Early Monastic Buddhism v1.c4.3

v1.c4.3

To go back to the advent of Aryans, it is the inference of scholars like Grierson, and Oldenberg,² that they entered into India in two groups, the later being separated from the earlier by a pretty long distance of time. The later group represented by the Kuru tribe settled in the mid-land comprising the country near the modern Delhi and its immediate north, while the earlier group settled in the outlands encircling the mid-land on the east, south and west. Prof. Keith thinks that the home of the Indo-Aryans of the earliest Vedic period lay in the countries "drained by the Indus river system, corresponding roughly to the N.W.-Frontier Province and the Punjab of the present day. The eastern limit was probably the Yamunā, though the Ganges was already known.”¹ In the subsequent Vedic period—that of the later Vedas and the Brāhmaṇas—the Indo-Aryan settlers gradually occupied the whole of Kuru-pañcāla country extending later to the Gangetic Delta of that river. Evidently Brāhmaṇic orthodoxy had its home in the mid-land while the outland represented unorthodoxy roughly in proportion to the distance from the actual centre of orthodoxy, because distance hindered the process of keeping on the same level the orthodoxy of the people of the remote districts while it is also recognised that between the two groups of the Aryans, there were differences of ideas, manners, customs and even perhaps of language. The tradition preserved in the Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa (I. 4. I. 10 f.) that Videgha Māthava, an Aryan conqueror, crossed the Sadānīrā (modern Gandak) but could not take with him Agni the sacrificial fire points to the fact that the Brāhmaṇas of the West considered themselves as superior both in culture and purity of descent to those of the Eastern countries (i.e., modern Tirhut and Behar). The diluted orthodoxy of the people of the eastern outland favoured the growth of systems of thought that did not care to be in correspondence with those prevailing in the Kuru-pañcāla country. The eastern outland comprised the Magadhan area as one of its components. It became a fruitful field for the growth of non-Brāhmaṇic religions like Jainism, Ājīvikism and Buddhism. There are evidences in the Piṭakas that Brāhmaṇical organization in Magadha and Videha was not so strong and well-knit as to resist effectively the progress of Buddhism. The members belonging to the community were not also so strong in dialectics as to defeat in argument Buddha or the more eminent of the Buddhist monks and several cases are recorded of debates between the Brāhmaṇas and the Buddhists, in which the former could hardly outwit the latter by exposing the hollowness of the logic underlying the arguments.