Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [79]
Buddhism, with its emphasis on suffering, resignation and the ultimate unimportance of the daily round of life, was never a positive influence on kings who must preserve their realms against external aggression. No Buddhist king in its homeland of India, not even Aśoka, managed to found a dynasty that would endure more than a couple of generations; and the strange attraction of Buddhism to invading Altaic peoples, especially the Tabgach and Genghis Khan’s Mongols, brought their soldierly virtues to an early end once they had settled in China. As Grousset remarks: ‘These ferocious warriors, once touched by the grace of the bodhisattva, became so susceptible to the humanitarian precepts of the śramanas [i.e. Buddhist monks] as to forget not only their native belligerence but even neglect their self-defence.’23
But there was one aspect of Egyptian and Chinese religion which was similar, and is probably connected with the gross survivability of their languages in situ over many millennia. This is the attitude that each of them took to their emperor, and his relation to his land, his people and their gods.
Both these empires achieved early unity under a single ruler, Egypt under the legendary Menes, China under the historical Shi Huang Di. Although afterwards there were often divisions, and competition among the different kingdoms, the two civilisations never found such disunity tolerable: their histories, as we have seen, distinguished firmly between prosperous periods, when a single royal house controlled the whole country, and interregna, which may have been perfectly peaceable, but suffered from the cardinal flaw that the country was divided. These were very much centred countries, and the centre was not a place (each of them had many different imperial capitals—Thebes, Memphis, Tanis, Leontopolis, Sais in Egypt, Chang-an, Luoyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Beijing in China) but a royal court. In each case, the king’s position* was sanctified by the national faith. The Egyptian pharaoh was seen as the incarnation (am) of kingship, maintaining a direct relation with the gods on behalf of all his people of the Two Lands. Likewise the Chinese emperor was Son of Heaven (tiān zî), guaranteeing order in the Central Kingdom.
Both rulers were absolute, deriving their sovereignty not from the people but the gods. Nevertheless each was subject to an explicit moral constraint. In Egypt, this was called maR ‘at, ‘order’, the moral and natural law. The pharaoh had a duty to put maR ‘at in place of jazfat, ‘wrong’, in his kingdom. The Chinese emperor had a duty to rule justly, and abstain from oppression; only so long as he did this, according to the influential doctrine of Mencius (Meng-zi), could he retain the Mandate of Heaven (tiān mìng), i.e. legitimacy: the oppressive ruler had forfeited his right to rule, and could be justly deposed by the people.
Both Egypt and China, therefore, had the same simple but sustaining political doctrine, which based the country’s identity on the rule of a single emperor, and based the emperor’s sovereignty on righteousness. The national philosophy therefore contained a built-in theodicy: the proof of a ruler’s righteousness was his success in maintaining a ruling dynasty. The gods were ensuring that only righteous monarchs would be successful, and so, whether the king was failing or prospering, all was right with the world, and the Egyptian or Chinese citizen, whether recent interloper or long-standing resident, could give the system his loyalty.
This doctrine was extemely fitting for a stable long-term culture, with the linguistic consequences that we have seen. But it could be maintained that it was the result, rather than