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DEC., 1920]
ON HISTORY OF THE INDIAN CASTE-SYSTEM.
227
Kula of the Khatiya, of the Brahmana, and of the Gahapati.16 Everywhere it is patent that in the period of the Pâli text the old framework did in no way cease to govern the actual life, and to represent its condition adequately. Where the Jataka stories turn upon questions of cleanness and defilement, the reference is to the old categories such as Khattiya, Brahmana (Udichchabráhmaṇa) and Chandala.17 "A breaking up of the Brâhman caste into several sub-castes," says Fick pertinently (p. 125' A. ), "a coalition of those expelled from caste into new castes, as it exists in modern India, is, I believe, not met with in the older Buddhistic period, because nowhere in the Pâli text do we find a trace of it." There is no reason to suppose that we have to think of a narrow caste-like union of a local nature inside the Brahman caste, when the expression Udichchabrahmana is used as; the word itself signifies nothing more than this, that the Brahmana families that came from the north-west-as well-known historical circumstances prove easily were held in particular esteem.
So far as the castes Khattiya, Vessa and Sudda are specially concerned, I believe that Fick (pp. 55, 163, 202) is far too sceptical with reference to their real significance during the period of which the Pâli texts furnish an account.19 When it is admitted that the families of Gautama, Bharadvaja, &c., were all grouped together in the caste of Brahmanas, as being pervaded all of them by the mystic potency of the Brahman, I cannot see why, just in the same way and answering to exactly similiar modes of expression in the texts, it should not be held that families like those of the Sâkyas, Lichchhavis, &c., all of whom felt in themselves the potency of the Kshatra nobility, all of whom said "Mayam pi Khattiya, 30 are to be reckoned as belonging to a single caste of the Khattiyasa single caste of which the members, when they said to each other "I am a Khattiya," "I too am a Khattiya, "31 knew and acknowledged each other as persons of the same kind and naturo. There might indeed be some hesitation about the real existence of a caste of Vessas in the Buddhist period. Turns of expression like those, so abundant in the Brahmana texts, speaking about the relation of the Kshatriya and the Vaisya as the oppressor and the oppressed, are not to be found in the Pâli texts. Again, it could hardly, at least not often, happen that any person who appears in a story as engaged in trade, should be designated as a Vessa, because the denomination Brahmana actually appears in numberless cases. It is not therefore to be wrongly supposed that here there is a positive withdrawal from our former position. The causes of this apparent anomaly are, methinks, clear as day. In the Rigvedio age the Vaisyas formed a union, which, however comprehensive it might be, was, none the less, a real, tangible union; not a union of Aryans raised above the general level, through spiritual or temporal nobility, by virtue of the inherent potency of the Brahma or Kshatra, but a union, we might say, of the Aryan peasants carrying on agriculture and cattle-breeding. In the Buddhist period, the advance of civilisation had dissolved the ancient union. Big
26 Fick (p. 22, n. 4) deduces wrongly from such passages, that kula there signifies "caste." It everywhere signifies "family," and those passages show that the generic notion of the family is split up into specific ideas like Brahman family and so forth.
27 Fick, 26 ff. Cf. J&t, Vol. VI, p. 422: evarapo pi náma khattiyo chanjaliyd saddhim vasam kappesi. 28 Bühler, in Jolly ZDMG., 50, 515. Cf. Fick, 138 ff.
20 Cf. about the role of the Vaidya and the Sûdra in Sanskrit literature, the analogous conceptions of Growse in Schlagintweit ZDMG., 33, 554, and L. von Schroeder, Indiens Litteratur und Kultur, 419. 30 Mahaparinibbana Sutta, p. 68 ff.
31 See the account by Fick, p. 26. The Buddhistic materials should not be forgotten, if one wishes to appreciate the theory set up by Senart (p. 24) of course in relation to the literature of the Sanskrit law books" As regards the Kshatriyas.... hardly their name itself has survived in some traces; they are rare."
