The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c28.100

v1.c28.100

There can be little doubt that the Maurya empire began with a Brāhman, as well as a national, reaction¹. The age of Buddha was one in which religious speculation was rife. Originally a product of the Brāhman hermitages, it had offered irresistible attractions to a people wearied of ritual formality. Innumerable sects arose; it became a common understanding² that from any class a man could go forth, abandoning his home, and found or join a sect of wandering disputants or ascetics. The Greek writers combine with the Buddhist and Jain books and the edicts of Açoka in testifying to the ubiquity of the *pravrajitas* or *çramaṇas* (Gk. *σαρμᾶναι*, *σαρμαναῖοι*)³. We cannot doubt that this would in the end constitute a danger to the established order and an offence to the Brāhman caste. The Brāhman, in the Vedic age a priest, had long ceased to be primarily so. It is true that in public and private ritual the priestly function was his, and he was entitled to the emoluments thereof: also the Purohita, or king's spiritual adviser, was one of the highest and most indispensable officers of state. It was, moreover, customary to consult the forest-dwelling Brāhmans upon high political matters⁴, and in the law-courts the sacred law was stated by Brāhman assessors⁵. Nevertheless, as has been well said, the Brāhman was not a person who fulfilled a sacred function—in particular, the service of a temple has always been regarded as demeaning him—but a person who *was* sacred. He was exempt from taxation and confiscation, from corporal chastisement and the death penalty, branding and banishment being in his case the *ultima ratio*⁶. His true office was study and teaching, and his proper abode was the forest hermitage, where he maintained the sacred fires and lived for another world. An order such as this, established in customary respect and daily observance, was obviously threatened by the intervention of proselitising sects of impromptu origin, making claims upon the livelihood of the people, and interposing in formal and informal gatherings with fundamental problems. We can therefore well understand why the Arthaçāstra (Chap. 19) forbids the practice of abandoning domestic life without formal sanction and without provision for wife and family; and we look forward with confidence to the great doctrine of the Bhagavadgītā, that grand pillar of Brāhmanism, that salvation is attainable not by the rejection of civil duty, but in and above the performance of it. Accordingly we see in the Maurya age the beginning of a stage of concentration, in which only a few great sects could maintain themselves by the side of a settled Brāhman orthodoxy. And this was a natural corollary of a great empire.