The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c9.13

c9.13

Consequently, the phenomenon, although in Brahmanical literature it is treated as an unusual phenomenon¹ and as the custom of a legendary king of ancient times, and although more frequently—as in the later chapters of the Mahâbhârata—the rightness of such an act is doubted,¹ the phenomenon of a king abdicating in favour of his grown-up son and himself retiring into the solitude of the forest was not at all unknown in Brahmanical lands. What was characteristic, however, of the culture of the East, as it was reflected in the Jâtakas, was the universality which attached to the phenomenon of homeless asceticism.