The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c16.13

c16.13

About the nature of the goods carried, the statements of the Jâtakas speak in a very uncertain voice. The narrator speaks mostly of five hundred wagons laden with valuable goods and leaves us to exercise our conjecture regarding the contents of these loads. Probably, the packages of the tradesmen contained cloths, for according to the Tuṇḍila Jâtaka there were in the neighbourhood of Benares fields sown with cotton¹ (kâppâsakhetta III. 286) and this cotton was probably in Buddha’s time chiefly used in the manufacture of goods in Benares.² On the other hand, cotton industry appears to have flourished in certain places in the west, as in the Mahâvagga of the Vinaya Piṭaka; Sivi cloth (Siveyyaka dussa VIII. 1. 29) is praised as specially valuable.