The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c6.s5.1

c6.s5.1

It is often thought that the institution of renunciation emerged as a protest against brahminical orthodoxy or that it originated in non-brahminical or even non-Aryan circles.⁷⁸ The theory of the four āśramas, or stages of life, would then have been an attempt at legitimizing the renunciatory modes of life and drawing them within the orbit of brahminical orthodoxy. There is of course full scope for recognizing the influence of extraneous beliefs and practices, for instance, in the matter of various forms of ascetism. But the important point is that these influences do not seem to have made a decisive irruption in the development of religious thought. They seem rather to have fitted themselves into the orthogenetic, internal development of Vedic thought. Or one might say that these extraneous beliefs and practices were not in principle dissimilar from those that obtained among the adherents of the preclassical ritual.