The Prequel to Shakyamuni:
What Was the World Thinking Before the Buddha's Appearance? Two thousand five hundred years ago,
a man named Siddhartha Gautama sat under a Bodhi tree and,
in one night, saw through the ultimate secret of human consciousness. When
we talk about this now, it seems as if
he appeared out of thin air, as if
he invented an entire worldview on his own that night.
But that's not the case.
Before him, there had been
a thousand years of accumulated thought—a
thousand years of questions, a
thousand years of conjectures, a thousand years of answers—most of which were wrong,
but each one was seriously sought.
Siddhartha was the inheritor of this thousand years,
and also its terminator.
If you don't know what he inherited,
you can't truly understand what he overturned. Hello
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
Starting today,
I'm going to create a new series
called .
This series will only do one thing: follow the timeline
from before the Buddha's appearance to today,
clearly dissecting the origins and development of Buddhism over the past two thousand five hundred years.
What was the background of each sutra?
How did each sect originate? What are the
Buddha's original insights, and what
are the adaptations made by later generations for dissemination?
I hope that before you truly embark on your path of practice... First, here's
a reliable map so you
know how the roads branch out, preventing
you from getting lost at crossroads.
Why doesn't the first episode start with the Buddha,
but with what happened before his appearance?
Because Siddhartha wasn't a genius who appeared out of thin air. He
entered a world that had been pondering for a thousand years.
His breakthrough was both an inheritance and a subversion of that thousand years. If
you don't know what he inherited, you
can't truly understand what he overturned.
So today,
we won't talk about what the Buddha said;
we'll talk about what answers
the world had regarding consciousness, the universe, and the self before he spoke,
and what unresolved questions remained.
If you want to truly understand Buddhism,
this is the first lesson you must learn.
Okay,
let's start from the beginning. In the
5th century BC, in the
Indian subcontinent, in what is
now Nepal and northern India,
this place
already had a system of thought that had been operating for nearly a thousand years when Siddhartha was born.
This system was called Brahmanism, and
its core texts were called the Vedas,
Sanskrit for "knowledge."
There are four Vedas, the oldest being the Rigveda, which was written around
1500 BC or even earlier.
Think about this time – China was still in the Shang Dynasty, and
ancient Greece didn't yet have Homer.
Meanwhile, Indians were already writing poems in Sanskrit about the essence of the universe. What questions were they asking after a
thousand years of accumulation?
The answer is very clear: What is the fundamental nature of this universe?
What is "I"? What is the relationship
between "I" and the ultimate essence of the universe?
These three questions
were the main
theme of the entire Indian intellectual world before Siddhartha's birth.
Let's look at them one by one. The
first question: What is the fundamental nature of the universe?
Brahmanism's answer is "Brahman."
Brahman is not a god,
nor is it God; it is
not a personified being. Brahman
is the ultimate foundation of the universe, the
source from which all things emerge, the
basis of all existence. In the
early Vedic period,
people used many gods to explain the universe—Indra was the thunder god,
Agni was the fire god,
Varuna was the water god—
the number of gods was vast.
But as thought deepened,
philosophers began to discover whether there was something
more fundamental behind these gods. The
culmination of this inquiry
appeared in
a series of texts written between approximately 800 BCE and 400 BCE,
called the Upanishads. The
Upanishads are one of the most important intellectual leaps in the history of Indian philosophy.
They pushed the concept of "Brahman," the essence of the universe, to its
ultimate extreme.
They said: Brahman is everything.
Brahman is that ineffable ultimate reality.
It transcends time, space, and even life and death. At this point,
you might think this is similar to the Buddhist concept of "emptiness,"
but the crucial difference is about to emerge. The
second question: What is the self? The
Upanishads answer with "Atman."
Atman is your inner true self, the eternal existence
hidden behind your body, feelings,
thoughts, and memories.
Atman is immortal.
Atman is pure consciousness.
Atman is your true essence.
Then the Upanishads utter one of the most famous statements in the history of Indian philosophy, which
I
discussed in detail in my previous video on emptiness, Brahman, and God:
"Brahman and Atman are one,"
also called "That is you." The
ultimate essence of the universe
and your inner true self
are the same thing.
Your consciousness
and universal consciousness
are one. The
individual soul
and the universal soul
are cut from the same piece of cloth.
This idea
is an incredibly astonishing epiphany in the history of philosophy.
This is not the polytheistic "gods managing the universe,"
nor the monotheistic "God creating humanity."
It is a more thorough insight. There
is no separation between "I" and "the universe."
Separation is an illusion.
Unity is the true reality. By the time
Siddhartha was born,
this system of thought was already very mature. The
Upanishads were extremely sophisticated, and the
Brahmin priests had established a complete
cosmology and system of practice based on it.
However,
a huge problem remained unresolved.
If the unity of Brahman and Atman is true,
if your true self and the essence of the universe are one,
then why can't you feel it?
Why do you feel pain, separation, limitation, and death?
This chasm was the
core problem Siddhartha had to confront.
Before him, the
Brahmins had offered an answer: because of
samsara. The concept of samsara had already taken shape in the Upanishad era.
This concept states that your soul is constantly reincarnated in countless lives
because your actions leave behind
karma, which drives the next reincarnation. The
reason you feel pain
is because you are trapped in this cycle of reincarnation and have
not yet returned to Brahman. The
direction of liberation is clear – liberation from samsara,
allowing Atman to return to Brahman.
But
how to achieve liberation,
through what methods?
Here, the
divergence arises.
And behind this divergence
lies an extremely dangerous social control system.
Before Siddhartha was born,
two main paths were competing. The
first route is the orthodox Brahmanical route. It involves accumulating good karma and purifying the soul
through meticulous sacrificial rituals,
studying the Vedas, and through the
mediation of Brahman priests.
This route has a fundamental premise: liberation requires the
help of professionals—the Brahman class.
You cannot do it yourself;
you need rituals,
scriptures, and
priests.
Brahmins are the priestly class,
standing at the top of the caste system.
They control the scriptures, the
rituals, and hold the
absolute power to decide "how your soul returns to Brahman." The
scriptures are written in Sanskrit, which
lower castes cannot understand.
Every step on the path to liberation is a tollbooth for them. The
most terrifying aspect of this system is
its incredibly sophisticated self-locking mechanism. The
logic is this: your Atman is eternal;
it carries the karma from your past lives. If
you are born into a Brahman family, it's because you did good deeds in your past life—you
deserve it. If
you are born into a Shudra family, accept the
karma from your past life. It's
not society that owes you anything; it
's your soul that owes itself something.
Can you resist?
No,
because resistance means you refuse to accept the law of karma.
Refusing to accept it means you violate the law.
Disobeying the Dharma will aggravate your bad karma.
Increased bad karma means a more miserable rebirth in the next life.
Every path points to "accepting fate."
Even the space for doubt is sealed off.
Habits, traditions, superstitions, religious beliefs,
plus the fear of punishment—all these forces combine to
firmly lock everyone into the position assigned to them at birth.
You don't need prisons
because the entire worldview is a prison itself.
Moreover, this system has a more secular consequence:
it provides religious legitimacy for the caste system.
Your suffering in this life
is what you deserve.
Your class status
is written by karma.
Don't complain;
accept your fate. A
symbiotic relationship formed between the Brahmin and Kshatriya classes.
Priests gave legitimacy to the king, and the
king protected the caste order.
The two pillars supported each other; neither could do without the
other.
This is the world Siddhartha entered—
not a world without answers.
Quite the opposite—there are too many answers, too
heavy,
and each answer is bound by chains. The
second path is the path of asceticism.
In Siddhartha's time, a
large number of ascetics were active on the Indian subcontinent.
They rejected the Brahmin monopoly,
rejected rituals and sacrifices, and
went into the jungles and wilderness.
Through extreme physical asceticism to temper their will and purify their souls,
they were called "Shramanas,"
meaning strivers or ascetics. The
Shramana movement was an intellectual rebellion,
proclaiming: liberation is not needed with Brahmins,
sacrifices,
or class privileges;
you can achieve liberation with your own body and will.
Beyond these two main paths, there was
another crucial intellectual landscape in Siddhartha's time.
You must know that at that time,
India had six highly influential philosophical schools, known as the
"Six Teachers."
I'll quickly go over them for you
because these six worldviews
still live on in our minds today.
First,
moral nihilism. The
core viewpoint is: no karma,
no reincarnation,
no karmic retribution. When
a person dies, it's like the four elements dispersing and returning to their places—earth to earth,
water to water,
fire to fire,
wind to wind—there is no such thing as a soul.
This is materialism from 2,500 years ago.
Second,
determinism. Everything is
determined by fate.
Humans have no free will; whether
you practice or not is irrelevant. Liberation
only occurs naturally at the time predetermined by fate.
This is complete fatalism.
Third,
relativism.
All questions cannot be answered definitively.
You ask if there is a soul after death—
maybe yes,
maybe no,
maybe both.
This is utter agnosticism. The
fourth type is the
ascetic path of moral causality.
This is the path of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism.
He was almost a contemporary of Siddhartha.
Mahavira believed that everyone has an eternal, unchanging soul
covered by the dust of karma. Asceticism
can eliminate old karma, and
discipline can prevent new karma.
As long as karma is completely purified, the
soul can be liberated and ascend to heaven. The
fifth,
and most important, is the Upanishad philosophy of orthodox Brahmanism, which
is the Brahman-Atman unity system discussed in detail earlier.
After Siddhartha renounced his worldly life, he followed the
path of a Shramana.
He studied meditation under the most famous meditation masters of the time. His
first teacher taught him to reach the "sphere of nothingness," and his
second teacher taught him to reach the "sphere of neither perception nor non-perception."
This is the pinnacle of meditation practice in the Upanishad tradition.
He also
practiced extreme asceticism in the forest with five fellow practitioners,
almost starving themselves to death.
But Siddhartha left.
Why?
Because he discovered that even if one reaches the highest state of meditation, suffering is still there
after leaving meditation. The
problem is not fundamentally solved; it is
only temporarily obscured.
We have arrived at the most crucial rift in all the intellectual legacy Siddhartha inherited.
Before him,
all systems of thought—whether it was the Brahmanical concept of the unity of Brahman and Atman, the
Jain asceticism of purification,
or the elevation of meditative states—shared a common presupposition that had never been
questioned: there exists a real,
eternal "self" that needs to be liberated.
All paths,
regardless of which one they took,
assumed: there is an Atman, a self, a
soul, a
core "I,"
and the purpose of practice was to liberate,
purify, or merge this "I" with Brahman.
All methods
were built on the same premise: there is an "I" practicing, and
this "I" is to achieve a certain goal.
No one asked: what if this "I" itself doesn't exist at all?
No one asked: what
if the "soul" we have been so painstakingly protecting and liberating is
essentially an illusion? This
question
is the shackle that Siddhartha broke under the Bodhi tree.
But—note—he was able to break it
because he thoroughly inherited this thousand-year legacy.
When he sat under that tree,
he was not a blank slate;
he was someone extremely well-versed in the Brahmanical tradition. Someone who
has reached the pinnacle of this tradition in meditation,
yet is extremely dissatisfied with its answers,
can see the cracks
because he has delved deeper into the system than anyone else.
Here,
I want to make a more macro-level observation. There
's a historical concept called the "Axial Age," an
observation proposed by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the 20th century.
He noted a striking coincidence:
around 800-200 BC, four
major civilizations of humankind almost simultaneously experienced philosophical awakenings.
In China,
Confucius taught rites and music in the State of Lu; Lao Tzu
rode a blue ox out of Hangu Pass, leaving behind the *Tao Te Ching*;
Zhuangzi dreamt of exchanging identities with a butterfly.
In ancient Greece,
Socrates asked questions in the streets of Athens;
Plato described the prisoners in the cave;
Aristotle taught all subjects at the Academy.
In Israel, the
prophets cried out in the wilderness;
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
Ezekiel left behind texts that fundamentally changed the course of monotheism.
In India,
Upanishad philosophers reached the pinnacle of the union of Brahman and Atman; the
six masters fiercely debated the nature of the universe; Mahavira
founded Jainism;
and Siddhartha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The
same era,
different civilizations. The
same set of questions were asked: What am I?
What is the world?
Why is there suffering?
How can we achieve liberation?
Karl Jaspers believed this was not a coincidence.
He saw it as a collective evolution of human consciousness, a
leap from mythological thinking to reflective thinking. For
the first time, humanity began systematically questioning the ultimate questions about its own existence.
This was the world Siddhartha was born into—an
era of simultaneous global awakening.
In India,
this awakening had been accumulating for nearly a thousand years,
producing extremely sophisticated cosmologies,
extremely systematic methods of practice, and extremely intense philosophical debates.
Siddhartha did not enter a blank slate;
he entered a highly developed intellectual battlefield.
His teacher was the most outstanding master in this tradition, and
his fellow practitioners were the most dedicated practitioners of the era. The
questions he faced were problems that this tradition had pondered for
a thousand years without fully resolving.
His answer was
so thorough
because he stood on the shoulders of a thousand years of accumulation
and took that step—a step
no one had taken before him.
Before him,
everyone believed: there is an "I" that
needs to be liberated.
After that night under the Bodhi tree,
he said: that "I"
never existed.
Reincarnation exists,
but there is no subject of reincarnation.
Karma exists.
But there is no unchanging soul that bears karma.
Suffering exists,
but the root of suffering is not that the soul is trapped,
but that it takes something that doesn't exist as itself.
This answer
overturns the underlying assumptions of all his previous answers over the past thousand years.
It's like a scalpel,
directly cutting into the root of all problems.
But—why can this scalpel cut so
accurately? What is
it cutting? After it's cut,
how does that illusion of "I" operate?
And what is in the cycle of reincarnation?
In this episode, we will
answer these questions for you one by one. Dear
viewers,
what are your expectations and opinions for this series?
Welcome to leave your valuable comments in the comment section. In the
next episode,
we will enter that night under the Bodhi tree.
I am Wang Lijie.
See you next time.