The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c7.3

c7.3

The time is past when people used to think that so far as ancient India was concerned, it was enough to consider only Brahmanical literature. The view that for ancient Indian culture and ancient Indian life, we require only to consider Brahmanical sources, is necessarily one-sided, because these sources were written from a one-sided point of view. For their authors immersed in the priestly views, the world which surrounded them, material as well as spiritual, existed only so far as it related to the sacrifices with their litany and their ritual which filled all their thoughts and aspirations, and where, as in the text-books of law, there was a departure from this special view-point and the entire domain of law and morals for private as well as public life was taken into account, this was still done from the standpoint of theorising Brahmanism¹; nay, even in epic literature, where one could expect most a view of the real state of things, this was prevented or, at any rate, rendered difficult by the all-eclipsing underwood of theories and systems. No wonder that this world which the Brâhmaṇas interpreted in their own way appears so foreign and so strange to us; no wonder that in many points it agrees so little with what we know of ancient India from other sides. Now-a-days, however, we no more consider a non-Brahmanical source, such as the accounts of the Greek messenger Megasthenes, unreliable simply because it cannot be brought into harmony with the Brahmanical theory²; we try, on the other hand, to collect all available material, whether it is of Buddhistic, Jaina or Greek origin, which exhibits the priestly theories in their true light—nay, we do not even hesitate to make use of the conditions of modern India which on account of the