Episode 2 - The story of India - The power of ideas - By bbc - With subtitles

WOOD: 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. MAN: Making a Hollywood film? WOOD: Not Hollywood, no, no. BBC documentary. Good morning. Times of India, please. WOOD: Amid one of the all-too-common crises of our modern world, we humans are a competitive species fighting for power, resources and ideas, still to learn history's lessons. Well, we're heading to Varanasi on the River Ganges. Tempered slightly because last night there was a terrible series of bombings in the city, the railway station and in one of the temples. Nobody knows quite why it's happened, but we think the trains are still running, so we'll see what happens. There are over six billion people in today's world, compared with 1 00 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, here. 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. And here you can find living continuities with the old ritual order of Indian society. That order was founded on the caste system, into which all Hindus are born, marry and die. (MEN CHANTING) The caste system divides people by birth, from high to low. It fixes their jobs and their place in society. We're gonna 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 family member, the fire can only come from your family. Because if they could not take the fire from us, it means he could not be burn the body even prime minister die. -Even the prime minister. -Even prime minister die. -Is it allowed to see? -Yes, allowed to see. -May we come? -Yes. -We follow you? Okay. -Yes. The sacred fire from which all funeral pyres must be lit has been kept burning here continuously for thousands of years. -WOOD: So is this the fire here? -This is the fire, here. And in the fire momently keeping here since 3,500 years. WOOD: In all societies in history, religions offer a path to salvation. But in practice, religions create bonds, both physical and mental. The essence of India's ancient system was that salvation only came by the precise performance of the right rituals in the right time and place. Before he start burning, he must walk around five time, because of the five element. -Earth, water, wind, fire, ether. -Fire, water, air, earth, ether. In the ritual universe, order is vital, and so it was with society in the 5th century BC. Know your place in the order, perform the necessary rituals, fulfil your duty, whatever caste you're born into. WOOD: You and your family are very, very important people in India. In a way of thinking. -In a way of thinking. -In a way of thinking. But in a way of naturality, if you say, people think us... We are the very low caste, we cannot touch him, we cannot... You are low caste, you are... Yes, we are untouchable. If we are a pariah, if the people... When we walk in a street, people don't like to touch us. -That is the biggest things. -Really. So even though... Because you perform... You do the rituals for the dead and you touch the dead, -you are very low caste. -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 renegotiated 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 at the centre of the world. And nowhere were these questionings more intense than in India. Speculation about the nature of the universe, the nature of the self and the connection between the two is one of the oldest obsessions of Indian civilisation. They were at it even in the Bronze Age. But in the cities of the Ganges Plain here in India, 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, very closely resembling their contemporaries in the Ionian Islands in Greece, the Greek philosophers, who suggested that 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, in the history of India and in the history of the world, was the Buddha. The Buddha's story is the stuff of fairy tales. He came from a world of princely magnificence and nowhere does princely better than India. Young, newlywed, high caste, he had everything. But 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. (GREETING IN TIBETAN) -How are you? -Hi. This one is the birth, when Buddha himself... Oh, from the side of his mother? Oh, yes, here. So here, he's... This is when he says, ''My black hair, I cut off.'' -Yeah, yeah. -Yeah, right. So he left his wife and his baby. Today, nearly 400 million people are Buddhists. From Burma and Korea to China and now the West. Young Gautam will reshape history. But at this moment, when he first comes here, he's another ragged renouncer. And 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 looked 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 the great moments in history and this is the very place. This is the diamond throne. -WOOD: The throne? -The throne, the diamond throne. So this is the place where the Buddha is believed to have sat and attained... Not believed, this is the place where he sat and 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. (PEOPLE 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 at all people need something, then it should be the bodhi tree, which has given me shelter underneath to sit and meditate and attain the supreme bliss that I had experienced. And it will also give shelter to thousands and 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, isn't it? 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. '' DALAI LAMA: Ultimately, inner happiness, inner satisfaction, must create 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 value is very essential in order to have happier individual, happier family, happier society or happier nation. WOOD: 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 first sermon is called Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. It means Setting the Wheel of Doctrine in Motion. Setting the Wheel of Doctrine, or Law, in Motion? -The wheel, yes. -Yes. The teaching of Buddha is not only for monks, it is for all. Bahujanahita means, ''For the well-being of many.'' And for the next more than 40 years, the Buddha journeyed and preached. -Yeah, 45 years. -45 years. -Journeyed and preached. -He walked, he never... -Never stay at one place. -Yeah, yeah. 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. But the thing to remember is he's a protestor. Through the whole of Indian history, there's a tension between the rulers and those who fought for social justice. From the wandering 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 there were monks living all the time. We know a place in this grove, like the Karanda Tank, which is still here, the squirrels' nesting place, the peacocks' dancing place... So 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 regather and if anybody wanted to be with the Buddha, for example, they could come to the same place. It's quite impressive. He's got about 1 ,000-1 ,250 disciples by that time. The King comes to meet him, as was tradition, and even tradition now. I mean, kings or powerful politicians go and meet religious leaders, not the other way around. The King says, ''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 be able to hear him speak. ''The fourth was to be able to understand that. ''And the fifth was to be able to be grateful for that.'' WOOD: In the hills above Rajgir, there's a little cave where the Buddha lived through the monsoon seasons. SETH: The Buddha really loved this place. It was a little higher than the surrounding area. It was one of his favourite places of meditation, he even says so. He loved watching the sunset from here. And he just came again and again, just for the sheer pleasure of it. This cave, actually, is lovely, because you can know that the Buddha was in this cave. SETH: As you go into the cave, it's a little, sort of, lower in height in the beginning and then it gets deeper. So you can stand up inside. And you can just sit here and meditate for hours and hours and just be with the Buddha, you can really feel the breath of the Buddha. Even though he was 2,500 years ago, you can really feel his presence in this cave now. WOOD: And again, that realistic voice. ''Be your own lamp, ''he said. ''Seek no other refuge but yourselves. ''Let truth be your light. '' (CHIMING) 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 a system based on pure morality, what we would call universal values. Trust, truthfulness, non-violence, that sort of thing. 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. 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 HONKING) 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 faithful disciples begged him to hold on a bit longer and not die here. ''It's a miserable, wattle-and-daub little place stuck in the jungle, ''in the middle of nowhere,'' he said. ''Couldn't you die in a famous place ''where they could give you a great funeral?'' And 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're the community now. ''I have reached the end of my journey. '' There are several versions of the Buddha's last moments. One of them says that he made a gesture and 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, the greatest the world had ever seen, invaded Greece. And in the following century, the Greeks came east looking for revenge. (MAN CHATTERING ON RADIO) 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. 1 st October, 331 BC, the greatest battle of antiquity was fought here, near the little village of Gaugamela. A true war of the worlds. 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, the 25-year-old 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, a superman. The man whose giant ego literally overwhelms the Persian divine king, Darius, and subdues history itself to his will. MAN: 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, which comprised at that stage maybe 1 50 to 200,000 individuals on this plain at that time, this all came down to a contest of wills between two individuals. -WOOD: And they both understood that? -Oh, I think they entirely... -And they can see each other? -Exactly. -Actually see each other, don't they? -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 the 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 close to a science fiction army. An ancient Greek version of Mad Max. And in the middle of them, Alexander the Great in his parade uniform with his ram's horn helmet with its great white plumes. And on his armour, the head of the gorgon which was supposed to turn to stone anybody who gazed into its eyes. Well, there was one person here who wasn't turned into 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 1 1 8 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 9 or 1 0 miles along the bank of the Ganges. And all along the river frontage, they saw palaces, pleasure gardens. The Greek ambassador Magasthenese said, ''I've seen the great cities of Asia, ''I've seen Susa in Persia, but nothing compares with this.'' And if Magasthenese's 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 be 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 of 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! (PEOPLE CHATTERING) Hello. How old is the house? (SPEAKING HINDI) 1 05 years, right, right, 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, 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 incredible tale of how, at the height of his power, the king renounced his empire. Only worshipping the feet, there's no image of... 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 Shravanabelgola, 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 on the... Where he could see that... Just... 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 want to get into the penance and then moksha. That's why he stood there renouncing his whole kingdom, everything. While he is doing penance, nobody eats anything. Finally, they attain moksha. Not one or two... -WOOD: They die or... -They die. Yeah. 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. The 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 the 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 1 837 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 Prinsep. Prinsep'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. Prinsep 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, dhanam, in Sanskrit. The gift of somebody, of something. He realised that the strange hooked ''C'' was a possessive, so-and-so's gift. And then he cracked an absolutely crucial phrase which occurred over and over again in these inscriptions and on the great pillars in Delhi and Allahabad. The phrase which begins this inscription here... (SPEAKING SANSKRIT) ''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, from the Bay of Bengal almost across to Afghanistan. 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, Ashoka. And back in Patna, the capital of his empire, he'd never been forgotten. And here I was expecting a dry-as-dust archaeological site. That's India for you. The place is an ancient sacred well, still used by the people of Patna in their thousands for their marriage ceremonies. It's now an auspicious place, but it's remembered in legend as a place of torture, a living hell. And the name of the king who built it... (SPEAKING HINDI) He told us that well was constructed by King Ashoka. MAN: Ashoka. WOOD: The well was built by Ashoka? -Namaskar. This is the well? -This is the Agam Kuan. -Can we have a look? -Yeah. (MAN SPEAKING HINDI) According to the legend told here, Ashoka decided to build what was called a hell on earth, which was on this spot. A kind of prison with great high walls within which terrible tortures were devised for people who went against his rule. WOMAN: The great king Ashoka 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 Ashoka. (CHUCKLING) 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. Ashoka agreed. And in Patna he built a torture chamber that he called hell on earth. When the people saw this, they called him ''Chand Ashoka''. Ashoka the Cruel. The legend of Ashoka the Cruel has been told for centuries. But the edicts deciphered by Prinsep give us real history. And they tell of Ashoka's attack on the eastern kingdom of Kalinga, today's Orissa. So if Ashoka is going to invade Kalinga, -this river he must cross? -Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, this was the entry point for the Mauryan army. Yeah, yeah. 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? And it is clearly written, ''Toshali Naga.'' Naga... We know that Toshali is the name of the capital of Kalinga -at the time of Ashoka. -Yeah. This Toshali, it is the name which appears in the holy inscription. MAN: See, this is a weapon. PRADHAN: This is your arrowhead. This is our metallurgical equal, resembling with Mauryan iron equipments. So this kind of thing has been found in the Ganges valley? So, all this metal work has come from a very small area of excavation? MAN: Very small. PRADHAN: Yes, very small. A host of spearheads, arrowheads, bits of weaponry. This is only a tiny sample that the Mauryan army fired an immense amount of weaponry at the people of Kalinga. The King, the beloved of the Gods, attacked Kalinga. 1 50,000 living persons were carried away captive. 1 00,000 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. (SCREAMS) ''In war, ''said Ashoka, ''everyone suffers. ''There is killing and injury. ''People are cut off forever from the ones they love. ''War is a tragedy for everyone. '' Ashoka had hit on one of the most dangerous ideas in history, non-violence. The legend says Ashoka now turned to Buddhism and built memorial stupas in atonement. And the archaeologists have also found their remains on the hills above the battlefield. -Many architectural members are found. -Yeah. Three letters are clearly visible. One is ''A,'' second is ''Sho,'' and there a ''Ka.'' The name Ashoka is clearly visible. ''All we human beings, ''says Ashoka, ''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 Ashoka, ''I desire non-violence for all creatures. ''And I resolve to conquer by persuasion alone. '' Of course, one should always take the words of politicians and leaders with a pinch of salt, especially when they've waged an aggressive war. But in this case, Ashoka's words are so personal, so self-recriminating and so idiosyncratic 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, Ashoka 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, Ashoka 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, and 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's near the battle site in Orissa. One of the great documents in the history of the world. One of the great ideas in the history of the world. 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 Ashoka says, ''All men are my children.'' Does that make Ashoka's India sound a bit like a nanny state? Well, maybe. But as Ashoka 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. He even had police to enforce them. This is a police raid on a load of bird shops and animal shops, pet dealers. People climbing up... People trying to escape up into the roof and over the roof. -Not illegal, legal. -So exotic birds... -Exotic birds. -...is okay? The amazing thing is that in Ashoka'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. WOOD: So this is... This is... This is Raja, who's the oldest inmate here. Almost the oldest inmate, yes. Hi, Raja. -WOOD: Hello, Raja. -Hi, Raja. There's a fantastic passage in one of Ashoka'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 will be cruel to humans as well. Since animals are powerless it shows your true nature in your interaction with them. Because since they can't do anything back to you and you don't have to be worried about anybody reacting, you can be your true self. 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 Ashoka 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. Ashoka 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 Yamuna, where Indian kings traditionally made great 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 Ashoka. And simply it's this, ''The message isn't from God.'' What Ashoka'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 and plants, from the rhino to the Ganges porpoise, the conservation of forests, preservation from needless destruction, it's moving the sphere of politics away from the sanctions of religion and magic 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 Ashoka'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 Ashoka had left was one half of an amalaka fruit. Broken-hearted, he summoned his ministers. Who now is Lord of the Earth? Oh, Majesty. Without question, of course it is you. -The great Emperor Ashoka 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 1 8th 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 that Buddha had never dreamed of. WOOD: All across the world now, there is a big interest in the Buddha. In Western people also. Why do you think this is? Buddha message true, so all people accept. -The Buddha's message is true. -True, yeah. 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.