Caste and Race in India c7.145

c7.145

The express ideas in the Buddhistic literature voice the feeling that caste has nothing to do either with material success in life or with reward after death. High caste is not protected from the effects of wrong doing, and to an ascetic caste ought to be a matter of utter indifference. One of the Jātaka-stories ends with the declaration from the Bodhisattva that the virtuous do not ask one about his birth if his piety is well known. A person's worth in life is determined by right conduct and knowledge.⁵ Nevertheless, in the various anecdotes about Buddha's former lives an individual's status is regarded as fixed by his conduct and even sometimes by his birth. 'In a dispute between two youths as to whether a person is a Brahmin by birth or by his actions, Buddha is said to have given his decision in favour of the latter alternative.¹ Thus Buddha is represented as being inclined to accept the divisions, basing them only on the individual's actions and not on his birth. That he meant these divisions to be status groups and not mere names is evident from another saying attributed to him, where the highest marks of social respect are claimed for the Kshatriyas and the Brahmins.² In actual practice it seems that birth determined an individual's status in society much more than the general remarks would lead us to expect. Nay, we are inclined to look upon this theorizing about the futility of caste-ideas as mere exhortations, similar to the theorizing of the Brahmins recorded in the Upanishads and the epic literature. Buddha, in one of his former lives, had a child by a courtezan who proposed that the child should be given the name of Buddha's father. Buddha is said to have thus reflected: "A child which is born of a low woman cannot possibly be given the family name."³ A king was fraudulently made to marry a girl born of a Kshatriya father and a slave mother as if she were a blue-blooded Kshatriya. When the king perceived the deceit practised on him he complained to Buddha, who, while consoling him, observed: "The family of the mother does not matter; the family of the father alone is important." Buddha's attitude as typified in this remark is not radically different from the brahmanical doctrine. The king evidently does not seem to have been satisfied. He is represented as having divested his low-born wife of all queenly honours. It may be interpreted to be the general rule of the times that the daughter of a Kshatriya male and a slave female could not be recognized as a Kshatriya.⁴ It is narrated in the introduction to one of the Jatakas how a Sakya-chief—the Kshatriya family in which Buddha himself was born—had great scruples about dining in the same plate with, or taking the food brought by his daughter by a slave woman.⁵ In this connection it may also be pointed out that, according to later works dealing with Buddha's life, Buddha is never represented to have chosen any but the families of the two higher castes for his previous births.⁶ In the opinion of the great majority of the monks, caste distinctions had value even after they had joined the brotherhood. Buddha does not countenance this view or practice.¹ From these facts we conclude that in the matter of caste-restrictions the preachings and actions of Buddha had only a general liberalizing effect. He does not seem to have started with the idea of abolishing caste-distinctions, nor do his actions, as described in the Jātaka-stories, demonstrate an utter indifference towards the accident of birth; much less do they evince any conscious effort to annihilate caste. Fick has rightly observed that it is wrong to look upon Buddha as a social reformer and Buddhism as a revolt against caste.²