THE BUDDHA AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

The Middle Country of India in which the Buddha lived and taught in the fifth century B.C. teemed with a luxuriant variety of religious and philosophiçal beliefs propagated by teachers equally varied in their ways of life. The main division was into the brahmins and the non-brahmanic ascetics, the samanas or "recluses." The brahmins were the hereditary priesthood of India, the custodians of the ancient orthodoxy. They accepted the authority of the Vedas, which they studied, chanted at countless rituals, sacrifices, and ceremonies, and turned to as the source of their philosophical speculations. Thus they are characterised in the suttas as traditionalists (anussavika), who teach their doctrines on the basis of oral tradition (MN 100.7). The Pali Canon generally depicts them as living a comfortably settled life, as marrying and begetting progeny, and in some cases as enjoying royal patronage. The more learned among them gathered a company of students - all necessarily of brahmin birth to whom they taught the Vedic hymns.

The samanas, on the other hand, did not accept the authority of the Vedas, for which reason from the perspective of the brahmins they stood in the ranks of heterodoxy. They were usually celibate, lived a life of mendicancy, and acquired their status by voluntary renunciation rather than by birth. The samanas roamed the Indian countryside sometimes in company, sometimes as solitaries, preaching their doctrines to the populace, debating with other ascetics, engaging in their spiritual practices, which often involved severe austerities (see MN 51.8). Some teachers in the samana camp taught entirely on the basis of reasoning and speculation, while others taught on the basis of their experiences in meditation. The Buddha placed himself among the latter, as one who teaches a Dhamma that he has directly known for himself (MN 100.7).

The Buddha's encounters with brahmins were usually friendly, their conversations marked by courtesy and mutual regard. Several suttas in the Majjhima Nikāya concern the brahmins' claim to superiority over those in other social classes. In the Buddha's age the caste system was only beginning to take shape in northeast India and had not yet spawned the countless subdivisions and rigid regulations that were to manacle Indian society through the centuries. Society was divided into four broad social classes: the brahmins, who performed the priestly functions; the khattiyas, the nobles, warriors, and administrators; the vessas, the merchants and agriculturalists; and the suddas, the menials and serfs. From the Pali suttas it appears that the brahmins, while vested with authority in religious matters, had not yet risen to the position of unchallengeable hegemony they were to gain after the promulgation of the Laws of Manu. They had, however, already embarked on their drive for domination and did so by propagating the thesis that brahmins are the highest caste, the fairest caste, the divinely blessed offspring of Brahmā who are alone capable of purification. Anxiety that this claim of the brahmins might actually be true seems to have spread among the royalty, who must have been fearful of the threat it posed to their own power (see MN 84.4, MN 90.9-10).

Contrary to certain popular notions, the Buddha did not explicitly repudiate the class divisions of Indian society or appeal for the abolition of this social system. Within the Sangha, however, all caste distinctions were abrogated from the moment of ordination.

Thus people from any of the four castes who went forth under the Buddha renounced their class titles and prerogatives and instead became known simply as disciples of the Sakyan son (see Ud 5:5/55). Whenever the Buddha or his disciples were confronted with the brahmins' claim to superiority, they argued vigorously against them, maintaining that all such claims were groundless. Purification, they contended, was the result of conduct, not of birth, and was thus accessible to those of all four castes (MN 40.13-14, MN 84, MN 90.12, MN 93). The Buddha even stripped the term "brahmin" of its hereditary accretions, and hearkening back to its original connotation of holy man, he defined the true brahmin as the arahant (MN 98). Those among the brahmins who were not yet hampered by class prejudice responded appreciatively to the Buddha's teaching. Some of the most eminent brahmins of the time, in whom there still burned the ancient Vedic yearning for light, knowledge, and truth, recognised in the Buddha the All-Enlightened One for whom they longed and declared themselves his disciples (see especially MN 91.34). Several even renounced their class privileges and with their retinues entered the Sangha (MN 7.22, MN 92.15-24).

The samanas were a much more diversified group which, lacking a common scriptural authority, promulgated a plethora of philosophical doctrines ranging from the diabolical to the superdivine. The Pali Canon frequently mentions six teachers in particular as contemporaries of the Buddha, and as they are each described as "the head, of an order...regarded by many as a saint" (MN 77.5), they must have been quite influential at the time. The Majjhima Nikāya mentions both the set of six and, separately, states their individual doctrines; it does not, however, correlate the names with the doctrines. The connections between names and doctrines are made in the Sāmañāaphala Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya.

Pūraṇa Kassapa, who is always mentioned first in the list, taught a doctrine of inaction (akiriyavāda) that denied the validity of moral distinctions (MN 60.13, MN 76.10). Makkhali Gosāla was the leader of the sect known as the Ājīvakas (or Ājīvikas), which survived in India down into the medieval period. He taught a doctrine of fatalism that denied causality (ahetukavāda) and claimed that the entire cosmic process is rigidly controlled by a principle called fate or destiny (niyati); beings have no volitional control over their actions but move helplessly caught in the grip of fate (MN 60.21, MN 76.13). Ajita Kesakambalin was a moral nihilist (natthikavāda) who propounded a materialist philosophy that rejected the existence of an afterlife and kammic retribution (MN 60.5, MN 76.7); his doctrine is always cited by the Buddha as the paradigmatic instance of wrong view among the unwholesome courses of action. Pakudha Kaccāyana advocated an atomism on the basis of which he repudiated the basic tenets of morality (MN 76.16). Sañjaya Belaṭthiputta, a sceptic, refused to take a stand on the crucial moral and philosophical issues of the day, probably claiming that such knowledge was beyond our capacity for verification (MN 76.30). The sixth teacher, the Niganṭha Nātaputta, is identified with Mahāvīra, the historical progenitor of Jainism. He taught that there exists a plurality of monadic souls entrapped in matter by the bonds of past kamma and that the soul is to be liberated by exhausting its kammic bonds through the practice of severe self-mortification.

Whereas the Pali suttas are generally cordial but critical towards the brahmins, they are trenchant in their rejection of the rival doctrines of the samanas. In one sutta (MN 60) the Buddha contends that the firm adoption of any of the first three doctrines (and by implication the fourth) entails a chain of unwholesome states generating evil kamma strong enough to bring a descent into the lower realms. Similarly the venerable Ānanda describes these views as four "negations of the holy life" (MN 76). The scepticism of Sañjaya, while not regarded as so pernicious, is taken as an indication of its proponent's dullness and confusion; it is described as "eel-wriggling" (amarāvikkhepa) because of its evasiveness and classified among the types of holy life that are without consolation (MN 76.30-31). The Jain doctrine, though sharing certain similarities with the Buddha's teaching, was held to be sufficiently mistaken in basic assumptions as to call for refutation, which the Buddha undertook on several occasions (MN 14, MN 56, MN 101). The repudiation of these erroneous views was seen, from the Buddhist perspective, to be a necessary measure not only to sound a clear warning against tenets that were spirtually detrimental, but also to cut away the obstacles against the acceptance of right view, which as the forerunner of the Buddha's path (MN 117.4) was a prerequisite to progress along the road to final deliverance.