The Far South

The Sangam literature throws valuable light on the Tamil society and culture. According to the literature it comes out very clearly that only Tamil people were mainly pastoral. The Sangam literature also tells us about many

tribes and traditional castes like Panar, Velar, Kuruvars etc. The Brahmans had a high position in the society but the society was not dominated by the priests. The position of women was not so good. In polity hereditary monarchy was the common form of government. The main duty of the king was to work for the public welfare and to maintain law and order. The form of the government was unitary and the king was an absolute sovereign. The king had many ministers to advise him.

Sangam literature refers to a body of classical Tamil literature created between the years 300 B.C. and 600 C.E. This collection contains 2381 poems written by 473 poets, some 102 of whom remain anonymous. The period

during which these poems were written is commonly referred to as the 'Sangam age' referring to the prevalent Sangam legends claiming literary academies lasting thousands of years, giving the name to the corpus of

literature. Sangam literature is primarily secular dealing with everyday themes in a South Indian context. The poems belonging to the Sangam literature were composed by Tamil poets, both men and women, from various professions and classes of society. These poems were later collected into various anthologies, edited and had colophons added by anthologists and annotators around 1000 C.E. Sangam literature fell out of popular memory soon thereafter, until they were rediscovered in the 19th century by scholars such as C.W. Thamotharampillai and U.V. Swaminatha Iyer. Sangam literature deals with emotional and material topics such as love, war, governance, trade, and bereavement. Much of the Tamil literature believed to have been written in the Sangam period is lost to us, though detailed lists of works known to the 10th century compilers have survived. The available literature from this period was categorized and compiled in the 10th century into two categories based roughly on chronology. The categories are: The Major Eighteen Anthology Series comprising the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Idylls and The Minor Eighteen Anthology Series.

Conditions for the Rise of Large States (like Magadha): From the sixth century BC onwards, the increasing use of iron in eastern UP and western Bihar created conditions for the formation of large territorial states.

Armed with iron weapons, the warrior class now played an important role. The new agricultural tools and implernents enabled the peasants to produce far more food grains than they required for consumption.

The extra produce could be collected by the princes to meet their military and administrative needs. The surplus could also be made available to the towns that had sprung up in fifth century BC. These material advantages naturally enabled the people to remain on their land, and also to expand at the cost of the neighbouring areas. The rise of large states with towns as their base of operations strengthened the territorial idea. People owed strong allegiance to the janapada or the territory to which they belonged rather than to their jana or tribe.

The Mahajanapadas A few janapadas arose towards the end of the Vedic period. However, with progress in agriculture and settlement by 500 BC, they became a common feature. Around 450 BC, over forty janapadas covering even Afghanistan and south-eastern Central Asia are mentioned by Panini. However, the major part of southern India was excluded. The Pali texts show that the janapadas grew into mahajanapadas, that is large states or countries. These texts mention sixteen of them. Nine of them also occur in Panini not as mahajanapadas but as janapadas.

In the age of the Buddha we find sixteen large states called mahajanapadas. Most of these states arose in the upper and mid-Gangetic plains, including the doab area covered by the Ganges, Yamuna, and their tributaries. They were mostly situated north of the Vindhyas and extended from the north-west frontier to Bihar.

Of these, Magadha, Koshala, Vatsa, and Avanti seem to have been powerful. Beginning from the east, we hear of the kingdom of Anga which covered the modern districts of Monghyr and Bhagalpur. If had its capital at Champa, which shows signs of habitation in the fifth century BC, and there is a mud fort dating to that century. Eventually the kingdom of Anga was swallowed by its powerful neighbour Magadha.

Magadha embraced the former districts of Patna, Gaya, and parts of Shahabad, and grew to be the leading state of the time. Its earlier capital was Rajgir, and later Pataliputra. Both were fortified, and show signs of habitation around the fifth century BC. North of the Ganges, in Tirhut division lay the state of the Vajjis which included eight clans.

However, the most powerful dynasty was that of the Lichchhavis with their capital at Vaishali which is coterminous with the village of Basarh in Vaishali district. The Puranas push the antiquity of Vaishali to a much earlier period, but archaeologically Basarh was not settled until the sixth century BC.

Further west we find the kingdom of Kashi with its capital at Varanasi. Excavations at Raighat show that the earliest habitations started around 500 BC, and the city was enclosed by mud embankments at about the same time. Initially Kashi appears to have been the most powerful of the states, but eventually it crumbed to the power of Koshala. Koshala embraced the area occupied by eastern UP and had its capital at Shravasti, which is coterminous with Sahet. Mahet on the borders of Gonda and Bahraich districts of UP. Diggings indicate that Sahet-Mahet was barely settled in the sixth century BC, but we see the beginnings of a mud fort. Koshala had an important city called Ayodhya which is associated with the story in the Ramayana

Excavations however show that it was not settled on any scale before the fifth century BC. Koshala also included the tribal republican territory of the Shakyas of Kapilavastu. The capital of Kapilavastu is identified with Piprahwa in Basti district. Habitation at Piprahwa did not occur earlier than c. 500 BC. Lumbini which is situated at a distance of 15 km from Piprahwa in Nepal, served as another capital of the Shakyas. In any Ashokan inscription, it is called the birthplace of Gautama Buddha.

In the neighbourhood of Koshala have the republican clan of the Mallas, whose territory touched the northern border of Vajji state. One of the capitals of the Mallas was at Kushinara where Gautama Buddha passed away. Kushinara is coterminous with Kasia in Deoria district. Further west was the kingdom of the Vatsas, along the bank of the Yamuna, with its capital at Kaushambi near Allahabad. The Vatsas were a Kuru clan who had shifted from Hastinapur and settled at Kaushambi. Kaushambi was chosen because of its location near the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna. In the fifth century BC, it had a mud fortification, as excavations reveal.

We also hear of the older states of the Kurus and the Panchalas which were situated in western UP, but they no longer enjoyed the political significance they had attained in the La Vedic period. In central Malwa and the adjoining parts of MP lay the state of Avanti. It was divided into two parts, the northern part with its capital at Ujjain, and the southern part at Mahishamati. Both these towns became fairly important from the fifth century BC onwards, though eventually Ujjain surpassed Mahishamati. It developed large-scale working in iron and erected strong fortifications.

Ashoka was one such ruler of India, who made many efforts for the moral development of the people. The ideas which made moral progress possible were called Dhamma in the writings of Ashoka. The Ashoka Dhamma has been explained in second and seventh pillar edicts as, Dhamma is to do generous acts, not to indulge in sins, adopting soft behaviour towards others etc.

Non-violence, respects to father-mother and elders, obediance were also emphasised. The teacher-pupil relationship is also very important aspect of Dhamma. Meagre income and meagre expenditure are also important aspects of Dhamma. These things make it cheer that Ashoka's Dhamma was a religion for the common people and the basic principles of this Dhamma were common to all religions. No religions or sect was to be against these basic principles. During the time of Ashoka, there were followers of many sects and there were chances of some hostility among them. Ashoka's Dhamma was an attempt to establish a kind of harmony among them. Ashoka not only emphasised on tolerance but also urged the people to know more and more about other's religions. Ashoka believed that knowing more about other's religion would lead to more and more religious virtues among the people. Ashoka's Dhamma was different from his personal religion which was Buddhism. Ashoka Dhamma was for laity, for the humanity. He worked zealously, for the spread of the Dhamma

Karma in Buddhism is the force that drives samsara. The cycle of suffering and rebirth for each being. Good., skillful deeds and bad, unskillful actions produce "seeds” in the mind which come to fruition either in this life or in a subsequent rebirth. The avoidance of unwholesome actions and the cultivation of positive actions is called sila. In Buddhism, karma specifically refers to those actions (of body speech, and mind) that spring from mental intent ("cetana) and which bring about a consequence (or fruit, "phala”) or result ("vipaka"). In Theravada Buddhism there can be no divine salvation or forgiveness for one's Karma since it is a purely impersonal process that is a part of the makeup of the universe. Some Mahayana traditions hold different views. For example, the texts of certain Mahayana sutras (such as the Lotus Sutra, the Angulimaliya Sutra and the Nirvana Sutra) claim that reciting or merely hearing their texts can expunge great swathes of negative karma. Some forms of Buddhism (for example, Vajrayana) regard the recitation of mantras as a means for cutting off previous negative karma. The Japanese Pure Land teacher Genshin taught that Amida Buddha has the power to destroy the Karma that would otherwise bind one in samsara. Rebirth refers to a process whereby beings go through a succession of lifetimes as one of many possible forms of sentient life, each running from conception to death.

Buddhism rejects the concepts of a permanent self or an unchanging, eternal soul, as it is called in Hinduism and Christianity. According to Buddhism there ultimately is no such thing as a self-independent from the rest of the universe (the doctrine of anatta). Rebirth in subsequent existences must be understood as the continuation of a dynamic, ever-changing process of "dependent arising" determined by the laws of cause and effect (Karma) rather than that of one being, transmigrating or incarnating from one existence to the next. According to the Pali Tipitaka and the Agamas of other, early Buddhist school, the Four Noble Truths were the first teaching of Gautama Buddha after attaining Nirvana. They are sometimes considered to contain the essence of the Buddha's teachings:

Life as we know it ultimately is or leads to suffering/uneasiness (Dukkha) in one way or another. Suffering is caused by craving. This is often expressed as a deluded clinging to a certain sense of existence, to selfhood or to the things or Phenomena that we consider the cause of happiness or unhappiness. Craving also has its negative aspect, i.e.one craves that a certain state of affairs not exist. Suffering ends when craving ends. This is achieved by eliminating delusion, thereby reaching a liberated state of Enlightenment (bodhi); reaching this liberated state is achieved by following the path laid out by the Buddha.

The Noble Eightfold Path - The fourth of the Buddha's Noble Truths is the way to the cessation of suffering (dukkha). It has eight sections, each starting with the word "samyak” (Sanskrit, meaning "correctly", "properly or "well”, frequently translated into English as "right") and presented in three groups known as the three higher trainings. Buddhist scholars have produced a remarkable quantity of intellectual theories, philosophies and world view concepts. Some schools of Buddhism discourage doctrinal study and some regard it as essential, but most regard it as having a place, at least for some persons at some stages in Buddhist Practice. In the earliest Buddhist teachings, shared to some extent by all extant schools, the concept of liberation (Nirvana) the goal of the Buddhist path is closely related to the correct understanding of how the mind causes stress, in awakening to the true nature of clinging, one develops dispassion for the objects of clinging and is liberated from suffering (dukkha) and the cycle of incessant rebirths (samsara). To this end, the Buddha recommended viewing things as characterized by the three marks of existence.

The Sangam literature throws valuable light on the Tamil society and culture. According to the literature it comes out very clearly that only Tamil people were mainly pastoral. The Sangam literature also tells us about many tribes and traditional castes like Panar, Velar, Kuruvars etc. The Brahmans had a high position in the society but the society was not dominated by the priests. The position of women was not so good. In polity hereditary monarchy was the common form of government. The main duty of the king was to work for the public welfare and to maintain law and order. The form of the government was unitary and the king was an absolute sovereign. The king had many ministers to advise him.

Sangam literature refers to a body of classical Tamil literature created between the years 300 B.C. and 600 C.E. This collection contains 2381 poems written by 473 poets, some 102 of whom remain anonymous. The period during which these poems were written is commonly referred to as the 'Sangam age' referring to the prevalent Sangam legends claiming literary academies lasting thousands of years, giving the name to the corpus of literature. Sangam literature is primarily secular dealing with everyday themes in a South Indian context. The poems belonging to the Sangam literature were composed by Tamil poets, both men and women, from various professions and classes of society. These poems were later collected into various anthologies, edited and had colophons added by anthologists and annotators around 1000 C.E. Sangam literature fell out of popular memory soon thereafter, until they were rediscovered in the 19th century by scholars such as C.W. Thamotharampillai and U.V. Swaminatha Iyer. Sangam literature deals with emotional and material topics such as love, war, governance, trade, and bereavement. Much of the Tamil literature believed to have been written in the Sangam period is lost to us, though detailed lists of works known to the 10th century compilers have survived. The available literature from this period was categorized and compiled in the 10th century into two categories based roughly on chronology. The categories are: The Major Eighteen Anthology Series comprising the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Idylls and The Minor Eighteen Anthology Series.