The Power of Ideas Michael Wood: The Story of India

Since ancient times, Indian civilisation has been driven by great ideas,

by the search for knowledge and truth.

Here in South India, the people of the Jain religion pay homage to a teacher

who was once a king, who renounced his kingdom to seek enlightenment.

From the Buddha to Mahatma Gandhi, Indian history is full of such figures,

men and women who contested the idea that history should only be written by the men of war.

From the 5th century BC, these ideas shaped one of the most revolutionary times in history,

when great empires were founded in India on these universal principles of peace and non-violence,

the next chapter in The Story of India.

'But our journey begins very much in the present.'

Not Hollywood, no, a BBC documentary. Good morning. Times Of India, please.

'Amid one of the all too common crises of our modern world, we humans are a competitive species,

'fighting for resources and ideas, still to learn history's lessons.'

We're heading to Varanasi, tempered slightly,

as last night there were bombings

at a railway station and a temple.

Nobody knows quite why it's happened.

But the trains are still running, so we'll see what happens.

There are six billion people in the world now, compared with a hundred million in the 5th century BC.

And the fulfilment of our desires has become a goal of civilisation.

Every person has his own identity, his own needs.

Mr Wood? Mr Wood? Ah, yes! Aren't the Indian railways wonderful?

All the great ancient civilisations meditated on these big questions - how to live life,

sharing the planet with other people, how to find happiness.

For Indian people, the traditional goal of life is to live with virtue - dharma.

To gain wealth and success - artha.

To find pleasure - kama.

But in the end, to seek enlightenment - moksha.

Back in the 5th century BC, a series of kingdoms had grown up in the Ganges plain with cities.

And in history, cities are always vehicles for change.

India's greatest sacred city, Varanasi, was founded around 500 BC.

It's been called the Jerusalem of India.

Here are living continuities with the old order of Indian society.

That order was founded on the caste system, into which all Hindus are born, marry and die.

The caste system divides people by birth from high to low.

It fixes their jobs and their place in society.

We're going to meet one of the family of the Dom Rajas, the lords of the dead.

They are the only people who can perform the funeral pyres here in Benares.

When family comes to have cremation of a family member, the fire can only come from your family?

Yes. Because if they could not take the fire from us,

they cannot burn the body even if it's the prime minister.

-Is it allowed to see?

-Yes.

-May we come?

-Yes.

-We follow you?

-Yes.

-OK.

'The sacred fire from which all pyres must be lit has been burning here for thousands of years.'

-So is this the fire here?

-Yes. And the fire has been here since 3,500 years.

'In all societies in history, religions offer a path to salvation.

'But in practice, religions create physical and mental bonds.

'The essence of India's ancient system was that salvation only came

'by the performance of rituals in the right time and place.'

Before he starts burning, he must walk around five times, because of the five elements.

-Earth, water, wind, fire, ether?

-Fire, water, air, earth, ether.

In the ritual universe, order is vital. And so it was in the 5th century BC.

"Know your place in the order.

"Perform the necessary rituals. Fulfil your duty whatever caste you're born into."

You and your family are very, very important people in India, yes?

-In a way of thinking.

-In a way of thinking.

But in reality, people think of us as a very low caste. "We cannot touch him.

-"We cannot..."

-You are low caste?

-We are untouchable. We are pariah.

When we walk in the street, people don't like to touch us.

So, because you do the rituals for the dead and you touch the dead, you are very low caste?

-But everybody needs you.

-Without us they cannot do.

From ancient times, that was the Indian way. And it's lasted thousands of years,

a system of power from the Iron Age, now being re-negotiated in modern, democratic India.

But it was challenged before.

People first started to question the old order in the 5th century BC.

And not just in India. In China, there was Confucius and Lao Tzu.

Across in the Mediterranean, the Greek philosophers. In Israel, the Old Testament prophets.

It was a revolutionary time for humanity - the birth of conscience, putting ethics centre of the world.

And nowhere were these questionings more intense than in India.

Speculation about the nature of the universe and the nature of the self and the connection between the two

is one of the oldest obsessions of Indian civilisation, even in the Bronze Age.

But in the cities of the Ganges plain here in the 5th century BC, a host of thinkers arose,

rationalists, sceptics, atheists.

There were those who denied the existence of the afterlife and reincarnation.

There were those like the Jains who believed that all living creatures

were bonded together in a chain of being across time.

There were scientists, closely resembling their contemporaries in Greece,

Greek philosophers, who suggested the world was composed of atoms and that everything was change.

And there were those who said there were immutable laws of the cosmos and all change was illusory.

But the most influential of these thinkers was the Buddha.

The Buddha's story is the stuff of fairytales.

He came from a world of princely magnificence. And nowhere does princely better than India.

Young, newly-wed, high-caste, he had everything. And then, in a sudden bolt of lightning,

he saw the reality of human life for everyone, suffering and death.

So there and then, young Gautam left behind his wife and family

and set out on the road, seeking truth.

'Six years he wandered, a long-haired dropout, until he finally came here to Bodh Gaya.'

-How are you?

-Hi.

This one is the bird

with Buddha himself...

From the side of his mouth? Oh, yes.

-So here, this is when he says, "My black hair, I cut off."

-Yes.

All right. Yeah. So he left his wife and his baby?

Yes.

Today, nearly 400 million people are Buddhists. From Burma and Korea to China and now the West,

young Gautam will re-shape history, but when he first comes here,

he's another ragged renouncer.

The Buddha had come here to do what Indian holy men did, practising almost unbelievable austerities.

"I ate so little those days," he said later, "that my buttocks were as knobbly as a camel's hoof.

"The bones of my spine stuck out like a row of spindles. And my ribs looked like a collapsed old shed.

"And much good did it do me."

And that's his voice, a vivid, realistic turn of phrase.

Not holier than thou. His years on the road had taught the ex-prince to speak the common language.

So he sits here under a pipal tree,

seeking enlightenment. It's one of the great moments in history. And this is the very place.

-This is the diamond throne.

-That throne? So this is the place where the Buddha is believed to have sat

-and attained enlightenment?

-This is where he attained enlightenment.

This is also called "the navel of the earth".

-So for all Buddhists, the most sacred place?

-For all the Buddhists from all over the world,

this is the most sacred place for worship and veneration.

CHANTING

Some of his devotees wanted a statue of the Buddha to be made.

He then and there rejected the idea, the proposal.

And he said that "if people need something,

"then it should be the Bodhi Tree, which has given me shelter

"to sit and meditate and attain the supreme bliss that I had experienced.

"And it will also give shelter to thousands of people who are in search of truth."

And today, Bodh Gaya is a magnet for thousands of people from all over the world,

whether seeking truth or simply curious.

And it's a luminous place -

magical, and yet, full of life.

It's great, isn't it, all the monks enjoying themselves?

How often we make our history the story of the great conquerors, the men of violence -

Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler.

That's what we teach our children in their history books.

But here's one man who sits under a tree, thinking, and changes the world.

But this is an Indian story.

By the morning, the Buddha had crystallised in his mind what he called the four noble truths.

In essence, the idea was very simple.

The nature of the human condition, he thought, is suffering.

And suffering is caused, in the end, by human desire, by attachment, by covetousness,

in the inner life, and in the outside world.

"Free yourself from those desires," the Buddha thought, "and you can become a liberated human being.

"But it can only come from within."

Ultimately, inner happiness, inner satisfaction,

must be created by oneself.

You could be a billionaire,

but deep inside, very lonely person,

very lonely feeling.

So therefore, as a human being,

regardless believer or non-believer,

these inner human values are very essential

in order to have happier individual,

happier family, happier society or happier nation.

The core of the Buddha's ideas was the Eightfold Path - respect for living things,

compassion, truth, non-violence,

ethical action. It's so easy to say, isn't it?

But we're still struggling for it today.

He's still on his own at this point, so he travels from Bodh Gaya to Sarnath.

Here in the Deer Park he picks up five old friends from his time on the road.

They become his first disciples. And he tries his ideas out on them.

And on this spot, now marked by the Great Stupa,

he gives what becomes known as the First Sermon.

This was called the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta.

It means "setting the wheel of doctrine in motion".

Setting the wheel of doctrine, or law, in motion. The wheel, yes.

And the teaching of Buddha is not only for monks, it is for all.

For the well-being of many.

-For the next more than 40 years, the Buddha journeyed and preached.

-45 years.

45 years, journeyed and preached.

-He never stayed at one place.

-Yes.

And now it becomes a great Indian story. The real journey begins.

He wanders, no possessions, on foot, begging,

through the small world of the Iron Age kingdoms of the Ganges plain.

THUNDER RUMBLES

But the thing to remember is, he's a protestor.

Through Indian history, there's a tension between the rulers

and those who fought for social justice. From the medieval saints to the freedom fighters

and the flood of modern poets and agitators, he's the first of India's million mutineers.

Then he comes here to Rajgir,

invited by the king, who saw something in him.

The king gave him some land on which to build a hut,

a bamboo grove. It's still here.

It was a place where monks lived all the time. We know of places in this grove which are still here,

the squirrel's nesting place, the peacock's dancing place.

You can imagine what it was like.

Every year he went back to the same place, so people knew where he was.

It was a good time for monks to re-gather.

And if anybody wanted to be with the Buddha, they could come here.

It's impressive. He's got about 1,000 disciples by that time.

The king comes to meet him as with tradition.

And now politicians go to meet religious leaders, not the other way round.

The king said, "I had five wishes. The first was to be king.

"And the second was to be able to receive an enlightened person.

"The third was to hear him speak. The fourth was to understand it. The fifth was to be grateful for that."

In the hills above Rajgir, there's a little cave where the Buddha lived through the monsoon seasons.

The Buddha really loved this place.

It was a little higher than the surrounding area.

It was one of his favourite places for meditation. He even said so. He loved watching the sunset from here.

And he just came again and again just for the sheer pleasure of it.

You can know that the Buddha was in this cave.

As you go into the cave, there's a little sort of...

It's low, then it gets deeper, so you can stand up.

You can just sit here and meditate for hours and just be with the Buddha.

You can feel his breath even though he was here 2,500 years ago.

You can really feel his presence in this cave now.

And again that realistic voice - "Be your own lamp," he said.

"Seek no other refuge but yourselves. Let truth be your light."

BELL CHIMES

For me, it's one of the never-failing miracles of history

that a human mind from so long ago can still speak to us directly in his own voice

and mean something now in our time of change. But then his was a time of change too.

Buddhism is based on pure morality, what we'd call universal values, trust, truthfulness, non-violence.

And those ideas were very attractive to the rising class of merchants and traders

in the cities of the Ganges plain.

But it's also atheistic. The logic of the Buddha's message is that belief in God itself

is a form of attachment,

of clinging, of desire.

And in the land of 33 million gods or is it 330 million,

that eventually would prove a step too far.

But all things must pass, as he would say.

No-one in history was clearer about that. No promise of heaven. No threat of hell.

He's an old man now, around 80. And this was his last journey,

among the scavengers and the dispossessed, with their unending struggle for mere survival.

Around 486 BC, according to the traditional date,

he headed back across the plain towards the Himalayas.

Now he's heading north back to the land of his childhood.

Perhaps he was consciously heading home.

He knew he was going to die.

HORNS BLARE

The Buddha's story ends in an endearingly scruffy little town on the Ganges plain, Kushinagar.

On the stalls, India's deities old and new.

And he's become one of them, against his wishes, of course.

One of the Buddha's disciples begged him to hold on a bit longer.

"It's a miserable place, stuck in the middle of nowhere," he said.

"Couldn't you die in a famous place where they could give you a great funeral?"

The Buddha said, "A small place is fitting."

He took some food in the house of a blacksmith - pork.

Like most ancient Indians, the Buddha was a meat eater.

And he fell ill.

Again the tradition marks the very spot, on the edge of Kushinagar.

At the end, his disciples can't bear to let him go.

"What more do you want of me?" he says. "I've made known the teaching.

"Ask no more of me. You are the community now. I've reached the end of my journey."

There are several versions of the Buddha's last moments. One says he exposed the upper part of his body

to show how age and sickness had wasted it to remind his followers of the human condition.

But all versions agree that his last words were these -

"All created things must pass. Strive on diligently."

Meanwhile, far to the west, tremendous events were changing the world.

At the time of the Buddha's death, the Persian Empire invaded Greece.

And in the following century, the Greeks came east,

looking for revenge.

And Europe faced Asia in the perennial battleground of Iraq.

What happened here would change the story of India.

Great ideas in history don't always spread beyond their own country.

The ideas of the Buddha remained a local cult in the Ganges plain for 200 years after his death.

And the catalyst for change, as so often in history, was war.

On the 1st of October, 331 BC,

the greatest battle of antiquity was fought here near the little village of Gaugamela.

It was waged between the might of the Persian Empire,

which ruled as far as the Indus Valley and the plains of India,

and an army which had marched from Greece under an extraordinary young general, Alexander the Great.

Alexander's invasion of the East was a true clash of civilisations,

a different model for history, one that we in the West have always been seduced by,

the East as the other, the heroic leader as superman.

The man whose giant ego literally overwhelms the Persian divine king, Darius,

and subdues history itself to his will.

Alexander was a globalist.

Alexander would thoroughly understand the world today.

The thing that unifies all armies is the will of the commander.

Even in a battlefield like this of 150,000 to 200,000 individuals,

on this plain at that time,

it came down to a contest of wills between two individuals.

-And they both understood that?

-Yes.

And they could actually see each other and the spears thrusting into the faces of the Persians.

At which point, Darius takes flight and drives his chariot out and away back down to the river.

Alexander's guru, Aristotle, another great teacher,

a seeker after truth and reason, had a different take on the world from a Buddha.

"The Greeks have strength and reason," he said, "so it's right they should rule the world."

So Alexander went on over the mountains, over the Khyber Pass, and down into the plains of India.

It was the first meeting of India and the West.

Alexander finally stopped in the Punjab, near today's Amritsar.

The Greek army reached the River Beas here, beginning of September, 326 BC.

But it wasn't any Greek army that you've imagined before.

Some of them were wearing Central Asian clothes, Persian trousers, Indian cotton tunics.

This isn't a classical Greek army, it's like a science fiction army, an ancient version of Mad Max.

And in the middle, Alexander the Great in his uniform,

with his ram's horn helmet with its white plumes, and on his armour the Gorgon's head,

which was supposed to turn to stone anybody who gazed into his eyes.

There was one person who wasn't turning to stone. A young Indian had come to Alexander's camp.

He was deeply impressed by this spectacle of imperialism, by the glamour of Alexander's violence.

And he would become one of the greatest figures in Indian history,

who would create the greatest Indian Empire before modern times. His name - Chandragupta Maurya.

In time, Chandragupta seized power, drove Alexander's successors out of India,

and ruled from the Khyber to Bengal.

And his state is the first forerunner of today's India.

In 300 BC, the Greeks sent their ambassadors to him, bearing gifts.

And they give the first ever account of India from the outside.

From Stone Age tribes in the Himalayas to the cities of the plains, a land of 118 nations,

rich and fertile, with rivers so wide, they couldn't see the other side.

"One of them," the Greeks said, "worshipped by all Indians, the Ganges."

The embassy eventually arrived at Chandragupta's capital, Patna.

The Greek ambassadors were amazed by what they saw.

The city stretched nine or ten miles along the bank of the Ganges.

And all along the river frontage, they saw palaces, pleasure gardens.

The Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, said, "I've seen the great cities of Asia. I've seen Susa in Persia.

"But nothing compares with this."

And if Megasthenes' description is accurate, this was indeed the greatest city in the world.

The city stood at the junction of four rivers and measured 22 miles in circuit.

In the king's camp were over 400,000 men

with 3,000 war elephants.

And he never travelled in state except with his bodyguard of female warriors, Indian Amazons,

loyal only to him.

Good morning.

Patna today has almost turned its back on the Ganges,

the silted shore of the ancient city now high and dry.

Fantastic.

There's the edge of old Patna.

Of course, in the days when the Greek ambassadors came, you've got to remember it was a new city then,

a new imperial city. There would've been brick kilns everywhere

that would've been needed in a great city like this.

Today's Patna is right off most people's tourist trail.

But what a place it is.

It's an amazing city, Patna, because you've got the layers of the past sort of superimposed here.

Tombs of Muslim saints sit on ancient Buddhist mounds.

It's a city where all India's communities have mixed over centuries

and left the tangled roots of history, as so often in India, all still alive.

With its crumbling palaces and merchants' mansions,

it's like wandering through an Indian version of Ancient Rome.

What a beautiful building.

Hello.

How old is the house?

SPEAKS IN LOCAL LANGUAGE

-105 years.

-105 years, all right. It's a lovely house, anyway.

But what about the very earliest layer of Patna?

The imperial city of Chandragupta visited by the Ancient Greeks?

In a forgotten corner of the city is the last pleasure lake of Chandragupta's capital.

And here, on a little island, is an ancient Jain shrine.

Tucked away here are the remains of a temple going back to the time of Chandragupta himself.

The shrine is dedicated to Chandragupta's guru

and it holds the key to the tale of how at the height of his power,

the king renounced his empire.

India, so the story goes, was ravaged by famine.

The powerless king turned to a Jain guru and bowed to him, as in the end, all Indian rulers must.

And so he left his throne and headed south in penance to the mountain of Sravanabelgola,

where in the myth, the ancient king, Bahubali,

had also renounced his kingdom for "moksha" - salvation.

His mother had a dream in which the goddess told her,

"You have to go and seek the blessings of Lord Bahubali."

Chandragupta Maurya, he took a bow and arrow

and then he shot the arrow only where he could see the impression of the statue.

And then he got the artist who could carve this statue of Lord Bahubali.

So Chandragupta Maurya became a naked holy man on a windy mountain top,

seeking "moksha" - liberation through knowledge.

CHANTING

Chandragupta Maurya, when he came here,

he wanted to renounce everything.

And for himself, he wanted to get into the penance and then "moksha".

They say he stood there, denouncing his whole kingdom, everything.

While he is doing penance, nobody eats anything.

-Finally they attain "moksha".

-Did they die?

-They die, yes.

The first great king of India starved himself to death in this cave,

witness to the age-old injunction to pursue knowledge and liberation above all other things.

Chandragupta made the first great Indian state,

a template of all future Indias right down to today,

a religious renouncer at the end, but what he bequeathed the future was the idea of secular authority,

a universal king who was the source of power and of law.

But 20 years after Chandragupta's death, his grandson would take those secular ideas,

join them to the ethics of the Jains and Buddhists and put that synthesis at the heart of politics.

This astonishing story was only rediscovered in modern times.

The tale takes us to Calcutta in the days of the East India Company.

It was here that the lost script of the Mauryan Empire was deciphered in 1837 in the Asiatic Society.

A young Briton with a talent for codes and ciphers

became fascinated by mysterious inscriptions on great pillars in Delhi and Allahabad.

His name was James Princep.

Princep's attention was drawn to a carved boulder, which turned out to be India's Rosetta Stone.

The decipherment came, like so many great examples of code-breaking, by a hunch.

Princep guessed that this unknown script contained a form of early Sanskrit.

He began to put two and two together.

He realised that this strange squiggle with an inverted "T" and a dot next to it

was probably the sign for a gift. "Danam" in Sanskrit - the gift of somebody of something.

He realised that this strange hooked "C" was a possessive - "so and so's gift".

And then he cracked an absolutely crucial phrase, which occurred over and over in these inscriptions

and on the great pillars in Delhi and Allahabad, the phrase, which begins this inscription here,

"Devanamapiya Piyadasi Laja evam aha."

"The Raja Piyadasi, beloved of the gods, says this."

It was a king. And a king, who judging by the inscriptions,

had ruled from the Himalayan foothills, almost to the south of India.

And a king whose memory had completely vanished from the historical record in India.

The name of the beloved of the gods was none other than Chandragupta's grandson, Asoka.

And back in Patna, the capital of his empire,

he had never been forgotten.

And here I was expecting a dry, dusty archaeological site.

That's India for you.

The place is an ancient sacred well still used by the people of Patna for their marriage ceremonies.

It's now an auspicious place.

But it's remembered in legend as a place of torture, a living hell.

The name of the king who built it?

SPEAKS IN LOCAL LANGUAGE

He told us the well was constructed by Asoka.

The well was built by Asoka?

Namaskar.

-This is the well?

-Yes.

-Can we have a look?

-Yes.

According to the legend told here,

Asoka built what was called "a hell on Earth", which was on this spot, a prison with great high walls,

within which terrible tortures were devised for people who went against his rule.

The great King Asoka had 500 beautiful young women in his harem.

One spring day, he found his thoughts lingering on the seductive forms around him.

But the great king had a flaw. He had bad skin.

Horrid to touch. Ugly Asoka. SHE LAUGHS

Wrap them all in hot copper plates and burn them.

Majesty!

A king should build a proper execution chamber

and appoint executioners to carry out his commands.

Asoka agreed. And in Patna he built a torture chamber that he called "hell on Earth".

When the people saw this, they called him Chand Asoka,

"Asoka the Cruel".

The legend of Asoka the Cruel has been told for centuries.

But the edicts deciphered by Princep give us real history.

They tell of Asoka's attack on the kingdom of Kalinga, today's Orissa.

-So if Asoka is going to invade Kalinga, this river he must cross?

-Yes.

-So this was the entry point for the Mauryan army?

-Yes.

So the real story begins with a brutal war of aggression.

And only in the last year have archaeologists in Orissa found the first evidence for the fighting.

Wow. That's...

That's very clear, isn't it?

-And what does it say?

-It is clearly written, "Tosali Nagar".

-Nagar.

And we know that Tosali is the capital of Kalinga

-at the time of Asoka?

-Yes.

This Tosali, it is the name that appears in holy inscriptions.

And this is a weapon.

This is an arrowhead.

-This also resembles Mauryan weapons.

-So this kind of thing has been found in the Ganges valley?

-So all this metalwork has come from a very small area?

-Yes.

A host of spearheads, arrowheads, bits of weaponry.

This is only a tiny sample.

The Mauryan army fired an immense amount of weaponry at the people of Kalinga!

The king, the beloved of the gods, attacked Kalinga.

150,000 living persons were carried away captive. 100,000 were killed in the war

and almost as many died afterwards.

But after the Kalingas had been crushed,

there arose in the king a great conflict, a regret for his conquest,

and a yearning for justice.

"In war," said Asoka, "everyone suffers. There is killing and injury.

"People are cut off forever from the ones they love. War is a tragedy for everyone."

Asoka had hit on one of the most dangerous ideas in history - non-violence.

The legend says Asoka now turned to Buddhism and built memorial stupas in atonement.

And the archaeologists have also found their remains on the hills above the battlefield.

Three letters are clearly visible.

One is "A". The second is "so". And the other "ka".

The name "Asoka" is clearly visible.

"All we human beings," says Asoka, "whatever our station in life,

"share the same human values - love of parents, respect for elders,

"kindness and attachment to friends and neighbours, even to servants and slaves.

"From now on," says Asoka, "I desire non-violence for all creatures.

"And I resolve to conquer by persuasion alone."

But one should always take the words of politicians with a pinch of salt,

especially when they've waged an aggressive war.

But Asoka's words are so self-recriminating

that it's hard not to think that it's his voice speaking to us.

"When the war in Kalinga was over," he says, "and the people conquered,"

he felt inside him "a great crisis, a striving for meaning and remorse".

So like his grandfather, Asoka goes on pilgrimage across India,

seeking a guru, a teacher.

And by the riverbank, he met the son of a perfume seller from Varanasi, a Buddhist monk.

And the monk told him to go and sit beneath the Bodhi Tree where the Buddha had found enlightenment.

And there the power of ideas and the power of the state came together in a uniquely Indian way,

a rejection of the path of violence, indeed, of a whole way of understanding history.

While he was here, Asoka gave rich gifts to the poor and the sick of this part of Bihar.

He consulted with the local communities about proper governance, about good conduct,

citizenship, I suppose, we'd call it today.

Forming in his mind now was an idea for a political order, such had never been conceived of before,

in the history of the world.

All over India, he carved his edicts on rocks and great stone pillars.

He erected stupas where he enclosed portions of the ashes of the Buddha,

symbols of the source of his moral authority.

Copies of the edicts are still being discovered,

20 of them in the last 40 years.

This one is near the battle site in Orissa.

One of the great documents in the history of the world. One of the great ideas in history.

The forerunner, the first forerunner of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

This amazing outpouring of ideas all boils down to one idea - all humans are one family.

As Asoka says, "All men are my children."

Does that make Asoka's India sound a bit like a nanny state?

Well, maybe. But as Asoka said, "It's hard to persuade people to do good."

His edicts didn't just cover humans. His are the first animal rights laws in the world.

POLICE SIREN

He even had police to enforce them.

This is a police raid on a load of bird shops and animal shops, pet dealers.

People trying to escape up into the roof and over the roof.

Nothing illegal! Legal.

-So exotic birds...

-Exotic birds.

-..is OK?

The amazing thing is that in Asoka's day

they had a network of police to enforce these rules in the 3rd century!

As a result, India has the oldest animal hospitals in the world.

-So this is Raja, who's the oldest inmate in here.

-Almost the oldest inmate here. Hi, Raja.

-Hello, Raja.

There's a fantastic passage in one of Asoka's edicts where he says, "I have made these provisions,

"which are to ban the killing of certain animals.

"But the greatest thing we could do is to protect ALL living things."

-He talks about practical things, but then the ideal.

-He understood if you're cruel to animals,

you'll be cruel to humans as well.

Since animals are powerless,

it shows your true nature in your interaction with them

as you can be your true self.

LOUD BARKING

In history there have been many empires of the sword.

But only India created an empire of the spirit.

And from the edicts we learn that Asoka didn't even stop there.

He sent embassies to the kings of Greece and Macedonia, North Africa, Syria, Babylonia.

All part of his project for the brotherhood of man and world peace.

Asoka also asked for religious tolerance. "We must respect all religions," he said,

"for all religions in the end have the same goal, which is enlightenment."

And it's fitting that here at the sacred confluence of the Rivers Ganges and Jumna,

where Indian kings made acts of charity to all faiths, his greatest pillar edict still stands today.

There's a key idea that lies behind all these edicts of Asoka.

And it simply is this - the message isn't from God.

What Asoka's doing is taking the ideas of the Buddhists,

the Eightfold Path, truthfulness, compassion, right conduct,

and the teachings of the Jains on non-violence, and making them not only the core of personal morality,

but of politics.

The social welfare legislation, the teachings on religious toleration,

even the ecological measures on the conservation of species, from the rhino to the Ganges porpoise,

the conservation of forests, the preservation from needless destruction,

it's moving the sphere of politics away from the sanctions of religion to the rule of reason and morality.

What's on that pillar is an extraordinary product of an extraordinary time, the Axis Age.

And when the time came to free India from British rule,

what better symbol for the national flag than Asoka's wheel of law?

As for the man himself,

his last days are a mystery.

But the legends tell of an old man stripped of everything.

In the end, all the great King Asoka had left

was one half of an amalaka fruit.

Broken-hearted, he summoned his ministers.

-Who now is Lord of the Earth?

-Your Majesty, without question, of course it is you,

the great Emperor Asoka himself!

Liar!

I have lost all my power. This piece of amalaka fruit in my hand is all that I can call my own.

Now I understand when the Buddha says, "All fortune is the cause of misfortune."

All things must pass, even Buddhism itself.

It became the greatest religion of the ancient world. It's still a power in Asia.

But in the Middle Ages it died in the heartland of India.

In the 18th century, when British explorers came seeking its lost history,

they dug in the jungle here at Kushinagar where he died.

And under the forest they found an astonishing image of the Buddha in the moment of death,

the moment of nirvana.

And that would begin the next cycle of the story,

spreading the Buddha's message to new lands of the West

and to continents the Buddha had never dreamed of.

All across the world now, there is a big interest in the Buddha, in Western people also.

Why do you think this is?

Buddha's message is true.

So all people accept it.

-The Buddha's message is true?

-Yes.

Next in The Story Of India -

silk roads, spice routes and China ships.

Epics of the South

and lost empires of the North.

Ancient India goes global in the happiest time in the history of the world.

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd 2007

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