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BOUNDARIES, DYNAMICS AND CONSTRUCTION OF TRADITIONS IN SOUTH ASIA
texts with the Indo-Aryans, the speakers of Indo-Aryan languages.3 Those who adhered to the arya ideology (the 'Aryans') were no doubt a sub-group of the Indo-Aryans, but it is by no means evident that they were in the early centuries more than a minority. And it is not at all certain that this minority was in any way representative of the other speakers of Indo-Aryan. Indeed, "the emergence of an arya ideology can be traced [...] to the geographical milieu of the Rgvedic hymns, bounded by the Indus and Sarasvati rivers, and need not be linked to the spread of Indo-Aryan languages" (Erdosy 1995: 3).
Few scholars nowadays would doubt that Indian civilisation has other sources than only the Veda. The very presence in South-Asia of speakers of languages belonging to other families, such as Dravidian and Munda, supports this. Scholars like to speculate what elements in Indian civilisation might have 'pre-Aryan' roots. However, even the early speakers of Indo-Aryan languages themselves were most probably divided in groups many of which did not adhere to, or even know about, the arya ideology that finds expression in the Vedic corpus. Unfortunately only the Vedic Indians have left us a literary corpus whose oldest parts date back to a period from which we have no other literary remains. A close inspection of the other literary remains that we do possess (all of them admittedly younger than the oldest parts of the Veda) indicates that, among the speakers of Indo-Aryan, there existed at least one other important ideology, utterly different from the arya ideology, which left its traces not only in non-Vedic movements and religions, but deeply influenced the tradition which saw itself as the continuation of the Vedic tradition: brahmanism or, if you like, hinduism.
I am not the first to draw attention to the ideology of those who often appear in the texts under the name Śramanas. In order to do justice to my predecessors, but also to introduce some important qualifications, I cite a passage from the third edition of G.C. Pande's Studies in the Origins of Buddhism:4
We find, thus, that in the Vedic period there existed two distinct religious and cultural traditions the strictly orthodox and Aryan tradition of the Brahmanas, and, on the fringe of their society, the straggling culture of the Munis and Śramanas, most probably going
> Parpola writes: "we must distinguish between the modern use of the name 'Aryan' to denote a branch of the Indo-European language family, and the ancient tribal name used of themselves by many, but not necessarily all, peoples who have spoken those languages (Parpola 1988: 219). Similarly Erdosy: "Until recently, archaeologists, and to a lesser extent linguists, had persistently confused 'Aryans' with Indo-Aryans" (Erdosy 1995: 3). Many scholars distinguish, often on linguistic grounds, two or more waves of immigration of 'Aryans', only one of which is responsible for the production of the Vedas. See Deshpande 1995: 70 ff; Witzel 1995a: 322 ff).
*Other authors who have drawn attention to the separate tradition of the Śramanas include A. K. Warder and Padmanabh S. Jaini.
II. Discourse, Conditions and Dynamics of Tradition in South Asia
back to pre-Vedic and pre-Aryan origins. Towards the close of the Vedic period, the two streams tended to mingle and the result was that great religious ferment from which Buddhism originated. (Pande 1983: 261)
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The part of this citation which I fully support concerns the "[...] two distinct religious and cultural traditions" that existed in the Vedic period. Besides the arya ideology incorporated in the Veda there was the ideology of the Śramanas. This ideology belonged to certain ascetics commonly referred to as Śramanas, but obviously not only to them. Ascetics come from social milieus, and are never more than a tiny minority in their particular milieu. The ideology of the Śramaņas (to be discussed below) was not the exclusive property of those who left the world to become ascetics, but characterized the community in which they grew up.
It is significant that Pande, in spite of drawing this important distinction between two altogether different cultures that coexisted in the Vedic period, feels obliged to speculate as to the origins of the culture of the Śramanas. He calls it a 'straggling culture', which suggests that it had wandered off from the earlier Vedic culture. He also speculates that the culture of the Śramaņas most probably had pre-Vedic and pre-Aryan origins. All this is speculation which is not based on any reliable evidence. It merely distracts attention from the important observation that already several centuries before the beginning of the Common Era (i.e. at the time when Buddhism and Jainism made their appearance) there existed in northern India an identifiable culture, the culture of the Sramanas, which had no visible links with Vedic culture.
There is a further element in Pande's passage which has to be considered with much caution. It is the mention of Munis besides Śramanas. This mention suggests that there is a historical connection between the Śramanas here talked about and the Munis and other marginal figures referred to in early Vedic texts from the Rgueda onward. The assumption of such a connection could be misleading, as will become clear below.
In the terminology here adopted, the Śramana tradition is the one which has given rise to religious movements such as Buddhism, Jainism and Ajivikism; all of these can in a way be said to belong to this tradition. This Sramana tradition is distinct from the Vedic tradition and cannot be derived from it. A variety of arguments support this position. They are unfortunately rarely taken into consideration by the majority of scholars, who go on repeating the by now classical opposite position according to which certain developments recorded in Vedic literature are the basis from which all those other religious movements arose. I am primarily referring to the ideas about karma and rebirth, and the possibility of liberation from these, which we find in the Vedic Upanisads. These ideas-so the argument runsarose at the time of the Upanisads; all developments in which they
