Miracle of Taxila

Documentary on the History of Taxila

At Taxila you come face to face with the great Buddha. He looms over you larger than life. His serene eyes gaze at you till you find yourself gripped by a feeling of awe. You meet others also at Taxila. Alexander of Macedonia, for one. And Asoka, the famous Buddhist king. And the Emperor Kanishka, perhaps the greatest of them all. Their imprints are everywhere.

As you, the space-age visitor, step into Taxila you feel suddenly 2,500 years younger. For that is when one of the world’s least known but most interesting civilizations took root and flourished in Taxila --- that ancient city south of the River Indus. Once a province of the powerful Achaemenian Empire, Taxila was conquered by Alexander in 327 B. C. It later came under the Mauryan dynasty and reached a remarkably mature level of development under the great Asoka.Then appeared the Indo-Greek descendants of Alexander’s warrior and finally came the most creative period of Gandhara. The great Kushan dynasty was established about 50 A.D. During the next 200 year. Taxila became a renowned centre of learning, from as far away as China and Greece. The end came in the fifth century A.D. when the White Huns snuffed out the last of the successive civilizations that had held unbroken sway in this region for several centuries.

Exploring Taxila is a multi-dimensional experience. You are attracted by the richness and variety of the famed Gandhara sculpture. There are endless images of Buddha, in stone and stucco, and numerous panels depicting all the important stages of the great sage’s life. Exquisitely sculpted friezes and statues of all sizes evoke the life and times of one of the worlds’ most impressive men of peace: Gautama Buddha.

Each carved bit of sculpture, from the colossal to the miniature ---- and there are literally thousands of them – is a collector’s item. Even if you aren’t exactly a devotee of the sculpture of the first century A.D., you will find it a challenge to trace similarities between the Gandhara masterpieces and their Graeco-Roman counterparts. Incidentally, it is these stone men and women of Gandhara who greet you so graciously in Taxila, or rather their craftsmen, who first gave visual expression to Buddha and his era. And then there are the excavated ruins. Three distinct cities stretch before you in a surprisingly good state of preservation. With your imagination aided by the carved people who inhabit these cities, you will have little difficulty in picturing crowds on the well laid out streets, families in the spacious houses, priests in the towering stupas and royalty in the great palaces.

The earliest city, Bhir Mound, dates back to the sixth century B.C. Its irregular streets, cramped houses and mediocre public building indicate its primitive origins. Sirkap, on the opposite side of the Tamara Stream, is much newer, having been built in the second century B.C. You will find Sirkap a well-planned city. And as you stroll down its wide streets, you can call at the houses of the affluent and go slumming, as it were, in the more crowded sections where dwelt the common man of the dim and misty past. Note the fortification wall, the long, straight and impressive main street, the Royal Palace, and Apsidal Temple and the Shrine of the Double-Headed Eagle. The third city, Sirsukh, is modern by comparison. It was apparently built by the Kushan kings in the first century A.D. It has not been fully excavated as yet but it is clearly a well fortified, well laid out city, patterned after Central Asian cities and is complete with a suburb.

In addition to these three major cities, many important monasteries, stupas and palaces have been excavated all along the Taxila valley. Many more, surely, still lies buried awaiting discovery. If you can’t manage all, you must at least explore the remarkable Dharmarajika Stupa, three kilometers east of the Taxila Museum. It comprises a main building, a monastery area where the monks lived and a series of small chapels. Sacred relics of Buddha and a silver scroll commemorating the relics were found in one of the chapels. A wealth of gold and silver coins, gems, jewellery and other antiques were discovered at Dharmarajika. They are all housed in the Taxila Museum.

There is also Jaulian, another impressive complex of chapels, stupas, quadrangles, and a monastery with assembly hall, storerooms, refectory, kitchen and bathrooms. At five small stupas you will see beautiful stucco relief of Buddha and Bodhisatvas supported by rows of stone elephants and lions. Two miles from Jaulian is another well-preserved monastery --- at Mohra Moradu. In one of the monk’ cells here was found a small stupa with almost all the details intact. At Jandial, two kilometers from Sirsukh, is an imageless temple in the classic Greek style, with columns and cornices.

For the climbers, there is the Glen of Giri, about five kilometers from Dharmarajika Stupa. Atop the highest peak of a range of hills are two stupas and a fortress built in a cleft near a spring of pure, sweet water. The stucco decoration of the stupas are well worth the climb. No amount of description can do justice to Taxila. To feel and understand its full importance, you simply have to go there. Even today, Taxila is a place of peace. Its pastoral landscape is almost as inviting as its living past. Early man knew what he was doing when 3,000 years ago he chose to site his cities in this delightful, hill-edged valley.

The Museum

The archaeological museum a Taxila is a real treasure-house. Its collection of coins, jewellery, relics, and gold and silver caskets alone are worth a king's ransom. But its real glory comes from stone and stucco---that exquisite Gandhara sculpture crafted at a time when the world was young. Its impressive collection will help you get to know Gautama, the Lord Buddha, better.

 A bureaucrat, mutated into an ‘intellectual’, hogs the waves of an Urdu television channel and tells the ignorant television viewing public what it wants to hear. One of his not-so-recent gems was about the country that is now Pakistan being a wild and savage land until illuminated by Islam in the early 8th century. That, until that time, this land had no culture or sophistication. The man is a liar and a charlatan.

·

··

  In April 326 BCE, Alexander arrived in Taxila and it is from that time we get the first real notice on this wonderful city. Several members of the Macedonian’s staff wrote diaries that were subsequently published. Some of those works are lost entirely, others preserved by later historians. Whatever the case, they provide a fantastic window into the city.

·

  Taxila, was a city of Buddhists and Brahmans and of yet another class that did not bury its dead. They exposed them in isolated places for the bones to be picked clean by the birds. This was a clear reference to the followers of the great Zartusht or Zoroaster — the people we today know as Parsees. We are told that the Brahmans were a very powerful class, actively engaged in the political life of the city and serving as counsellors to the court.

·

  As for the Buddhists, Greek writers refer to them as ‘sramanes’. Clearly this was a mispronunciation of ‘sramanera’, or a new entry training to be a monk. Though there is no dearth of ruins of post-Alexander Buddhist monasteries in town, we can take this as proof of Taxila being a centre of learning even before the westerners descended upon it.

·

  There is no notice of animosity between followers of the various religious persuasions who lived in total harmony. Taxila, if we are to believe Alexander’s general Nearchus, was a city of peace and the rule of law. Nearchus notes, with evident awe, the rectitude and decency of the townspeople who made all monetary transactions without “either seals or witnesses”. Yet the courts of law were without any cases of fraud! Mendacity was unheard of and when folks went away, either for work or pleasure, they left their homes unlocked and unguarded for theft was not known in Taxila!

·

  The people of Taxila were admirers of physical beauty and never left home improperly dressed or made up. The men wore their beards either in white or in punk shades of bright red, green or purple. The dress, as described by Nearchus, was “an under-garment of cotton which reaches below the knee halfway down to the ankles, and also an upper garment which they throw partly over their shoulders, and partly twist in folds around their heads.”

·

  Their shoes had thick soles to make the wearer seem taller and the clothing of the rich men was worked in gold thread and studded with precious stones. When they went about their business out of doors, attendants shaded them from the harsh Punjabi sun with broad parasols.

·

  Polygamy was common among the rich. But parents with daughters of marriageable age and unable, because of poverty, to wed them off, exhibited the damsels in the town square. There the champions of Taxila fought boxing matches and the winner’s prize was the hand of the girl in marriage.

·

  Arrian called Taxila “the largest [city] between the Indus and the Jhleum” and we can tell from the above description of its richer classes that it was indeed so. Sitting at a spot that made it an important staging post for caravans, it picked off large amounts in custom duties. But much of its wealth also came from its rich agriculture. According to Nearchus, there was no shortage of food in Taxila.

·

  But the noblest aspect of Taxilian society was the respect it bestowed upon its learned men. The philosophers, whose fame had reached Alexander months before he got to Taxila, were held in the highest possible esteem by the Taxilians. They lived outside town, but whenever they wandered in, people mobbed them, oiling their hair and massaging their limbs, begging them to come into their homes so that they could hear their discourse.

·

  Taxila was a city of high culture that valued true learning. And we have a mendacious bureaucrat pretending to be an intellectual who tells us otherwise.

 A bureaucrat, mutated into an ‘intellectual’, hogs the waves of an Urdu television channel and tells the ignorant television viewing public what it wants to hear. One of his not-so-recent gems was about the country that is now Pakistan being a wild and savage land until illuminated by Islam in the early 8th century. That, until that time, this land had no culture or sophistication. The man is a liar and a charlatan.

·

··

  In April 326 BCE, Alexander arrived in Taxila and it is from that time we get the first real notice on this wonderful city. Several members of the Macedonian’s staff wrote diaries that were subsequently published. Some of those works are lost entirely, others preserved by later historians. Whatever the case, they provide a fantastic window into the city.

·

  Taxila, was a city of Buddhists and Brahmans and of yet another class that did not bury its dead. They exposed them in isolated places for the bones to be picked clean by the birds. This was a clear reference to the followers of the great Zartusht or Zoroaster — the people we today know as Parsees. We are told that the Brahmans were a very powerful class, actively engaged in the political life of the city and serving as counsellors to the court.

·

  As for the Buddhists, Greek writers refer to them as ‘sramanes’. Clearly this was a mispronunciation of ‘sramanera’, or a new entry training to be a monk. Though there is no dearth of ruins of post-Alexander Buddhist monasteries in town, we can take this as proof of Taxila being a centre of learning even before the westerners descended upon it.

·

  There is no notice of animosity between followers of the various religious persuasions who lived in total harmony. Taxila, if we are to believe Alexander’s general Nearchus, was a city of peace and the rule of law. Nearchus notes, with evident awe, the rectitude and decency of the townspeople who made all monetary transactions without “either seals or witnesses”. Yet the courts of law were without any cases of fraud! Mendacity was unheard of and when folks went away, either for work or pleasure, they left their homes unlocked and unguarded for theft was not known in Taxila!

·

  The people of Taxila were admirers of physical beauty and never left home improperly dressed or made up. The men wore their beards either in white or in punk shades of bright red, green or purple. The dress, as described by Nearchus, was “an under-garment of cotton which reaches below the knee halfway down to the ankles, and also an upper garment which they throw partly over their shoulders, and partly twist in folds around their heads.”

·

  Their shoes had thick soles to make the wearer seem taller and the clothing of the rich men was worked in gold thread and studded with precious stones. When they went about their business out of doors, attendants shaded them from the harsh Punjabi sun with broad parasols.

·

  Polygamy was common among the rich. But parents with daughters of marriageable age and unable, because of poverty, to wed them off, exhibited the damsels in the town square. There the champions of Taxila fought boxing matches and the winner’s prize was the hand of the girl in marriage.

·

  Arrian called Taxila “the largest [city] between the Indus and the Jhleum” and we can tell from the above description of its richer classes that it was indeed so. Sitting at a spot that made it an important staging post for caravans, it picked off large amounts in custom duties. But much of its wealth also came from its rich agriculture. According to Nearchus, there was no shortage of food in Taxila.

·

  But the noblest aspect of Taxilian society was the respect it bestowed upon its learned men. The philosophers, whose fame had reached Alexander months before he got to Taxila, were held in the highest possible esteem by the Taxilians. They lived outside town, but whenever they wandered in, people mobbed them, oiling their hair and massaging their limbs, begging them to come into their homes so that they could hear their discourse.

·

  Taxila was a city of high culture that valued true learning. And we have a mendacious bureaucrat pretending to be an intellectual who tells us otherwise.