Story of Nation Buddhist India

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

Page 83

BUDDHIST INDIA
together, such as then existed in North India, existed also everywhere throughout the world, among peoples of a similar stage of culture. They are, it is true, the key to the origin of the later Indian caste system. But that system involves much more than these restrictions. And it is no more accurate to speak of caste at the Buddha's time in India, than it would be to speak of it as an established institution, at the same time, in Italy or Greece. There is no word even for caste. The words often wrongly rendered by that modern expression (itself derived from a Portuguese word) have something to do with the question, but do not mean caste. The Colours (Vanna) were not castes. No one of them had any of the distinctive marks of a caste, as the terın is now used, and as it always has been used since it was first introduced by Europeans, and there was neither connubium nor commensality between the members of each. Jāti is “birth"; and pride of birth may have had to do with the subsequent building up of caste prejudices; but it exists in Europe to. day, and is an idea very different from that of caste. Kula is “family"or" clan "according to the context. And though the mediæval caste system had much to do with families and clans, it is only misleading to confuse terms which are so essentially different, or to read back a mediæval idea into these ancient documents. The caste system, in any proper or exact use of the term, did not exist till long afterwards.'
i For the discussion of this question see also Senart, Les Castes dans l'Inde; Fick, Sociale Gliederung im nordöstlichen Indien zu Buddha's Zrit; and Rhys Davids, Dinlogues of the Buddha, 1. 95-107.