Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

Chapter Nine
THE AXIAL AGE
(800 BC - 600 AD)
Let us designate this period as the
"axial age." Extraordinary events are
crowded into this period. In China lived
Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in
Chinese philosophy arose . . . In India
it was the age of the Upanishads and of
Buddha; as in China, all philosophical
trends, including skepticism and materialism,
sophistry and nihilism, were
developed.
-Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom
THE PHRASE "THE AXIAL AGE" was coined by the German existentialist
philosopher Karl Jaspers.1 In the course of writing a history of
philosophy, Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras
(570-495 Be), the Buddha (563-483 Be), and Confucius (551-479
BC), were all alive at exactly the same time, and that Greece, India, and
China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between
contending intellectual schools, each group apparently, unaware of
the others' existence. Like the simultaneous invention of coinage, why
this happened had always been a puzzle. Jaspers wasn't entirely sure
himself. To some extent, he suggested, it must have been an effect of
similar historical conditions. For most of the great urban civilizations
of the time, the early Iron Age was a kind of pause between empires,
a time when political landscapes were broken into a checkerboard of
often diminutive kingdoms and city-states, most often at constant war
externally and locked in constant political debate within. Each case
witnessed the development of something akin to a drop-out culture,