History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c9.s1.5

c9.s1.5

Penetration down the Ganges probably proceeded slowly; but the records of the period have left little direct indication of the process of Āryan expansion, or of the culture of the people whom the Āryans met. It is not likely that that culture was at the lowest stages of barbarism. It must have been able to exert a counter-influence on the Āryan polytheism which was imposed upon it, for it is difficult otherwise to account for the emergence of the doctrine of transmigration and of mystical monism in the period of the Upaniṣads, which probably dates from the seventh century B.C.² By this time we find that Āryan influence had reached as far as Magadha and Videha, where reigned the great king Janaka, an enthusiastic patron of the hermits and wandering sophists who propagated the new ideas.³ We cannot be certain that the earliest teachers of the Upaniṣadic doctrines were Āryan by blood. The theory of transmigration must have been developed from older animist theories very widespread among primitive peoples, and its first propagators may have been non-Āryans, stimulated by the invaders to develop their cruder ideas of metempsychosis by giving them an ethical basis in the form of karma.