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The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c9.s9: Śākya the Buddha, a Risi with a Non-Vedic Upaniṣad

The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c9.s9

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Śākya the Buddha, a Risi with a Non-Vedic Upaniṣad

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The ascendancy of Śākyasimha the Buddha (B.C. 563-483) in the sixth century B.C. is an important landmark in the evolution of Vedic culture. It indicates that the assimilation of the Eastern region to the Vedic system was incomplete. East of the Sadānīrā (Gandaki) River the Vedic tradition was not strong enough to withstand a powerful exponent of somewhat non-Vedic or extra-Vedic, nay, anti-Vedic norms. Then, the race or the caste to which Sākya belonged as a native of the Bihar-Nepal frontier was likewise not much subject to the Vedic institutions and ideals.

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And, finally, Pali or Prākrit, probably the language of the people in Eastern India, had not been reduced to nothingness under the domination of Sanskrit. Rather it was powerful enough to be used as the vehicle of a new moral and social philosophy.

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Altogether, the attempts at *rapprochement* between the *Madhyadeśa* and "the East," between the alleged “Aryans” and “Non-Aryans” etc. that had been going on through the ages broke down by the sixth century B.C. And among the innumerable sophists, metaphysicians, *sanyāsins*, mystics, philosophers, social reformers, moralists and so forth the *Upaniṣad* which succeeded in conquering the mind of India was not one of those which grew up in the schools associated with the Vedic complex. It was rather the one which in the sayings of Śākya the Buddha was born out of the urge for a new racial, regional and moral solidarity such as the Vedists of the time failed to offer.

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Śākya the Buddha may be taken to be a professor of one of the *Upaniṣads*, so to say, and thus to be one of the last of the Vedic *Ṛiṣis*. By harping on the doctrine of *sila* (right conduct) he served virtually to restore the Rigvedic concept of *rita* (right way) and inaugurate a Renaissance in Vedic culture. What the *Vrātyaṣṭoma* of the *Atharva Veda* did in the matter of raising the Vrātyas to a higher status that the Śākyan doctrine of *sila* did in regard to thousands of other kinds of Vrātyas, so to say, inhabiting as they did the Eastern regions. The “Aryanizing,” “Brahmanizing” and assimilative work of the older Vedic Ṛiṣis was thus continued by Śākya in a novel guise. From Madhuchchhandā, Brihaspati, Vaśiṣṭha and Viśvāmitra to Śākyasimha we have but one tradition, namely, that of the “*charaiveti*” (march on) of the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa* (VII, 15), “conquering and to conquer.”³² In Śākya’s tactics we encounter but another item in the pluralistic make-up of the Vedic complex.

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³² See the chapter on “The Peers of Sakyasimha” in B. K. Sarkar : *Chinese Religion Through Hindu Eyes* (Shanghai 1916) pp. 50-53.

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The Brahmanizers of the Vedic complex succeeded in Brahmanizing the Vrātya among many other non-Brahmanic elements in Eastern India as elsewhere. But they failed to adapt themselves adequately to the racial and regional features such as ultimately found self-expression in the "eightfold path of the Aryan" as unfolded by Sākya the Buddha (*Dīgha-Nikāya, Sutta* 22).³³

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³³ Warren: *Buddhism in Translations* (Cambridge, Mass, U.S.A. 1906).

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The *Ṛiṣis* of the *Yajurveda* Black School *Taittirīya Saṃhitā* (I. viii, 3) had been ideologically quite akin to Sākya the Buddha when they in a mood of self-criticism propagated the penitential formula for the "remaking of man" as embodied in the following verse:³⁴

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³⁴ Keith: *The Veda of the Black Yajus School*, Part I. (Cambridge Mass, 1914) p. 115.

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"The wrong we have done in village or wild,
In the assembly, in our members,
The wrong to Śūdra or Aryan,
The wrong contrary to the law of either,
Of that thou art the expiation; hail."

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Incidentally, it should appear perhaps plausible to presume in this "melioristic" *sūtra* that the Śūdra is an antithesis to Aryan and therefore = anti-Aryan. In that case the *Taittirīya* social polity should in this passage at any rate be treated as liberalized enough to comprehend the Śūdra in the Vedic *mores* and thus to furnish but another instance of the racial fusion in culture.

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But the word Aryan in the text is not to be taken as equivalent to Ārya. The commentary renders it as equivalent to *svāmi* (master) or Vaiśya. In that case Śūdra cannot be taken as = *Non-Aryan*. The verse points to the social conditions under which the Vaiśya as well as Śūdra are likely to be dscriminated against by the privileged classes. But the reformist tendency of the hymn is evident all the same, and we understand that the privileged classes are making a clean breast of what they may have committed against the unprivileged. In any case, the verse embodies an ideal of societal reconstruction according to somewhat more democratic and humane lines. And that is a strand of Vedic thought to which the Śākyan ideology is the most akin.

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