The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c9.3

c9.3

When later, as the followers of Buddha formed an organised body and introduced special rules, the admission of people of the Buddhist faith into the order was effected through the act of initiation and this was characterised as pabbajjâ as going out, no new thing was created; and nothing that was not known to Brahmanical law—the entrance of a Brâhmaṇa into the state of a hermit (vânaprastha) was extremely well-known—was introduced into the life of the Buddhistic order. Even before Buddha's time, the custom of escaping from the worldly state and retiring from home into the isolation of the forest, was not confined to the Brâhmaṇas. As he himself, a Khattiya of the proud family of Sâkya princes, exchanged the glitter and pomp of worldly life for the homeless condition of the ascetic, so other sons "of aristocratic families" followed the tendency of that time and renounced their home in order to obtain possession of "the highest perfection of a holy striving."¹ Among the disciples who followed his doctrine we find, along with young Brâhmaṇas, people belonging to his own station and sons of rich tradesmen and high officials. They are all to be looked upon by us not as members of a well-organised order of monks—such an order was created centuries later—but rather as nothing else than Tāpasas on Samaṇas, whom we come across so often in the Jātakas who group round the person of a teacher (gaṇasatthā) and listen to his word. It will perhaps be stated against me that precisely at this point the Jātakas do not exhibit the actual conditions of the pre-Buddhistic period but that their authors have put the later rules of the Buddhistic order back into earlier times. For this supposition, however, there is no sufficient ground, for in the first place, the possibility that all Aryan Indians in ancient times could embrace the homeless condition appears from the Brahmanical law books themselves.¹ Then again—and this in my opinion places the correctness of the accounts in the Jātakas beyond question—we find this very thing in the report of Megasthenes who was sent about the year 300 B.C., as a messenger of Seleukas to the court of Candragupta in Pātaliputra—and thus in eastern India, the heart of Buddhism. He places at the head of the Indian society which he divides into 7 γένη as first γενος the σοφισταί and says of these that they again fall into two γενη, namely, the βραχμαναι and the Σαρμαναί. Whilst he understands by the first Brâhmaṇas in general—whom he, probably impelled by the fact that they, like the Samaṇas led the life of a hermit, puts with these in the same class—he makes the description which he gives of the Σαρμαναι applicable to the Samaṇas or ascetics of our text¹; above all—and this concerns us here—he applies to them the proposition which is used wrongly in Greek reports with regard to the σοφισταί in general, the proposition, namely, that whereas marriages between the separate castes are not allowed, nor is any change from one profession to another permissible, every man can adopt this condition.²