History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c91.70

v7.c91.70

It is not unlikely that the above passages from the Vāyu, Varāha and Padma are later interpolations. When Buddhism was flourishing large companies of Buddhist monks were fed by the people. When Buddhism declined and disappeared from India after the 12th or 13th century A. D. people came to believe that there was great merit in feeding poor brāhmaṇas just as in former times people fed monks and the Purāṇas might have only echoed and emphasized the general sentiments of the people. If the people in general had not come to believe in this, the author feels that no amount of interpolations or insistence by the so-called crafty brāhmaṇas would have been effective. Writers, Western or Indian, that, relying on the notions current in the 19th and 20th centuries, pass severe and unmeasured strictures on the provisions for brāhmaṇas in the Purāṇas do great injustice to the authors of Purāṇas that flourished about a thousand years ago or more. Such writers should compare Indian medieval conditions, ideas and doings of brāhmaṇas with the claims of the Popes, Christian priests, Inquisitions and the state of monastic Orders in Europe from about the 10th century A. D. to the 15th century. In comparison it would be found that the conditions in Europe were terribly worse than in India in those centuries.¹⁴⁹⁴