Three Beginnings at Once 三個地方同時開始

🔊What these people shared was not a set of doctrines. Their answers differed enormously. What they shared was a turn of attention. Older religion in all three places centered on ritual, the correct performance of sacrifices that kept the gods or ancestors favorable. The new teachers asked what lay behind the ritual and whether it mattered at all. They asked what a good person is, what the self is, why there is suffering, and what is real beneath appearances. They taught students, not only kings and priests, and their students argued with one another. In each place, an inherited way of life became something that could be examined.

這些人共享的不是一套學說；他們的答案差異極大。他們共享的是注意力的一次轉向。在三個地方，較古老的宗教都以儀式為中心：正確地舉行祭祀，好讓神或祖先保持眷顧。新的老師們追問儀式背後是什麼，以及儀式究竟重不重要。他們問：什麼是好人？什麼是自我？為什麼有苦？在表象底下什麼是真實的？他們教的是學生，不只是國王與祭司；而他們的學生彼此爭論。在每一個地方，一種承襲的生活方式，變成了可以被檢查的東西。

🔊In India, the Vedic religion of fire sacrifices was already ancient. The Upanishads, composed by forest-dwelling teachers over several centuries, turned inward. The Katha Upanishad tells of a boy, Nachiketas, who is granted three wishes by Death himself and uses the third to ask, in Swami Paramananda’s translation, “There is this doubt regarding what becomes of a man after death. Some say he exists, others that he does not exist.” Death begs him to choose something else, and the boy refuses. The Buddha and Mahāvīra went further and rejected the authority of the Vedas altogether. In his first sermon, in Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation, the Buddha described a path between two extremes: “Indulgence in sensual pleasures, which is low,” and “indulgence in self-mortification, which is painful.”

在印度，以火祭為中心的吠陀宗教那時已經很古老了。奧義書由住在森林裡的老師們，在幾個世紀中陸續寫成；它們把目光轉向內在。《卡塔奧義書》講一個男孩納奇凱塔斯的故事：死神親自給了他三個願望，他用第三個願望問（依 Swami Paramananda 的英譯）：「關於人死後會怎樣，有這樣一個疑惑：有人說他存在，有人說他不存在。」死神求他選別的，男孩拒絕了。佛陀與大雄走得更遠，完全拒絕了吠陀的權威。佛陀在他的初轉法輪裡（依 Sujato 比丘的英譯），描述了一條介於兩個極端之間的道路：「沉溺於感官的享樂，那是低下的」，以及「沉溺於自我折磨，那是痛苦的」。

🔊In China, the Zhou dynasty’s rituals had kept order for centuries, but by Confucius’ time the Zhou kings were powerless and the states fought one another. Confucius did not reject ritual. He asked what made it worth keeping, and found the answer in human virtue. When his student Zigong asked for one word to guide a whole life, Confucius replied, in James Legge’s translation, “Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” In Greece, the old poets’ gods were doubted by Xenophanes, and Heraclitus taught that “this world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire.” Three different idioms, ritual reformed, ritual transcended, ritual replaced by nature, all expressed one change. People were now looking for an order they could understand.

在中國，周朝的禮已經維持秩序好幾個世紀；但到了孔子的時代，周天子已無實權，諸侯互相攻伐。孔子並沒有拒絕禮。他追問是什麼使禮值得保存，並在人的德行裡找到答案。當學生子貢問：有沒有一個字可以終身奉行？孔子回答：「其恕乎！己所不欲，勿施於人。」在希臘，詩人們的神被色諾芬尼懷疑；赫拉克利特則教導：「這個對一切都相同的世界，不是任何神或人所造的；它過去一直是、現在是、將來也永遠是一團永恆的活火。」三種不同的語言：改革禮、超越禮、用自然取代禮；都表達了同一個改變：人們現在要尋找一種他們能夠理解的秩序。

🔊Why then, and why there? Historians have offered several explanations. All three regions were becoming richer and more urban. The Lydians, Herodotus reports, “were the first of men, so far as we know, who struck and used coin of gold or silver,” and coinage appeared in India and China in the same centuries. Trade created merchants who traveled, compared customs, and had money for teachers. All three regions were also politically broken into rival states, the Greek cities, the Indian kingdoms of the Ganges plain, and the warring states of China. Rival courts competed for advisers, and a teacher who was unwelcome in one state could move to another. Wealth, writing, travel, and political competition together may have made room for people whose job was to think.

那為什麼是那個時候、那些地方？歷史學家提出了幾種解釋。三個地區都在變得更富裕、更城市化。希羅多德記載，呂底亞人「據我們所知，是最早鑄造並使用金幣或銀幣的人」；而錢幣在同樣的幾個世紀裡，也出現在印度與中國。貿易造就了到處旅行、比較風俗、並且有錢供養老師的商人。三個地區在政治上也都分裂成彼此競爭的國家：希臘的城邦、恆河平原上的印度諸國、中國的戰國。互相競爭的朝廷爭相延攬謀士；一位在某國不受歡迎的老師，可以到另一國去。財富、文字、旅行與政治競爭，或許合起來，為那些以思考為職業的人騰出了空間。

🔊Some scholars doubt the whole idea. The “age” stretches over six hundred years, which is long for a coincidence. Important thinkers, such as Zarathustra in Iran and the Hebrew prophets, fit it only awkwardly, and earlier civilizations, Egypt and Mesopotamia, had wisdom literature of their own. The concept may say more about how modern Europeans wanted to see world history than about the ancient world. These are fair objections, and this course treats the Axial Age as a useful lens, not a law of history. Even so, the lens shows something true. The questions that still define philosophy, how to live, what is real, how we can know, what we owe one another, were first asked in recognizably modern form in these three places, at roughly the same time, by people who had never heard of one another.

有些學者懷疑整個觀念。這個「時代」橫跨六百年，對一個巧合來說太長了。一些重要的思想家，例如伊朗的瑣羅亞斯德與希伯來的先知，只能勉強放進這個框架；而更早的文明，埃及與美索不達米亞，也有它們自己的智慧文學。這個概念可能更多地反映了現代歐洲人想怎麼看世界史，而不是古代世界本身。這些反駁都是公道的；這門課把軸心時代當作一個有用的鏡頭，而不是歷史的定律。即便如此，這個鏡頭照出了一些真實的東西。至今仍界定著哲學的那些問題（怎麼活、什麼是真實的、我們怎麼知道、我們虧欠彼此什麼），最早是在這三個地方、大約同一個時候，由一些從來沒聽說過彼此的人，以今天還認得出來的形式提出的。