The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c18.2

v1.c18.2

THE later half of the sixth century b.c. seems to have been unusually fertile in giving rise to new religious movements in India. An old text amongst the sacred lore of the Buddhists¹ mentions sixty-three different philosophical schools—probably all of them non-Brāhman—existing at the time of Buddha, and there are passages in Jain literature exhibiting a far larger number of such heretical doctrines. Although these statements may have been influenced by the tendency to exaggerate which is visible in most Hindu works, and although many of these sects may have been distinguished only by very subtle differences in matters of doctrine and practice, we are still bound to believe that there was an extraordinary impulse shown in the rise and development of new theological and philosophical ideas at that time. It is beyond our power of investigation to determine whether some of these schools may not have owed their origin to a time far more remote than that of Buddha. In the few cases where we are in some degree able to form an opinion on such points—and the history of the Jain doctrine gives us some hints in this direction—it seems most probable that this may have been the case. It is certainly difficult to believe that all these sects should have originated at the same time. We may therefore suggest that revolts against the Brāhman doctrines date from a much more remote age than the time of Gautama Buddha, the founder of one of the most important religions of the world, and Vardhamāna Mahāvīra, the founder or rather reformer of the Jain church. Not only these two religious teachers but also a number of others, of whom we know little or nothing more than the name, preached in a spirit of most conscientious and determined contradiction against the sanctity of the Vedic lore, the sacrificial prescriptions of the ritualists, and the claims of spiritual superiority asserted by the Brāhmans; but it is a strange characteristic of these sects, so far as we know them, that they adopted in their ascetic practices and in their whole mode of life the rules which had been already fixed by their Brāhman antagonists.