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From Risabha To Mahavira
Dr. M. D. David, M.A., Ph.D., LL.B.
The sixth century B.C. happens to be the most fertile from the point of view of the birth of new religious sects in India. It was a century of religious unrest because the pathway to Moksha came to be barred more annd more firmly for a nonBrahmin. Caste system had placed a Brahmin in a privileged placed in the later Vedic Society. It had become rigid. According to the Brahmins, the custodians of the religious life of the people, they alone were entitled to take up asceticism (Sanyasashram). There were many non-Brahmins who desired to take up ascetic life to attain salvation. Kshatriyas, being a caste next to the Brahmins, mainly felt inferior and resented these restrictions and reacted. The Kshatriya dominated reform movements arose to purify Hinduism of some of its evils that had greatly degenerated it.
There was a great spiritual and moral unrest. Men's minds were deeply stirred by the problems of life after death. How to free the soul from the bondage of Karma was the main spiritual problem or as Mrs. Stevenson puts it, "The desire of India is to be freed from the cycle of rebirths, and the dread of India is reincarnation". Brahmins advocated sacrifices and rituals (Karmamargan. Sacrifices were abhored by the Kshatrivas. There were some for whom asceticism (Tapas) and self-mortification were more appealing. There were others who advocated Jnanamarga (Path of Knowledge) as described in the Upanishads. Thus it was the main interest of the philosophers and the thinkers to discover a new way to secure freedom from rebirth.
The ascetics or wanderers, in addition to the hermits, formed an important body of teachers-a new phenomenon to be seen in the pre-Buddhist India. Prof. Rhys Davids writes, “And we hear of Sophists, just as we hear in the history of Greek thought. But the peculiarity was that, before the rise of Buddhism, it was a prevalent habit for wandering teachers also and not only students to beg. Such wandering teachers, who were not necessarily ascetics except in so far as they were celebates are always represented as being held in high esteem by the people." These teachers spent eight or nine months of every year, wandering about, with a definite object of engaging people in discussion and deliberation "on matters of ethics and philosophy, nature-love and mysticism” This body
