The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c12.23

c12.23

The account of the rajjugâhaka amacca given in the Kurudhamma Jâtaka seems to be so simple, so obvious, that it is difficult to understand why Rouse in his translation of the Jâtakas (Cambridge, 1895, p. 257) takes the meaning “cart-driver” given by Childers (Pali Dictionary, under the word rajju). Doubts only arise regarding whether and in what way the rajjuka or rajjugâhaka amacca was engaged in fixing and collecting the taxes, whether he is to be conceived, as Bühler wants to do, as a “tax-officer who measures the field” (for the purpose of fixing the land tax). I don’t consider myself compelled, as I have already said, to accept the inference from the measurement of lands to a “land-tax,” and even the circumstance that in the Kâma Jâtaka (IV. 169), in immediate connection with the measurement of the field by royal officers, the question of remission of taxes occurs, does not seem to me to establish conclusively the existence of the land tax, for by bali, a tax on the produce, a fixed percentage of the crops raised, might very well be meant. Even the method of collecting the taxes noticed by us above gives us no fixed data by which to decide the question, as by the corn which was measured in front of the king’s granary, we might understand as well a portion of the produce as an amount fixed for all time, a ground-rent. Against the supposition of such a ground rent there is first the circumstance that neither in the lawbooks nor in the epics is it even mentioned that the taxes which are measured the lands, or whether officers acting under his supervision measured the fields, as the Kâma Jâtaka (IV. 169) shows, cannot be determined from the two mutually contradictory statements; what seems more probable is that the episode of the Kurudhamma Jâtaka owes its origin to the attempt of the narrator to give as ancient a colouring as possible to the events described by him.