The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c8.54

c8.54

Thus we meet everywhere in the Pali canon and even in the Jâtakas⁴, although the worthlessness of the castes is emphasised, with the Brahmanical caste theory and the division of society into four castes, the Khattiya, Brâhmaṇa, Vessa and Sudda, as something self-evident, and nowhere is any doubt expressed. Still let us look a little more minutely at these passages. These are, so to speak, academic discussions regarding the value of castes which all only serve—not to give us a picture of Indian society—but to oppose the claim of the Brâhmaṇas to be through their caste in sole possession of truth, of the knowledge of the path of emancipation. In my opinion, there is no more reality in these theoretical speculations than in the theory of the Brâhmaṇas; they are nothing else than a reflex of the priestly literature and show us that the Brahmanical theory was not only well known to the Buddhist monks but was so strongly inbedded in their consciousness, that they could not free themselves from it, although in all probability, they were quite convinced of its incongruence with the real world as well as of the worthlessness of the caste. Moreover, the Buddhist writers never cared in the least to contradict the caste-theory as such and thereby introduce a better organisation of society; what they tried to do was simply to show that caste is of no value for the striving for emancipation.