Buddhism's Role in the Birth of Caste Ideology

Scholars of Buddhism have long vacillated on how to characterize the Buddhist tradition’s attitude toward caste. This ambivalence is rooted in the tendency to place “real religion” in origins and the fact that nineteenth-scholars argued over how to characterize the Buddha’s relationship with the caste system. Many early scholars painted the Buddha as a reformer, in the mold of Martin Luther, who rebelled against the arrogance of the Brahmans and the caste system. This view was famously rebutted by Hermann Oldenberg, which led to a shift in scholarly opinion that Philip Almond has attributed to a fear of socialist unrest in Victorian England. More recent scholarship has done little to settle the issue, however, because the evidence itself is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, there are numerous passages in the Tipiṭaka in which the Buddha is portrayed as arguing against the pretenses of the Brahmans and the validity of the varṇa system. On the other hand, Oldenberg was certainly correct in observing that there is little evidence that the Buddha or early Buddhists engaged in social reform, and there is ample evidence that Buddhist societies, including in the present day, have integrated caste structures.

In this paper, I will argue that the seemingly ambivalent attitude of the early Buddhist tradition toward caste is in fact an artifact of a modern scholarly misunderstanding of the history of the caste system. The prevailing assumption has been that the caste system was of hoary antiquity by the time of the Buddha, and that therefore “the Buddha” (a problematic stand-in for the early Buddhist community), if he spoke about caste at all, must have taken a stand one way or the other about it. I will argue instead that the beginnings of caste ideology were coalescing among reactionary Brahmans at the same time as the early Buddhist texts were being composed. There are indeed discussions of this emerging ideology in the early Buddhist texts, but they do not represent “the Buddha”’s response to a pre-existing caste system. Rather, the ideology of varṇa was itself a reaction to Buddhism and the broader śramaṇic movement from which it emerged.

The argument in this paper builds upon Nathan McGovern’s argument in The Snake and the Mongoose that reactionary Brahmans who wrote the Dharma Sūtras constructed the varṇa system in order to preclude śramaṇic conceptions of Brahmanhood as being the product of lifelong celibacy and renunciation. However, I will focus on how the discussions of varṇa in the Tipiṭaka are best understood when read as being in dialog with the roughly contemporaneous texts written by more reactionary and conservative Brahmans. The texts that represent the reactionary position are the Dharma Sūtras, while the text that best represents more conservative (i.e., neither reactionary nor radical śramaṇic) Brahmans is the Mahābhārata.

As McGovern has argued, reactionary Brahmans constructed the varṇa system to define Brahmanhood solely on the basis of birth, thus short-circuiting śramaṇic claims to Brahmanhood achieved through brahmacarya. Johannes Bronkhorst, further, has noted that early Buddhist literature rarely if ever refers to the varṇa system except in debates with Brahmans. These debates typically revolve around a particular rhetorical strategy: demonstrating the ridiculousness of the varṇa system because it simply does not correspond with reality. This rhetorical strategy, I will argue, is indicative of a situation in which the varṇa system was an ideological novelty, not an established social system that the Buddhists wished to rebel against. Moreover, the Buddhist argument had an effect on its opponents. The oldest Dharma Sūtra, that of Āpastamba, delineates the varṇa system (probably for the first time), but it does not taxonomize the so-called “mixture of varṇas” (varṇa-saṅkara). This is a later innovation first found in Gautama. I will argue that the addition of the concept of varṇa-saṅkara to the varṇa system proper was specifically intended to counter the criticism, leveled in the Buddhist texts, that varṇa does not correspond with social reality.

The Mahābhārata, I will argue, came from a less reactionary Brahmanical milieu that I dub “conservative.” That milieu consisted primarily of vānaprastha Brahmans who engaged in traditional forms of renunciatory practice, including celibacy, but were uncomfortable with radical śramaṇic programs that sought to institutionalize renunciatory practice in ways that would render traditional Vedic study and sacrifice obsolete. They were amenable to the reactionary view of society, as articulated in the varṇa system and the concept of varṇa-saṅkara, but they tended toward a more open acceptance of different āśramas that ultimately led to a reformulation, as described by Olivelle, of the āśramas from life-long vocations to stages of life in the Mānava Dharmaśāstra, a text that was in the tradition of the Dharma Sūtras but heavily influenced by the Mahābhārata.

The key innovation of the Mahābhārata was the character of Kṛṣṇa, an incarnation of God who represented an innovative response to the Buddha, whom Buddhists superenthroned (to borrow Alexis Sanderson’s term) above Brahmā. Kṛṣṇa’s teachings, including but not limited to the Gītā, give a place for renunciation but restrict it within the varṇa system and subordinate it to bhakti—devotion to God, i.e., Kṛṣṇa himself. One particular Buddhist text, the Ambaṭṭha Sutta, appears to constitute a rejoinder to the character of Kṛṣṇa within one of its dramatized debates about varṇa. In this text, a young Brahman named Ambaṭṭha shows disrespect to the Buddha, and the Buddha responds by forcing the young man to admit that he is descended from Kṛṣṇa (lit., “Black”), who is identified as the black-skinned baby of a slave girl of Ikṣvāku, ancestor of the Buddha. This story thus turns the genealogical rhetoric of the reactionary and conservative Brahmans against them, but in a way that arguably reinscribes rather than subverts the ideology of birth.