Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.t1.14

c7.t1.14

No one can understand the course which Indian thought has taken, without keeping in view the picture, with its lights and shadows, of this order of philosophers, as the Greeks named the Brahmanical caste. And above all it must be remembered that, at that time at least, which has shaped the determinative fundamental thoughts for the intellectual efforts of a subsequent age and for Buddhism also, this priestly class was something more than a vain and greedy priestcraft, that it was the necessary form in which the innermost essence, the evil genius, if we may so call it, of the Indian people has embodied itself.