial residents was enough to quell their growing dissatisfaction. Externally, the languishing legions stationed on the borders could no longer hold back Germanic and Asiatic tribes, which continuously raided and invaded, eventually sacking Rome. Its last single leader, Diocletian (245–312), divided the Empire in two along a linguistic line, the Greeks of the East and the Latins of West, then the Emperor's power into four (the Tetrarchy), two seniors called Augustus and two junior Caesars. Ironically, it is by these titles that Roman Empire finally shed its Republican forms. The seat of imperial power would totter from the Western to the Eastern Empire, now known as Byzantium, until this as well as other struggles for supremacy toppled the former (456) and the latter a millennium later. But as the namesake of the Eastern capital, Constantinople, became a convert to Christianity and began its incremental integration with the state, this major thread in the story of peace and peacemaking will be taken up again in
Chapter 4
.

3

Peace in the Ancient East: India, China and Japan

The Many, the Few, the One: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient India

The vast array of circumstances and lifestyles that have defined the Indian subcontinent's identities also bring together a core strand throughout its ancient history:
harmony
. As in Ancient China, harmonic policies and practices effectively promoted peace by laying grounds for unity in diversity. Building on differences whenever possible, overcoming them when not, at one time thousands of indigenous villages sprawled across the Indus River Valley (
c
. 3300 BCE). Finding defensive walls unnecessary, they devoted their considerable resources to securing social peace by meeting the basic needs of the many rather than of the few, putting in place the world's first sanitation systems and gridded town structures, in which sectors were based on occupation and equally provided for irrespective of wealth and status. The partnership model thus seems to have prevailed in Ancient India until the Indus Valley's extended drought-related decline, after which the dominator model took root
c
. 1500 BCE. This change resulted from the arrival of nomadic Aryans (“noble ones”) of the eastern Eurasian steppes. By literary conjectures, scholars debate whether they came in a sudden invasion or in migratory waves. In any case, that Ancient Indian life was forever transformed by them, less towards than away from peace, is indubitable. The potentials of Ancient Indian peace and peacemaking came to be circumscribed by structurally violent socio-political structures, namely the caste system, and ongoing warfare on two levels: between local chiefdoms for direct rule and regional kingdoms for hegemony.

A mosaic of chiefdoms (
rashtras
) arose between the Indus Valley and the Ganges River Valley to the east, in which natives were generally
subordinated to the more or less unwelcome newcomers. However, biogenetic, cultural and ideological imperatives required that their ways of life be fused together or doomed to die apart. The nearly impenetrable forests and mountains of the two Valleys were the rashtras' natural borders, and account for the astonishing number of languages and traditions in India then as today. A multicultural proto-civilization thus emerged, called Vedic from the Vedas, its unifying foundational text and a forerunner of Hinduism. Socio-politically, a hereditary hierarchy topped by feuding Aryan chieftains (
Rajas
) and their staffs of mixed descent ascended in its early years. Rashtras then became loose confederations of capital cities, seats of religious and secular power, and satellite villages (
janas
). Later, groups of rashtrasbecame
mahajanapadas
or “great kingdoms” under
Chakravatins
, “conquerors of the world,” who were entrusted with exterminating external threats more than with direct rule, which was relegated to Rajas. The direct rule of a Raja meant the ability to raise tributary revenue from his
janas
, bolstered by the plunder gained by ritualized raids into neighboring rashtras, usually with no intent to impose direct rule. The rise of
mahajanapadas
thus on the whole decreased the frequency but increased the scale of warfare in Ancient India: periodic breaks in collective peace made individual and social peace more likely.

Chakravatins and Rajas were not the only driving forces behind these individually short-lived but as a whole long-lasting Vedic states (
c
. 1500– 300 BCE). They ruled by the consent and legislated with the approval of four councils of unequal weight. The
vidhata
and
gana
were elite bodies with religious and economic clout; the
sabha
and
samiti
were popular assemblies of lesser bearing. Vedic cities were also divided along occupational lines, though the strife of stratification replaced egalitarian harmony as the sustaining basis and goal of society. Hence, India's caste system originates with the Vedic civilization's socio-political structures. The Veda-prescribed castes (
varnas
) were, in declension: Brahmins, scholar-priests, bureaucrats; Kshatriya, warrior-rulers; Vaisya, farmers, traders; and Sudra, manual workers, artisans. Only centuries after the Vedas was the term
jati
used to indicate the rigid, endogamous and hereditary social group the
varnas
had by then become. The social order and continuity the caste system conferred must in regards to peace be evaluated in the shadows of the structural violence it propagated. Positive and negative examples can be found in the
Ramayana
and
Mahabharatra
epics (
c
. 400– 200 BCE), part mythologies, part histories, which narrate battles as well as socio-cultural syntheses by marriage, political alliances couched in spiritual-philosophical discourse. Because of ongoing warfare between chiefdoms and kingdoms, prescribed forms of peacemaking were perhaps more fully developed in Ancient India than anywhere else at the time.

The Brahmins'
lingua franca
, Sanskrit, had a developed lexicon of peace in these overall non-peaceful conditions. Pragmatic peace terms are expounded in Kautalya's
Arthashastra
(fourth century BCE), an encyclopedic treatise on autocratic statecraft which deals with economics, education, jurisprudence, clandestine operations and peacemaking, among many other topics. A Six-Fold Policy between states is elaborated: peace (
sandhi
), war, neutrality, preparing for war, alliance, and making peace with one state while waging war with another, called double policy. To name a few of the peace processes described: peace made with a promise is called
paripanita
and with no promise,
aparipanita
; on the condition that troops along with the ruler would be turned over,
atmamisha
; on the condition that the commander would march with the army to a specified place,
adrishtapurusha
; when concluded by offering goods carriable away on men's backs,
upagraha
; when obtained by ceding all of a war-torn realm,
uchchhinnasandhi
(“peace cut off from profit”); and, when bought with an large amount of money,
kapala
. The thrust of these peace policies is economic so that, for example, if “any two kings hostile to each other and deteriorating expect to acquire equal amount of wealth in equal time, they shall make peace with each other;” and if “by making peace with one, I can augment my own resources, and by waging war with another, I can destroy the works of my enemy,” then he may adopt the double policy and increase his resources.
¹
A ruler situated between two more powerful states is instructed to seek protection from the stronger or to make peace with both on equal terms. Above all, relative strengths and resources must be considered in making peace and alliances or breaking them. In the end, “when the advantages derivable from peace and war are of equal character, one should prefer peace; for disadvantages, such as the loss of power and wealth. . . are ever-attending upon war.”
²
The surest way for a ruler and his people to prosper was for them to unite in amity with their neighbors, creating
suvarnasandhi
, “golden peace.”

Reinforcing implementations of these political peace-related terms were parallel religious ones based on polytheistic belief systems, Vedism and Hinduism, likewise formative of Indian culture, specifically in relation individual minds, bodies and spirits. Similarities between Vedism and Hinduism outweigh their differences for our purposes and lie primarily in their respective emphases within the same textual tradition, Hinduism being an outgrowth of Vedism. Of primary importance to inner peace in Vedism is the recitation of hymns and the performance of rituals; in Hinduism, bodily drills like yoga and exercises of the spirit and mind take precedence. A salient peaceful feature of Ancient Indian polytheism, aside from ongoing syncretism and henotheism, is that unnumbered gods and goddesses represented everything from elements of local landscapes and natural phenomena to everyday objects and timeless ideals were all part
of one pantheon and system of belief. Ways of worshiping them included individual or group meditations, festivities, rituals and drills. War did require religious legitimatization, but this astonishing plurality meant that religion was seldom a valid pretext for war on its own. Presupposing tolerance, polytheism fostered a peaceful coexistence of spiritualities coordinated by shared pantheist concept:
atmans
, the individual souls of humans as well as divinities;
brahman
, the universal soul governing them by an eternal law,
karma
, by which atmans' actions are held accountable. In Hinduism there is a separate deity called Brahma, the creator, part of a trinity with Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer, whose imports to peace are obvious. Atmans and brahman were at one time united and innately peaceful,
shanti
in spiritual senses and
manahprasada
in cognitive. Their separation stems from atmans' ties to the temporal-material world and the brahman's universal and everlasting immateriality, whose energy is the basis of this world.

In a sense, the sole purpose of Vedic and Hindu practices is to restore individual atmans' lost peace by identifying or unifying them with brahman, which is why purification rituals to “decontaminate” atmans from impurities play key roles in Hindu spiritual and bodily inner peace practices. By following the Vedas, atmans can generate qualitatively positive karma while also reducing it quantitatively; not doing so generates negative karma and increases it. Reincarnation (
samsara
) occurs through a hierarchical order of beings so that, and until, atmans become empty of karma. At that point, liberation from the cycle of reincarnation (
moksha
), identification with the brahman and immaculate peace are attained. This process was adapted, with variations, by Mahavira in the Janaist religion he founded in the fifth century BCE. Although stress is placed on the individual, karma also had strong collective connotations. The proportion and degree of the karma-free in society serve as a gauge of its general peaceful state, which in turn influences the feasibility of individual karmic pursuits. Shanti is sometimes used interchangeably with
sandi
(association, combination), the opposite of
vigraha
(separation, isolation); corollary terms are the absence of isolation (
vigrahabhava
) and absence of strife (
yuddhabhava
). Believing that our actions in this lifetime determine our state in the next is a tremendous impetus for peace, the logic being not only that the peace we bring about now will follow us, but also that violence will too. This concept may be called
reincarnative peace
, found in both polytheistic and monotheistic traditions, East and West. So while polytheistic beliefs supported social stratification, they also offered practical opportunities to transcend them.

As a rule, the preceding socio-political and religious traditions combined sustained the caste-based dynastic system through the Magadha Empire (684 BCE–550 CE) despite the Persian occupation under Darius
I, and those of the Indian Middle Ages (230 BCE–1279 CE) despite the Greek invasion of Alexander the Great. Tumultuous as they were, these mixed native dynasties and periods of foreign rule left largely unchanged the Vedic socio-political and Hindu religious forms until the Islamic Sultanates of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. Two peaceful exceptions that proved this structurally violent rule were the first explicitly nonviolent religion, Buddhism, and the part of Ashoka's reign based on its principles. Like those of future peace leaders, their stories mingle history, legend and allegory but with distinctively peace-oriented messages. Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha's given name, was the son of a Kshatriya prince in modern Nepal. Soon after birth (
c
. 563 BCE), a seer foretold that he would be a great teacher if he left the palace grounds and a great king if he did not. So his family immersed him in luxurious distractions to shield him from sufferings that might motivate his departure. But on escaping his comfortable confines, and after having married and continued the family line, he witnessed three commonplace sights from which he had previously been safeguarded: an old, a sick and a dead man. These sights made him aware of human suffering's universality, of which the unnecessary persistence, he decided, precluded individual and social peace, to which he then devoted his life.