Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c21.21

c21.21

The third noticeable feature in these pre-Buddhistic religious conditions was that not merely was there a constant stream of recruits swelling the ranks of ascetics, monks, and hermits in the country under the operation of the laws of Āśramas throwing people out of home into homelessness, but these were also being organized into fraternities developing their own systems of doctrine and discipline in different degrees of independence of the authority of Vedic ritualism. Long before the age of the Buddha there arose these monastic orders with the external forms and technique of their religious life fully developed and fixed, for to the religious consciousness of the times the monastic life appeared to offer the best and surest means of attaining their ends to those associated in a common quest of salvation. The most luxuriant growth of these religious fraternities was in the congenial and fruitful soil offered by the eastern parts of the Gangetic valley at a distance from the home and headquarters of conservative Brahmanism. The seat of the Vedic cult was, as has been already pointed out, towards the western parts where the Vedic Aryans first settled themselves in the 'holy land' proper, from which Manu [ix, 225] would expel all heretics. From that centre Vedism in its progress towards the east lost much of its pristine purity, rigid orthodoxy, and formalism, in its assimilation of the foreign elements in a new environment. Parts of the *Satapatha Brāhmaṇa* and some of the Upanishads belonging to these eastern tracts introduce us (as we have already seen) to the moving scenes of lively learned debates at the courts of kings of Kāśī, Kosala, and Videha, where Brahmans contend on equal terms for intellectual supremacy with Kshatriyas and even women to whom orthodoxy would assign the status of the Sūdra in respect of admission to sacred science. But they also show us that the Brahmans themselves permitted, encouraged, and participated in these philosophical controversies which are the true forerunners of the later heresies. From a philosophical standpoint, Jainism or Buddhism has hardly any ground for a break with the previous thought. It is also patent at the same time that in these eastern parts, far away from the base of its supplies, the leadership in religious thought passed considerably and conspicuously to the Kshatriyas, of whom came both the Buddha and Mahāvīra, the two most distinguished heretics.