Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s6.39

c8.s6.39

All or nearly all the sects born of Hinduism have accepted metempsychosis as an indisputable certainty; all or nearly all have accepted the caste without protest. Buddhism, from the point of view of religious profession, makes no difference between the castes; all are admitted without difficulty and without distinction into the body of monks, and all are called to salvation. Logically these premises ought to result in the suppression of castes, but such is not the case. Direct polemics develop late, and then—for example, in a book which is completely devoted to them, the Vajrasūchī—they take the special form of an attack directed against the privileges of the Brahmanic class. It is a struggle for influence between the two clerical orders, not a formal protest against a system outside which the Buddhists themselves could conceive no social existence.