A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c8.s3.52

c8.s3.52

Before the Council of Pâṭaliputra the Buddhists place, indeed, 300 years of Buddhist history, but that history was clearly supplied from their own heads and not from authentic documents. Buddhism, up to the time of Aśoka, was but one out of many sects established in India. There had been as yet no schism, but only controversy, such as we find in the Brâhmaṇas themselves between different schools and parties. There were as yet no Brahmans as opposed to Buddhists, in the later sense of the word. No separation had as yet taken place, and the greatest reformers at the time of Buddha were reforming Brahmans. This is acknowledged in the Buddhist writings, though they probably were not written down before Aśoka's Council. But even then Buddha is represented as the pupil of the Brahmans, and no slur is cast on the gods and the songs of the Veda. Buddha, according to his own canonical biographer, learned the Rig-veda and was a proficient in all the branches of Brahmanic lore. His pupils were many of them Brahmans, and no hostile feeling against the Brahmans finds utterance in the Buddhist Canon. This forms a striking contrast with the sacred literature of the Jains. The Jains, who are supposed to have made their peace with the Brahmans, yet in their sacred works, written towards the beginning of the fifth century A.D., treat their opponents with marked disrespect. Their great hero Mahâvîra, though at first conceived by a Brahman woman, is removed from her womb and transferred to the womb of a Kshatriya woman, for "surely," as Sakko (Indra) says¹, "such a thing as this has never happened in past, happens not in present, nor will happen in future time, that an Arhat, a Chakravarti, a Baladeva, or a Vasudeva should be born in a low caste family, a servile family, a degraded family, a poor family, a mean family, a beggar's family, or a Brahman's family; but, on the contrary, in all time, past, present, and to come, an Arhat, a Chakravarti, a Vasudeva, receives birth in a noble family, an honourable family, a royal family, a Kshatriya family, as in the family of Ikshvâku, or the Harivanśa, or some such family of pure descent."