The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s1.38

v2.c40.s1.38

As has been indicated, stress is naturally laid in support of the theory of Kṣatriya influence on the explicit assertion of the king that the knowledge of transmigration had never belonged to any Brahmans, but the assertion is a very odd one: the king claims that the ‘giving of instruction’ has been the possession of the warriors because the Brahmans have not studied this doctrine, but even for India such a thought is absurd and meaningless, and reduces the claim of the king to what, it seems, is an idle vaunt. Then again, as it is impossible to deny that the Ātman-Brahman doctrine has a long previous history in the Brāhmaṇas, and is a logical development of the idea of unity of the Rigveda, we must admit that the warrior class must have shared in the intellectual development, which produced that idea, and then started a fresh view—which nevertheless was based on the Brahman, not the Kṣatra—in opposition to the sacrifice, while the priests were deeply engaged in the sacrifice. But the sacrifices were essentially not matters in which the priest acted for himself: he aimed at securing the profit of his patron, and the patrons for the great sacrifices must have been in the main the very warrior class, which we are to assume turned with disgust from the sacrifice.¹ The true solution of the problem is suggested by the obvious difficulties of the position of the maintainers of the theory: we must adopt a solution which explains why the whole Upaniṣad tradition is Brahmanical, and yet why the texts record actions of importance as regards the doctrine by the princes of earth. It is absurd to imagine that these references would have been left to stand had the Brahmans found them derogatory to their dignity: the sense of historical accuracy must have been very strong, incredibly so indeed, which would have induced a priesthood to preserve an exact account of the royal founders of each doctrine, and that they did so is sufficiently disproved by the mere fact that they clearly did not preserve a true account even of the Brahman founders of their doctrines. The prominence of Yājñavalkya can hardly be historical, since he is also the great ritual teacher of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa, and the device of assuming more than one man of the same name is absurd in this as in many other cases, since the texts assume that the two are the same: nor again does any one really believe that Sanatkumāra was a human king.