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SOCIAL LIFE AND ECONOMIO OONDITIONS 145
and though the majority of them followed other pursuits, they were equally with the nobles distinguished by high birth and clear complexion. Below these were the peasantry, the people, the Vaisyas or Vessas. And last of all came the Śūdras, which included the bulk of the people of non-Aryan descent, who worked for hire, were engaged in handicraft or service, and were darker in colour. In the Ambattha Sutta, kanhā (blackies) and bandhupādāpaccā (sprung from the feet of Brahmā) are freely applied to the Suddas as two terms of contempt. But the peoples of different complexions became so much intermingled in course of time that the brightness of colour in the natural sense of the term could rarely be relied upon as criterion of superiority of the social grade.
In order to prevent the loss of colour through intermixture and to preserve the national, racial, tribal or family type, it was deemed necessary to impose certain restrictions, rigid more or less, as to connubium or the right of inter-marriage and commensality or the right of eating together.' Aiming at the production and preservation of the best possible type, not only from the physical and mental point of view but also from the family and cultural, the distinotigns and restrictions were based also
Buddhist India, pp. 53-54,
