Fields of Blood (15 page)

To win the war, the Pandavas have to kill four Kaurava leaders who are inflicting grave casualties on their army. One of them is the general
Drona, whom the Pandavas love dearly because he was their teacher and initiated them in the art of warfare. In a council of war, Krishna argues that if the Pandavas want to save the world from total destruction by establishing their rule, they must cast virtue aside. A warrior is obliged to be absolutely truthful and keep his word, but Krishna tells Yudishthira that he can kill Drona only by lying to him. In the midst of the battle, he must tell him that his son
Ashwatthaman has died so that, overcome with grief, Drona will lay down his weapons.
¹⁰⁹
Most reluctantly, Yudishthira agrees, and when he delivers this terrible news, Drona never imagines that Yudishthira, the son of
Dharma, would lie. So Drona stops fighting and sits down in his chariot in the yogic position, falls into a trance, and ascends peacefully to heaven. In terrible counterpoint, the chariot of Yudishthira, which has always floated a few inches above the ground, comes crashing down to earth.

Krishna is no Satan, tempting the Pandavas to sin. This is the end of the
Heroic Age, and his dark stratagems have become essential because, as he tells the desolate Pandavas, the Kauravas “could not have been slain by you on the battlefield in a fair fight.” Had not
Indra lied and broken his oath to
Vritra in order to save the cosmic order? “Not even the world-guardian gods themselves could have killed by fair means those four noble warriors,” Krishna explains. “When enemies become too numerous
and powerful, they should be slain by deceit and stratagems. This was the path formerly trodden by the devas to slay the asuras; and a path trodden by the virtuous may be trodden by all.”
¹¹⁰
The Pandavas feel reassured and acknowledge that their victory has at least brought peace to the world. But bad karma can only have a bad outcome, and Krishna’s scheme has appalling consequences that resonate horribly with us today.

Crazed with sorrow, Ashwatthaman, Drona’s son, vows to avenge his father and offers himself to
Shiva, the ancient god of the indigenous peoples of India, as a self-sacrifice. Entering the Pandava camp by night, he slaughters the sleeping women, children, and warriors who are “exhausted and weaponless” and hacks horses and elephants to pieces. In his divine frenzy, “his every limb doused in blood, he seemed like Death himself, unloosed by fate … inhuman and utterly terrifying.”
¹¹¹
The Pandavas themselves escape, having been warned by Krishna to sleep outside the camp, but most of their family are killed. When they finally catch up with Ashwatthaman, they find him sitting serenely with a group of
renouncers beside the Ganges. He fires off a magical weapon of mass destruction, and
Arjuna retaliates with a weapon of his own. Had not two of the renouncers, “desiring the welfare of all creatures,” positioned themselves between the contending weapons, the world would have been destroyed. Instead Ashwatthaman’s weapon is diverted into the wombs of the Pandava women, who will bear no more children.
¹¹²
So Yudishthira is proven right: a destructive cycle of violence, betrayal, and lies has rebounded on the perpetrators, resulting in destruction for both sides.

Yudishthira reigns for fifteen years, but he has incurred the ancient stain of the warrior. The light has gone out of his life, and after the war he would have become a renouncer had not his brothers and Krishna strongly opposed it. The king’s rod of force is essential for the welfare of the world, Arjuna argued. No king has ever attained glory without slaying his enemies; indeed, it is impossible to exist without harming other creatures: “I don’t see anyone living in the world with
nonviolence. Even ascetics cannot stay alive without killing.”
¹¹³
Like
Ashoka, who was also unable to stem the violence of imperial warfare, Yudishthira focuses on kindness to animals, the only form of ahimsa that he is able realistically to practice. At the end of his life, he refuses to enter heaven without his devoted dog and is congratulated for his compassion by his father,
Dharma.
¹¹⁴
For centuries, the Indian national epic has compelled
its audience to appreciate the moral ambiguity and tragedy of warfare; whatever the warrior’s heroic code maintained, it was never a wholly glorious activity. Yet it was essential not only to the survival of the state but also for civilization and progress and, as such, had become an unavoidable fact of human life.

Even
Arjuna, who is often irritated by his brother’s yearning for
nonviolence, has an “
Ashoka moment.” In the
Bhagavad-Gita
he and Krishna debate these problems before the final battle with the
Kauravas. As he stands in his chariot beside Krishna in the front line, Arjuna is suddenly horrified to see his cousins and beloved friends and teachers in the enemy ranks. “I see no good in killing my kinsmen in battle,” he tells Krishna, “I do not want to kill them, even if I am killed.”
¹¹⁵
Krishna tries to hearten him by citing all the traditional arguments, but Arjuna is not impressed: “I will not fight!” he cries.
¹¹⁶
So Krishna introduces an entirely novel idea: a warrior must simply dissociate himself from the effects of his actions and perform his duty without any personal animus or agenda of his own. Like a yogin, he must take the “I” out of his deeds, so that he acts impersonally—indeed,
he
will not be acting at all.
¹¹⁷
Instead, like a sage, even in the frenzy of battle, he will remain fearless and without desire.

We do not know whether this would have convinced Arjuna, because he is suddenly blasted by a terrifying epiphany. Krishna reveals that he is really an incarnation of the god
Vishnu, who descends to earth whenever the cosmic order is in jeopardy. As Lord of the World, Vishnu is ipso facto involved in the violence that is an inescapable part of human life, but he is not damaged by it, “since I remain detached in all my actions, Arjuna, as if I stood apart from them.”
¹¹⁸
As he gazes at Krishna, Arjuna sees that everything—gods, humans, and the natural order—is somehow present in Krishna’s body, and although the battle has not even begun, he sees that the Pandava and Kaurava warriors are already hurtling into the god’s blazing mouth. Krishna/Vishnu has therefore already annihilated both armies, and it makes no difference whether Arjuna fights or not. “Even without you,” Krishna tells him, “all these warriors … will cease to exist.”
¹¹⁹
Many politicians and generals have similarly argued that they are only instruments of destiny when they commit
atrocities—though few have emptied themselves of egotism and become “free from attachment, hostile to no creature.”
¹²⁰

The
Bhagavad-Gita
has probably been more influential than any
other Indian scripture. Yet both the
Gita
and the
Mahabharata
remind us that there are no easy answers to the problems of war and peace. True, Indian mythology and ritual often glorified greed and warfare but it also helped people to confront tragedy and even devised ways of extirpating aggression from the psyche, pioneering ways for people to live together without any violence at all. We are flawed creatures with violent hearts that long for peace. At the same time as the
Gita
was being composed, the people of China were coming to a similar conclusion.

3

T
he Chinese believed that at the beginning of time, human beings had been indistinguishable from animals. Creatures that would eventually become human had “snake bodies with human faces or the heads of oxen with tiger noses,” while future animals could speak and had human skills. These creatures lived together in caves, naked or clad in skins, eating raw meat and wild plants. Humans did not develop differently because of their biological makeup but because they were taken in hand by five great kings, who had discerned the order of the universe and taught men and women to live in harmony with it. These sage kings drove the other beasts away and forced humans to live separately. They developed the tools and technology essential to organized society and instructed their people in a code of values that aligned them with the cosmic forces. Thus for the Chinese, humanity was not a given; nor did it evolve naturally—it was shaped and crafted by the rulers of states. Those who did not live in civilized Chinese society therefore were not really human; and if the Chinese succumbed to social disorder, they too could lapse into bestial savagery.
¹

Some two thousand years after the dawn of their civilization, however, the Chinese were wrestling with some profound social and political dilemmas. For guidance, they turned to their history—or what they imagined it to be in the absence of the scientific and linguistic techniques we employ today. The myths about the sage kings were formed during
the turbulent Warring States period (c. 485–221 BCE), when the Chinese were making a traumatic transformation from a multistate system to a united empire, but they may have originated from the mythology of the shamans of hunter-gatherer times. These tales also reflected the Chinese view of themselves in the intervening millennia.

This mythology makes it clear that civilization could not survive without violence. The first
sage king,
Shen Nung, the “Divine Farmer,” was the inventor of agriculture on which progress and culture depended. He could summon rain at will and conjure grain from the sky; he created the plow, taught his people how to plant and till the soil, and liberated them from the need to hunt and kill their fellow creatures. A man of peace, he refused to punish disobedience and outlawed violence in his kingdom. Instead of creating a ruling class, he decreed that everyone should grow his own food, so Shen Nung would become the hero of those who repudiated the exploitation of the agrarian state. But no state could abjure violence. Because the Divine Farmer’s successors had had no military training, they were unable to deal adequately with the natural aggression of their subjects, which, unchecked, grew to such monstrous proportions that humans seemed about to slide back into animality.
²
Fortunately, however, a second sage king appeared. He was called Huang Di, the “
Yellow Emperor,” because he recognized the potential of China’s ochre-colored soil.

To farm successfully, people must organize their lives around the seasons; they are dependent on the sun, winds, and storms located in
Heaven (
Tian
),
^a
the transcendent realm of the sky. So the Yellow Emperor established human society in the “Way” (
Dao
) of Heaven by processing annually across the world, visiting each of the four compass points in turn—a ritual that maintained the regular cycle of the seasons and would be imitated by all future Chinese kings.
³
Associated with storm and rain, the Yellow Emperor, like other storm gods, was a great warrior. When he came to power, the arable land was desolate, rebels were fighting one another, and there was drought and
famine. He also had two external enemies: the animal-warrior
Chi You, who was harassing his subjects, and the Fiery Emperor, who was scorching the cultivated land. The Yellow Emperor, therefore, drew on his great spiritual “potency” (
de
) and
trained an army of animals—bears, wolves, and tigers—that managed to defeat the Fiery Emperor but could make no headway against the brutality of Chi You and his eighty brothers: “They had the bodies of beasts, the speech of men, bronze heads, and iron brows. They ate sand and stones, and created weapons such as staves, knives, lances, and bows. They terrorized all under Heaven and slaughtered barbarically; they loved nothing and nurtured nothing.”
⁴

The Yellow Emperor tried to help his suffering people, but because “he practiced love and virtuous potency [
de
],” he could not overpower Chi You with force. So he cast up his eyes to Heaven in silent appeal, and a celestial woman descended bearing a sacred text that revealed the secret art of warfare. The Yellow Emperor could now instruct his animal soldiers in the proper use of weaponry and military conduct, and as a result they defeated Chi You and conquered the entire world. While Chi You’s savage violence turned men into beasts, the Yellow Emperor transformed his army of bears, wolves, and tigers into human beings by teaching them to fight according to the rhythms of Heaven.
⁵
A civilization founded on the twin pillars of agriculture and the organized violence of warfare could now begin.

By the twenty-third century BCE, two other
sage kings, Yao and Shun, had established a golden age in the Yellow River Plain, which was known forever after as “the Great Peace.” But during Shun’s reign, the land was devastated by floods, so the king commissioned Yu, his chief of public works, to build canals, drain the marshes, and lead the rivers safely to the sea. Because of Yu’s heroic labors, the people could grow rice and millet. Shun was so grateful that he arranged for Yu to succeed him, and he became the founder of the
Xia dynasty.
⁶
Chinese history records three successive ruling dynasties before the establishment of the empire in 221 BCE: Xia,
Shang, and
Zhou. It seems, however, that the three coexisted throughout antiquity and although the dominant ruling clan of the kingdom changed, the other lineages remained in charge of their own domains.
⁷
We have no documentary or archaeological evidence for the Xia period (c. 2200–1600 BCE), but it is likely that there was an agrarian kingdom in the great plain by the end of the third millennium.
⁸

The Shang, a nomadic hunting people from northern
Iran, seized control of the great plain from the Huai Valley to modern
Shantung in about 1600 BCE.
⁹
The first Shang cities may have been founded by the masters of the guilds that pioneered the manufacture of the bronze weapons, war
chariots, and the magnificent vessels that the Shang used in their sacrifices. The Shang were men of war. They developed a typical agrarian system, but their economy was still heavily subsidized by hunting and plunder, and they did not establish a centralized state. Their kingdom consisted of a series of small towns, each governed by a representative of the royal family and surrounded by massive ramparts of packed earth to guard against flooding and attack. Each town was designed as a replica of the cosmos, its four walls oriented to the compass directions. The local lord and his warrior
aristocracy lived in the royal palace, served by retainers—craftsmen, chariot builders, makers of bows and arrows, blacksmiths, metalworkers, potters, and scribes—who dwelled in the south of the city. This was a rigorously segmented society. The king was at the apex of the social pyramid; next in rank were the princes who ruled the cities, and the barons who lived on revenues from the rural territories; the
shi,
the ordinary warriors, were the lowest-ranking members of the nobility.

Religion pervaded Shang political life and endorsed its oppressive system. Because they were not part of their culture, the aristocrats regarded their peasants as an inferior species that was scarcely human. The sage kings had created civilization by driving the animals away from human habitations; the peasants therefore never set foot in the Shang towns and lived quite separately from the nobility in subterranean dwelling pits in the countryside. Meriting no more regard than the Yellow Emperor had shown toward Chi You’s horde, they led brutally miserable lives. In the spring the men moved out of the village and took up permanent residence in huts in the fields. During this season of work, they had no contact with their wives and daughters, except when the women brought out their meals. After the harvest, the men moved back home, sealed up their dwellings, and stayed indoors for the whole of the winter. This was their period of rest, but now the women began their season of labor—weaving, spinning, and wine making. The peasants had their own religious rites and festivals, traces of which have been preserved in the Confucian classic
The Book of Songs.
¹⁰
They could be conscripted in the military campaigns of the aristocracy and are described lamenting so loudly when they were dragged away from their fields that they were gagged during the march. They did not take part in the actual fighting—that was the privilege of the aristocracy—but acted as valets, servants, and carriers
and looked after the horses; still, they were strictly segregated from the nobility, marching and camping separately.
¹¹

The Shang aristocracy appropriated the surplus produce from the peasants but otherwise took only a ceremonial interest in agriculture. They offered sacrifices to the earth and to the spirits of the mountains, rivers, and winds to obtain a good harvest, and one of the king’s tasks was to perform rituals to maintain the agricultural cycle on which the economy depended.
¹²
But apart from these liturgical rites, the aristocracy left agriculture entirely to the
min,
the “common people.” At this date, however, very little of the region was given over to cultivation. Most of the
Yellow River Valley was still covered by dense woods and marshes. Elephants, rhinoceroses, buffaloes, panthers, and leopards roamed through the forests, together with deer, tigers, wild oxen, bears, monkeys, and game. The Shang state continued to depend on the surplus produced by the peasants, but like all agrarian aristocracies, the nobility regarded productive work as a mark of inferiority.

Only the Shang king was permitted to approach Di Shang Di, the sky god, who was so exalted that he had no dealings with other human beings. This placed the king in a position similar to Di’s, a state of exception that consigned the rest of the nobility to a subordinate place.
¹³
It invested one man with such
absolute privilege that he had no rivals and no need to compete with others. In his presence, a nobleman was as vulnerable as a peasant; the king was above all factions or conflicts of interest and was therefore free to embrace the concerns of the entire social body.
¹⁴
He alone could impose peace by offering sacrifice to Di, consulting him about the advisability of a military expedition or the founding of a new settlement. The aristocracy supported him by devoting themselves to three sacred activities that all involved the taking of life: sacrifice, warfare, and hunting.
¹⁵
The min took no part in any of these pursuits, so violence was the raison d’être and distinguishing characteristic of the nobility.

These three duties were intricately interconnected in a way that shows how impossible it was to separate religion from other spheres of life in agrarian society. Sacrifice to the ancestors was deemed essential to the kingdom, because the fate of the dynasty depended on the goodwill of their deceased kings who could intercede with Di on its behalf. So the Shang held lavish “hosting” (
bin
) ceremonies at which vast quantities
of animals and game were slaughtered—sometimes as many as a hundred beasts in a single ritual—and gods, ancestors, and humans shared a feast.
¹⁶
Meat eating was another privilege strictly reserved for the nobility. The sacrificial meat was cooked in exquisite bronze vessels that, like the bronze weapons that had subjugated the min, could be used only by the nobility and symbolized their exalted position.
¹⁷
The meat for the bin ceremony was supplied by the hunting expeditions, which, as in other cultures, were virtually indistinguishable from military campaigns.
¹⁸
Wild animals could endanger the crops, and the Shang killed them with reckless abandon. Their hunt was not simply a sport but a ritual that imitated the sage kings, who, by driving the animals away, had created the first civilization.