The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c13.6

c13.6

Even the Khattiyas of the east, however much they may have excelled the Brâhmaṇas in wealth and power, felt themselves standing on the same level with them in spiritual matters and were in this one point compelled to give the priests a power over themselves, not indeed the Brâhmaṇa caste as such, for this had become through its worldliness something different in Buddha’s time from what it claimed to be according to its own literature and what in fact it might originally have been, but individual representatives of this caste, and principally, the house priest, the purohita.