Story of Nation Buddhist India

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: T Fisher Unwin Ltd

Page 80

SOCIAL GRADES
9
were recognised as a factor in the social life of the people.
Again at Jāt. 5. 280, we have, as the central in. cident of a popular story, the detail, given quite as a matter of course, that a brahmin takes, as his only wife, the discarded consort of a Kshatriya. The people laugh at him, it is true, but not because he is acting in any way unworthy of his social stand. ing, only because he is old and ugly.
There are also numerous instances, even in the priestly manuals of custom, of unions between men and women of all degrees of social importance. These are not only between inen of rank and girls of a lower social grade, but also between inen of a lower, and women of a higher, position; and we ought not to be in the least surprised to find such cases mentioned in the books. Even without them we should know, from the existing facts, what must have happened. It is generally admitted that there are now no pure Aryans left in India. Had the actual custom been as strict as the brahmin theory this would not be so. Just as in England we find Iberians, Kelts, Angles, Saxons, Danes, and Normans now fused, in spite of theoretical restrictions on intermarriage, into one nation, so in Northern India the ancient distinctions, Aryan, Kolarian, and Dravidian, cannot, at the time of the rise of Buddhism, any longer be recognised. Long before the priestly theory of caste had been brought into any sort of working order, a fusion, sufficient at least to obliterate completely the old landmarks, was an accomplished fact; and the modern divisions, though