Until now I have discussed impermanence and non-self and how astonishing the words of Gautama Siddhartha were. This time I want to step outside Buddhist doctrine and look at Buddhism within the long course of human and religious history. From that distance, Buddhism’s uniqueness becomes even clearer.
Science and reason reveal the long history of humanity
Primates are estimated to have appeared around eighty-five million years ago. The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor roughly seven million years ago, and human relatives such as Australopithecus later left evidence of upright walking. Homo erectus appeared around 2.7 million years ago, while fully modern humans, Homo sapiens, are thought to have emerged about two hundred thousand years ago.
Every human living on Earth today belongs to the single species Homo sapiens. Other human groups, including Neanderthals, once lived alongside us. They were formerly imagined to have lost a competition and disappeared without a trace, but DNA studies have shown that people in different regions retain roughly one to four percent Neanderthal ancestry. The groups interbred. This became clear after 2010 because computers and genetic analysis grew capable of extracting information from tiny amounts of ancient remains.
Through science, reason, and scholarship, we can know the broad history of human development. Dates and interpretations may change with new discoveries, and I may not know every detail precisely. What matters here is the overall path.
Settled agriculture produced population, power, and class
For a very long time humans lived by gathering, hunting, and moving. Around the ninth to eighth millennia BCE, settled agriculture began. In a small mobile group, even a leader had to work with everyone else to find food. Agriculture increased production and allowed people to remain in one place, raise more children, and expand rapidly in number.
When a group grows from a few dozen people to one or two hundred, someone is needed to settle disputes, make shared decisions, and perform work for the whole community. Chiefs and leaders appear. As the population grows larger, leaders leave direct farming and take charge of decision and rule; classes begin to form.
To give their words force, rulers need an authority everyone recognizes. The sun and moon, sky and sea, water and fire, thunder and lightning—natural powers that inspired wonder—were made divine. A ruler declares that he is a god’s son, performs sacrifices, communicates with gods, and received social rules from them. Divine authority grants legitimacy to his rule.
When a population exceeds a thousand and includes many clans, a chief of chiefs and eventually a king emerges. The ruler climbs a high tower or mountain and offers sacrifices to heaven, the sun, death, and local nature gods. Religious belief built upon local traditions legitimizes the political order. In early societies where religious and political authority were one, religion supported social cohesion and supplied norms.
Ancient myths, including Korea’s Dangun story, repeatedly tell of divine descent, heavenly selection, and extraordinary birth. The claim that a ruler received power from celestial beings was not confined to one region.
City-states and empires governed through divine authority
Mesopotamia means the land between two rivers in Greek. Agriculture developed early in the fertile region between the Euphrates and Tigris, and Sumerian civilization began around the fifth millennium BCE.
One of its best-known works is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is king of the city-state Uruk and is described as two-thirds god and one-third human. Although he commits violence and abuses power, divine blood supplies a justification for his rule.
When a city-state grows by conquering its neighbors, it becomes an empire. The Akkadian Empire followed Sumer, and Old Babylonia followed it. Hammurabi’s law code, dating to around the eighteenth century BCE, organized rules for trials and many situations of social life. It is famous for severe formulas such as “an eye for an eye,” but its larger importance lies in social norms being recorded and systematized.
The stone bearing the code depicts the king receiving law from a god. If Hammurabi had simply announced, “I made these rules,” people might not submit. The claim that a god gave the law created authority. As the society and empire grew, gods became increasingly important to government.
When the gods of city-states met through war, the victor’s god became the greater god. Gods of conquered peoples were subordinated or absorbed into the victor’s system. As kingdoms and empires changed, so did religions and the ranks of their gods.
From Neo-Babylonia to Persia and Zoroastrianism
Babylon, the capital of Neo-Babylonia, had a great ziggurat described in the Bible as the Tower of Babel. It was a high tower for the god worshiped by the city. A divine title meaning “lord,” Bel, also appears in biblical tradition as Baal.
Babylon was conquered by Cyrus II of Achaemenid Persia. Cyrus released the Judeans held captive there. Under Darius I, wars with the Greek world followed; the Battle of Marathon around 490 BCE and the story of a runner carrying news of victory belong to this course of events.
An important Persian religion was Zoroastrianism. It includes the prophet Zarathustra, the supreme deity Ahura Mazda, Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu in a conflict of good and evil, angels and demons, judgment after death, and an end-time teaching. Such elements influenced Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The religions of India and Iran also divided from common roots
The Zoroastrian Avesta and the Indian Vedas were written in closely related languages. Ancient Indians and Iranians once shared culture, customs, language, and religion before their paths divided, and the names and characters of their gods preserve many similarities.
The Zoroastrian ahura and the Indian asura share a linguistic root, yet a divine category on one side becomes demonic on the other. Conversely, the daevas associated with evil in Zoroastrianism correspond to the Indian devas, the heavenly gods. As peoples divided and their historical conditions changed, the value of related divine names could reverse.
Viewed through anthropology and religious history, religion itself has continually changed according to cause, relation, and dependent arising. Traditions developed in separate regions, were integrated by empires, traveled to other cultures, and influenced one another. Christianity, Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, and Indian religions may appear wholly separate today, but influences from Zoroastrian, Indo-European, and Mesopotamian cultures are interwoven within them.
The renunciant culture of ancient India created conditions for Buddhism
Early religious life included petitioning for blessings, sacrifice, and spells. These were especially powerful in ancient India. Brahmins monopolized ritual, but a new renunciant movement arose outside their order and sought truth directly. Its practitioners disciplined themselves, claimed truths found through practice, and built a culture of reasoning and debate about those discoveries.
Buddhism did not appear in ancient India as a purely accidental event. Renunciant culture created favorable conditions for it. When Siddhartha left home around the fifth century BCE, the teachers he visited already taught truths they claimed through argument and experience. Where Brahmins had monopolized sacrifice and truth, the renunciant declared, “I too can practice and awaken.” It was an intellectual rebellion.
The Buddha accomplished de-religionization alone 2,500 years ago
Even among the many renunciants and Upanishadic currents, however, the Buddha was unique. He rejected the established Indian logic of soul, gods, spells, sacrifice, and caste. At a time when the long history of religion was producing increasingly elaborate gods and philosophies, he stepped out of the entire mystical structure. He accomplished a de-religionization by himself.
After looking at reality directly, the Buddha spoke of impermanence and non-self. The sun, moon, and seasons seem to return repeatedly. Spring, summer, wet season, and dry season cycle, so ideas of natural recurrence and rebirth after death could easily emerge. Imagining souls, gods, and another world was understandable within earlier human life.
Impermanence, however, means that even a god could not remain permanent and that sun and moon do not remain constant. Against the belief that an unchanging atman resides within and exchanges bodies through rebirth, the Buddha said there is no such atman. There is no independent, unchanging entity that can be called me, and nothing exists without relation to other things. Even a god, were one to exist, could not stand outside change. This was a Copernican reversal unprecedented in religious history.
Later Buddhism became religion again
During the next 2,500 years, Buddhism was re-religionized. Afterlife and rebirth not taught by the Buddha were attached to it; India’s preexisting six realms and deities entered Buddhism. Forms of goddesses and gods from Indian and related religious cultures were blended into beings such as Avalokiteshvara, and after his death the Buddha was deified within systems of Buddhas of the three times. Belief, prayer, and petition for blessings became Buddhism again.
Impermanence and non-self were too alien for established Hindu society to absorb without alteration. If one follows through the denial of eternal gods, souls, and independent substances, inherited custom and Brahmin-centered caste must also collapse. The story that Brahmins emerged from the god’s mouth and other castes from lower parts of the divine body legitimized hierarchy. So did the claim that people were born into superior or inferior positions because of past lives. The Buddha’s insight undermined all of it.
The gods, prayers, spells, and rebirth found today in Theravada and Mahayana traditions are religious features attached after the Buddha. Using this standard, we can trace when rebirth entered, when the Buddha was deified, and when new bodhisattvas and devotional practices arose.
Buddhism did not develop by becoming religious
Some describe those changes as the development of Buddhism. I will state my view clearly: not one part of that was a development. The Buddha’s teaching already contained the alpha and omega.
Buddhism was a revolutionary teaching unlike anything earlier in religious history, and it retains that life today. We should not seek development by adding mystery and authority. We should recover its original form: impermanence, non-self, dependent arising, and direct seeing. That Buddhism shines even more clearly when seen together with science and reason.
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