Civilisations in Decline
PART ONE
THE VEDIC AGE
Barbarism v. Civilization
According to the accepted wisdom, we have advanced since the dawn of man. The story goes that once upon a time human beings lived in darkness.
 |
| Primitive Man |
Imagine there is no civilization. Rage, anger, and fear drives the world. People live as animals amid outbreaks of violence and barbarism.
 |
The human society is unrecognizable. There is little difference between man and beast. Fear drives a world where might makes right and only the strong survive. Strange religions are followed in dark caves where fire is a mystery. Cannibals practice human sacrifice to appease the gods of the jungle. Primitive societies govern with the force of arms.
 |
| Barbarism |
Of course, this sort of world is behind us now. We live in a modern world with a civilization that has given us everything from birth control pills to the internet. Teenagers can’t live without a smart phone in their hand that controls everything from the television in the living room to the GPS system in their cars.
 |
| Civilization |
Cheap electricity and transportation fueled by petroleum makes it possible for China to ship manufactured goods all over the world. I was surprised the other day when buying a plastic virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico to find it stamped “Made In China.” Living in Mexico, I used to travel to the border town of Laredo in Texas to go shopping. Now the only difference is that the Chinese products in Texas are cheaper than the Chinese products in Mexico. Walmarts sell cheap Chinese products at discount prices all over the United States and Mexico, driving out locally-made products. All this is made possible by cheap oil.
 |
| Abandoned Opera House, Detroit Michigan, USA |
Revert to Barbarism
But what happens when the oil runs out? How quickly would our world revert to barbarism? And what happens to civilization in decline? It usually takes three generations to go from pauper to prince or from prince to pauper. How many generations would it take to go from the height of civilization to absolute barbarism?
The Vedic Age
The great Vedic civilization did not end with the Kurukshetra war. But it might just as well have. Modern historians find the accounts of the war of Kurukshetra dubious hyperbole.
How could such an advanced civilization existed in the valley of the now extinct Saraswati river? They ascribe the story of the struggle between the Kurus and the Pandavas to mere legend or mythology. But a close study of the Sanskrit Mahābharata reveals irrefutable evidence of a great civilization. Just as Hector, Odysseus, and Achilles were legend long before Homer compiled the Iliad, the heroes of Mahābharata were celebrated by Vyāsa long before the advent of Buddha. The Guptian dynasties promulgated Buddhism in India in around the 4th Century before Christ. Their crusade for Buddha was bent on destroying forever the remnants of the Vedic civilization and the power of the brahmans.
 |
| Chandragupta |
The refutation of brahmanism was based on long resentment of the caste system, which must have presided over India for centuries before Buddha. This age-old system had roots in scriptures compiled in Sanskrit long before Panini’s grammar was collected by the scribes of Alexander and secreted in the Alexandrian library in Egypt to be decrypted by Aristotle’s disciples. While the actual accounts found in the Mahābhārata may be subject to a certain amount of hyperbole, the existence in India of a highly organized society at least two thousand years before Christ cannot be denied.
The warriors of Mahābhārata know the use of iron swords, horse-drawn chariots. They built marble palaces and trained elephants in the use of war. They were expert poets, artists, and artisans. They cast statues in bronze and carved stone. Their knowledge of alchemy and herbs in different medicines is indisputable and recorded in different scriptures such as Ayur-Veda. And yet their civilization disintegrated.
Sometimes it is questioned why there are few historical references to the kings who ruled India during the time of the Mahābhāṛata.
Since the time of the Mahābhārata war, India was ruled by Buddhists who did everything possible to eradicate the memory of brahmanism. Centuries later it was the turn of the Islamic Moghul kings, who conquered India from the West. The terrible Aurangzeb was known to dismantle temples and demand tribute in pounds sacred thread that had to be stripped from the backs of the brahmans who wore them.
The memory of the Vedic age has been further erased by the British Raj, the 200-year rule of the English in India.
 |
| British Colonial Power |
“Who controls the past controls the future,” wrote Orwell. Ironically, the curators of India’s past are the very British who worked so hard to convince the world that India’s past was the history of savages. The first and greatest Indologists, Monier-Williams, H.H. Wilson and company, were English. The erudite Max Muller was German with his own theories of Aryan racial superiority. The theory was that the great Aryan race came from Europe and invaded India, driving the black Dravidian peoples to the South. These so-called “Aryans” were the civilizing force that created the Vedic Age. Having fallen into decline they returned to Europe. But the 19th Century saw their return to India, to re-civilize the barbarian tribes they found. This argument (the prevailing view taught by the Jesuits in Calcutta at Presidency College in the early part of the 20th Century) radicalized Subhash Chandra Bose to organize an army to fight the British during the Second World War.
After the decline of the Vedic Age, India was dominated by Buddhists, invaded by Islam, and subjected to 200 years of racist colonial rule by the British Raj. After so many attempts to erase the memory of an ancient world, it is no wonder that the truth about its rise and fall is difficult to reconstruct.
The Bhagavad-Gita gives evidence that the Mahabharata war was a divine intervention to rid the earth of militaristic despotism. The end of the end was the disappearance of the Yadus, the last survivors of the war.
The Śrīmad-Bhāgavatama, or Bhāgavata Pūrana gives the authoritative account of the disappearance of the Yadu dynasty in the 11th Canto, first chapter. According to this version, the destruction of the Yadu dynasty, was the result of a curse and the appearance of an iron club, symbolizing the iron age, the age of industrial destruction, steel, and war.
As the Purana tells the story, God Himself (Kṛṣṇa) orchestrated the conflict between military dynasties which culminated in the Great War. To achieve his purpose he took help from his own dynasty, the Yadu family. In the end, the destruction of the Yadu dynasty itself became necessary to return the world to its peaceful condition.
The despotism of the Yadus manifest itself as pride. Their pride led to a curse by brāhmaṇas, a fratricidal battle and the end of the dynasty. Nowhere in the Bhāgavata Pūrana is it asserted that the destruction of the Kurus or the Yadus was a result of an invasion from an outside group of “Aryans.”
The thesis that Aryans invaded from Europe, civilized India and in turn were driven out by barbarians is a patent attempt by the Europeans to appropriate the culture and wisdom of India. The real story of the destruction of the Vedic civilization is much more tragic, for it rests not upon the foundation of a foreign intrusion, but on the bloodshed of fratricidal civil wars.
The description given by the Bhagavata of the disappearance of the Yadu dynasty is instructive. Here, civilization ends, not by the destructive power of a hurricane, but through envy, fraternal disrespect, intoxication, and finally civil war.
The Bhagavat Purana holds (SB 11.1-11.3) that:
When the Yadus, proud of their position, insulted a group of wise men and sages headed by Narada, they were cursed for their impudence. According to the legend, as a result of the curse one of the Yadus gave birth to an iron bar. Terrified by the curse of the sages, the Yadu princes tried to avoid the karmic result, for they understood the power of the brahman’s curse.
According to legend, they ground the iron bar into powder and threw the dust into the ocean. But the waves returned the iron dust to the shore, where it took root in the mangroves and grew into iron canes.
Kṛṣṇa, seeing omens of the coming iron age, brought his family and the members of the Yadu dynasty to the holy place called Prabhāsa. The Yadus held ceremonies and rituals, but in the celebrations that followed, their intelligence became clouded and drank a kind of mead made from sugar cane. As they became drunk on cane beer, those great heroes of the Yadu dynasty became bellicose and challenged each other to fight. The fight became a furious quarrel as they attacked each other at the sea-shore.
As the fight grew hot, they fell on one another with bows and arrows, maces and swords, javelins and darts and entered into full battle.
They mounted their chariots and elephants, fixed their battle flags, cried “war” and set loose their most vicious passions. Their eyes red with blood, they went at each other mounted on donkeys, camels, bulls, buffalos, mules and even other human beings and fought like wild elephants in the jungle.
Frothing with hate and drunk with rage Pradyumna fought Sāmba, Akrūra turned on Kuntibhoja, and Aniruddha raged against Sātyaki.
Others also, such as Niśaṭha, Ulmuka, Sahasrajit, Śatajit and Bhānu, fell on one another and killed each other, being blinded by intoxication and murder.
Completely abandoning their natural friendship, the members of the various Yadu clans — the Dāśārhas, Vṛṣṇis and Andhakas, the Bhojas, Sātvatas, Madhus and Arbudas, the Māthuras, Śūrasenas, Visarjanas, Kukuras and Kuntis — all slaughtered one another.
Thus bewildered, sons fought with fathers, brothers with brothers, nephews with paternal and maternal uncles, and grandsons with grandfathers. Friends fought with friends, and well-wishers with well-wishers. In this way intimate friends and relatives all killed one another. When all their bows had been broken and their arrows and other missiles spent, they seized the tall stalks of cane with their bare hands.
These cane stalks bore the cursed powder of iron within them and as soon as they took them cane turned iron rods hard as thunderbolts in their raging fists.
So armed, the warriors fought one another with great violence, and when Lord Kṛṣṇa tried to stop them they attacked Him as well.
In their confused state, O King, they also mistook Lord Balarāma for an enemy. Weapons in hand, they ran toward Him with the intention of killing Him.
 |
| Destruction of the Yadu Dynasty by fratricidal war. |
O son of the Kurus, Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma then became very angry. Picking up cane stalks, They moved about within the battle and began to kill the offenders, armed with these clubs.
The violent anger of these warriors, who were overcome by the brāhmaṇas’ curse and bewildered by Lord Kṛṣṇa’s illusory potency, now led them to their annihilation, just as a fire that starts in a bamboo grove destroys the entire forest.
When all the members of His own dynasty were thus destroyed, Lord Kṛṣṇa thought to Himself that at last the burden of the earth had been removed. Lord Balarāma then sat down on the shore of the ocean and fixed Himself in meditation upon the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Merging Himself within Himself, He gave up this mortal world. Lord Kṛṣṇa, the son of Devakī, having seen the departure of Lord Rāma, sat down silently on the ground under a nearby pippala tree and disappeared from the earth planet.
