There is term introduced called Axial age around the middle of that first millennium. At the time of 2500 years ago, in India the upanisadic sages like yagyavalkya, who rebelled against the ritualism of the Vedic tradition. Then after that we had Shakyamuni Buddha founder of Buddhism and Mahavir a founder of Jainism. The point for us is in, looking at the history of the Buddhist tradition. As we see in this concept of axial age Toynbee (founder of the concept) he called the buddha the most successful of all the axial age reformers. Buddha is Ethical reformers, rather than sort of religious founders or something cause the main job was to try to tame the power mad warrior kings the Agamemnon’s and so forth who were backed up by their high priests, but become too dangerous with their wealth, weaponry and large populations, the beginnings of urbanization. Buddhas teaching as kind of like a Socratic teaching like a Confucian teaching as sort of trying to set up new codes for more urbanized more pluralistic societies where the individual has to figure out the meaning of life is more for themselves.
Toynbee considered the buddha the most successful and probably so not necessarily because he was so much brighter than any of the others but because the society was more tolerant and more willing to have people becoming unconventional and challenging old warrior tribal codes that the pre city state societies operated on. So all of these people spoke of gaining wisdom from investing reality as being the purpose of human life, along with the development of justice and ethnics in order to live together in cities and in larger societies not just small tribes. They spoke of generosity as essential economically to people, not to hoard things people with power not to hoard everything and create destitute people. Spoke of nonviolence and gentleness because people at war all the time then you cant really farm, you cant make anything creative, you cant develop prosperity. All of these qualities needed for harmonious life in tribally pluralistic cities , all essential for human civilisation.
TRUE MEANING OF CIVILIZATION
As we all know that civilization comes from civics, which means a city you know. We are still trying to learn the lessons of the these great Axial age reformers today. As saw there are four problems, the way it analyzed it, these problems are be setting the city state societies of time.
Problems
1. Militarism and materialism, the materialism of the growing merchant classes and the militarism of the warriors who were using their old militaristic ethic too powerfully because of having large standing armies and things and not just winning some territory or something but destroying the neighboring city state completely like, the destruction of troy.
2. Elitism and political cynicism, the upper classes became very ossified and they just has power in is own sake, ember you have Socrates challenging Themistocles about might doesn’t make right.
3. Traditionalism and ritualistic formalism, so whatever the ancestors did that’s what we have to do and then with any problem you go and do a ritual in the temple and then the gods will help you.
4. Proletarianization what they called are historians we have to forgive them the term and cultural alienation meaning that the majority of the people in the society are kind of alienated they don’t get to go to best temples, the best rituals and they sort of made into a kind of proles, meaning commoners who just serve.
Solutions of Problems of societies
For these problems reformers told us the solutions also so that we can overcome these problems:
1. Moral sensitivity and ethical dualism to respond to the militarism and so forth.
2. Existential humanism and internal transformation so in other words, the individual could change themselves, they could be more humanistic and a bit more ethical.
3. Historical nemesis and reinterpretation so here we talk about how we reinterpret history not to just tell that what ancestor did but by holding up an ideal ancestors, Confucius was big on that and buddha told many stories of that kind, of how an ancestor had behaved better than the people in the present time should reform themselves rather than just follow some rigid ancestor who behaved ………… who gave them license to behave badly.
4. C and D individual and universal social amelioration through scientific and moral education and that dealt with the large mass of alienated people and in the case of the buddha particularly
Toynbee admired the fact that he drew from the non twice born classes as they were called or the low caste people in India and they has through his order, they has access to education and access to the individual self-transformation access to enlightenment actually which before was completely reserved may be only for the high priest class and maybe some of the warrior class. Though all such generalizations of course are always prone to exceptions. This scheme is useful to approach the buddha as a lead figure in this era, paradigmatic in the Eurasia wide axial age transformation.
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