The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c19: Conclusion
The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c19
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Conclusion
c19.1
We have come in the course of our remarks to the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Since the days of Bernardin de St. Pierre people have always complained of the lot of the despised classes of India and thrown the responsibility for their miserable position upon the priests; people speak very often even to-day of a demon which possessed the Indian people in consequence of the caste-organisation and represent the caste as an artificial product of priestly selfishness. European travellers when they first gave us a knowledge of modern India, made the want of freedom and low position of the Parias and the rigid organisation of Indian society an object calling for expressions of pity, and ever since people became acquainted in Brahmanical literature with a one-sided representation of the social relations of ancient India, they believed, as they took the theory for the truth, to have found here the key to the origin and development of caste-life.
c19.2
The picture which we can draw from our popular sources of the social conditions which ruled in eastern India about Buddha's time, does not give occasion, in my opinion, for a highly sentimental view, nor does it justify the theory that the castes were invented by the priests for establishing and strengthening a hierarchical social organisation. The political influence of the Brâhmaṇas greatly diminished, especially, in the eastern lands, as compared with the position and power of the ruling classes who, leaving out of account special cases, did not allow much scope for any Brahmanical desire for power; even of an intellectual supremacy of the Brâhmaṇas no trace is to be found in the age and the subject with which we have to do, for even in the spiritual province, other classes, especially, the ruling princely families, challenged the premier position of the worldly Brâhmaṇa caste. As for the position of the lower classes, it was not better, but also not worse, than it would appear to be under similar conditions; aboriginal races standing at a low culture-stage are oppressed in all ages and times by their more highly cultured conquerors and employed in a slave's work: also similar contrasts between immense wealth on the one side and miserable poverty on the other we meet with wherever a more highly cultured race wants to use its superiority even in economical matters.
c19.3
The social organisation of ancient India which appears to us very strange, nay, even monstrous, in the form in which we find it in the Brahmanical lawbooks in which it is made into an unalterable system, shows itself in reality as the necessary development of conditions imposed by ethnical and cultural distinctions. Instead of the four strictly isolated castes of the Brahmanical system and the mixed castes arising from their combination, we notice a number of essentially distinct social groups which in the majority of cases cannot properly be called "castes," in which, however, we see the first germs and beginnings of an organisation of the modern type. A caste in the sense of their own theory only the Brâhmaṇas form; other groups, like the ruling class of Khattiyas, the class of royal officers, the leading middleclass families have particular characteristics in common with the *jâti* of the Brâhmaṇas; they cannot, however, lay any claim to the designation "caste," because they lack the essential characteristics of this; the same is true of the rest of the *jâtis* which are sharply distinguished from the great mass of the people, such as the guilds of tradesmen and artisans, the lower professions, the despised and shunned races. All these *jâtis*—and in this the Indian society of that time have their own peculiar, specifically Indian stamp—are hereditary and to go out of the circle fixed by birth is impossible, according to the rules.
c19.4
So far as they are described in the Jâtakas, the social conditions remained probably unchanged even long after Buddha's time. When about two hundred years after Buddha's death the Greek messenger Megasthenes lived in the court of Candragupta in Pâtaliputra, he manifestly found similar conditions. The Greek reports which are traceable to him contain a description of the Indian society of that time which, it is true, does not wholly agree with facts which we can gather from our source, but can be brought much more into agreement with these than with the Brahmanical system. They give the number of játis or classes (γένη or μέρη) as seven; as the first γένος they mention the σοφισταί or φιλόσοφοι who, as we have seen, correspond to the Samaṇas and partly to the Brâhmaṇas of our source; the second γένος, the farmers or γεωργοί, can be placed in the same class with the gahapati or kuṭumbika of the Pali Texts. By the herdsmen and hunters named in the third place, we have probably to understand the low non-Aryan races of the Jâtakas, whilst the fourth γένος, that of the τεχνίται or the γένος δημιουργικόν, agrees with the artisans of our text. The remaining three γένη, the γένος of the warriors (πολεμισταί), that of the supervisor (ἐπίσκοποι or ἔφοροι) and that of the king’s councillor (σύμβολοι or σύνεδροι) belong to the category of râjabhogga, the officers in the king’s employ. After the enumeration of the seven γένη the Greek sources point out as their characteristic feature the fact that they did not allow any inter-marriage and that it was not permissible to pass from one γένος to another or to follow the profession of two classes at one and the same time.
c19.5
Later, in the course of centuries, the játis, as we know them in the Jâtakas, have experienced continuous changes under the most divers influences: the official theory of the Brâhmaṇas, ethnical and geographical influences, the tendency of the Indians to schematise, the placing of the concepts "profession" and "caste" side by side—all this has worked upon the játis, transformed them and made them resemble one another more and more, so far as their essence and organisation are concerned, until, finally, they became modern castes. This process of transformation is in no way, as one hears it maintained so often to-day, broken by Buddhism, nay, not even retarded. Buddha's doctrine does not aim at a transformation or improvement of the social conditions: the worldly life and its forms are a matter of indifference to the virtuous Buddhist who renounces the world. He never raises the question whether the worldly life could be different from what it is but accepts it in its incompleteness and badness as something unchangeable. The destiny of man, the external organisation of his earthly life is for the Buddhist a necessary consequence of his karman, his former deeds: wealth or poverty, high or low caste, the individual has deserved through his deeds in a former existence. The human social order was for the Indians even of that time a reproduction of natural life and moved, according to their view, like this in eternally identical paths; he who was born a Caṇḍāla must—so long as he did not retire from human society and pass into asceticism—remain a Caṇḍāla during his life-time and bear the lot of such a one, just as everybody who expiates the sins of former existence by re-birth as low beast, has to live through the whole existence of such a beast till death makes him pass into another existence.
c19.6
The doctrine of *karman* and re-birth and the supposition of an unalterable social order are closely connected with each other and have exercised a mutual influence upon each other in their further development; both dogmas are deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Indian people and rule their thoughts even to the present day Even to-day they influence the organisation of social life and determine its forms: even the modern castes are, as little as the castes of ancient India, an artificial product; on the other hand, they have grown out of the spirit of the Indian people whose stamp they bear.