The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c14.7

c14.7

If we try to get a picture of this caste from a popular source, like the Jâtakas, we should not be surprised to find it different from that of the Brahmanical sources. Freed from his worldly conditions, the Brâhmaṇa appears to be placed, as it were, in an ideal world, as the centre of which he is regarded, standing above the gods, or at least, on the same level with them.¹ It is different with the Jâtakas which present to us the Brâhmaṇas as they are in their daily lives. We see him now as a teacher asking the new scholar about the honorarium he has brought, now he meets us behind the plough, now in the court of the king interpreting signs and dreams or predicting from the constellation of the stars the future of the newly-born prince, now as a rich merchant in the midst of his accumulated treasures, now at the head of a big caravan.