Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s2.6

c7.s2.6

It is probable that there were from the beginning persons, chiefly Brahmans, who as beggars or forest hermits sought their deliverance in retirement from worldly concerns. But an exclusive right of Brahmans only to those spiritual treasures, to obtain which men parted with all earthly treasure, was not asserted in early times; we have no trace that before Buddha’s time, or in Buddha’s own time, the Brahman caste had come forward with claims of such a kind, or that there was need of any struggle whatever to win for prince and peasant, as well as Brahman, the right to leave wife and child, goods and chattels, in order to seek, as mendicant monks, in poverty and purity of life, the deliverance of their souls. Side by side with the Brahmans, who appear in the old philosophical dialogues speaking of the mysteries of the Âtman, we find in more than one place princes, and even wise women are not wanting in these circles; why should men desire to forbid those, whose discourses on deliverance they listened to and applauded, an entry on that life of holy renunciation, which leads man to this deliverance?