________________
INDIAN SOCIETY IN 6TH CENTURY B.C. Character of the Age :
6th century B.C., the age in which Mahavira, was born, was a period of great intellectual stir practically all over the world. Greece, Persia and China as well as India--all centres of important civilisations-experienced ferment in the scalm of thought. The advent of Socrates and his distinguished pupils and contemporaries in Greece, of Zoroaster in Persia, and of Lao Tse and Confucius in China marked a revolution in the thought of those countries in just the same way as the coming of Mahavira and the Buddha meant the advent of philosophical rationalism in our own country.
In Indian society this age was in many ways a period of transition and uncertainty. The state of society which is revealed in the religious literature of the Jains and the Buddhists is quite different from that which is depicted in the Epics of the later Vedic literature and is, of coursc, fundamentally different from that depicted in the Vedas. From the simple and on the wholc republican social organisation of the Vedic times the country had been passing through a process of gradual stratification until by the time of the birth of Mahavira caste distinctions and priestly oligarchy had become a source of cnormous social irritation and a means of popular exploitation. The simple religion of nature-worship implied in the hymos of the Rig Veda had similarly becn developing into a curious combination of theorctcal monotheism and practical worship of a multiplicity of gods and divine satellites with an admixture of elaborate ritualism and superstition. This development was disturbing to the cquanimitr of the thinking part of the population, and alreads thcrc had grown up a school of meditators who discarded the rituals and pantheistic worship under priestly auspices and retired to forests for meditation and con
166
