How It Evolved
Hinduism · Chapter 6 · The Shramana Challenge Majority view

Buddha, Mahavira and the Shramanas: How Brahmanism Adapted

Buddha, Mahāvīra, and what Brahmanism had to become to survive them

By Updated 15 min read 78 sources cited

Region Magadha and the eastern Ganga plain; then the Mauryan empire

In brief

  • Buddhists, Jains and Ajivikas accepted karma and rebirth but rejected the Veda, sacrifice and brahmin authority.
  • Ashoka's edicts, c. 250 BCE, are India's first securely dated writing and ban sacrificial slaughter.
  • Ahimsa and vegetarianism entered Brahmanism under Shramana pressure; Vedic religion had sacrificed and eaten cattle.
  • The four ashramas began as alternative vocations and only later became life stages ending in renunciation.
Where it happened
LumbiniGirnarKandaharSanchiMathura12345678
The 8 places on the map
  1. 1Pataliputra: Later capital of Magadha
  2. 2Sarnath: Ashoka's Lion Capital
  3. 3Lumbini: Ashoka's inscription records a pilgrimage here
  4. 4Girnar: Ashoka's Rock Edict 1
  5. 5Kandahar: Ashoka's Greek-Aramaic bilingual edict
  6. 6Sanchi: Mauryan stupa; Buddhist building continued under the Śuṅgas
  7. 7Bharhut: Gateway given "in the reign of the Śuṅgas"
  8. 8Mathura: Club-bearing yakṣa, c. 100 BCE
On this page
The Lion Capital of Ashoka from Sarnath: four back-to-back lions above a drum carved with wheels and animals, on a bell-shaped base
Chrisi1964 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
How religions evolved 640 BCE 640 BCE 600 BCE 600 BCE 500 BCE 500 BCE 400 BCE 400 BCE 300 BCE 300 BCE 200 BCE 200 BCE 160 BCE 160 BCE compressed scale Hinduism c. 1500 BCE – present 13 chapters · 4 dated firsts · 3 branches and offshoots chapters dated firsts turning points §5 The Upanishadic Turn, 900 BCE – 500 BCE Karma, rebirth, and the discovery of the self §5 The Upanishadic Turn §6 The Shramana Challenge, 600 BCE – 200 BCE Buddha, Mahāvīra, and what Brahmanism had to become to survive them §6 The Shramana Challenge §7 Epic and Classical Synthesis, 200 BCE – 300 The Gītā, the first images, and the birth of devotion §7 Vedic religion, then Brahmanical Hinduism · c. 1500–1200 BCE (Rigveda composed) · consensus The Family Books of the Rigveda, composed and transmitted orally in the Punjab; a religion of fire sacrifice to Indra, Agni and Soma. ❶ Śramaṇa renouncers" data-detail="Wandering renunciant movements of the Ganga plain, outside the Vedic ritual order: the world the Buddha, Mahāvīra and the Ājīvikas shared. From 500 BCE to 500 CE the real division is Vedic against Śramaṇa; Brahmanism absorbs renunciation through the āśrama scheme, and the line rejoins the trunk.">❶ Śramaṇa renouncers · c. 600–500 BCE · majority Wandering renunciant movements of the Ganga plain, outside the Vedic ritual order: the world the Buddha, Mahāvīra and the Ājīvikas shared. From 500 BCE to 500 CE the real division is Vedic against Śramaṇa; Brahmanism absorbs renunciation through the āśrama scheme, and the line rejoins the trunk. Jainism · Pārśva, 8th–7th c. BCE · majority Jain tradition counts 24 tīrthaṅkaras. Most historians accept the 23rd, Pārśva, as a real teacher of the 8th–7th c. BCE, and date the 24th, Mahāvīra, to the 5th c. BCE; the 22 before Pārśva belong to tradition and cannot be dated. Jainism grew among the renouncers who rejected Vedic authority: it is drawn from this lane because no series covers it yet, not because it descends from it. ❹ Ājīvikas" data-detail="Makkhali Gosāla's determinists, one of the six heterodox teachers; Ashoka's Pillar Edict 7 names them as a body (c. 250 BCE) and he and Daśaratha endow their caves. Basham traced the name in South Indian inscriptions and texts into the 13th–14th c. CE; whether those late Ājīvikas held Gosāla's doctrines is uncertain.">❹ Ājīvikas · 5th c. BCE · named in South India to the 13th–14th c. CE · contested Makkhali Gosāla's determinists, one of the six heterodox teachers; Ashoka's Pillar Edict 7 names them as a body (c. 250 BCE) and he and Daśaratha endow their caves. Basham traced the name in South Indian inscriptions and texts into the 13th–14th c. CE; whether those late Ājīvikas held Gosāla's doctrines is uncertain. ❷ c. 500 BCE" data-text="Ahiṃsā as a supreme value" data-detail="Enters a tradition whose central rite had been animal sacrifice." data-hl="1">❷ c. 500 BCE: Ahiṃsā as a supreme value. Enters a tradition whose central rite had been animal sacrifice. Source: Ācārāṅga Sūtra 1.4.1; Chāndogya 3.17.4 lists it earlier as one virtue. Confidence: majority. ❸ c. 500 BCE" data-text="Renunciation as an institution" data-detail="Absorbed by requiring everyone to renounce — last." data-hl="2">❸ c. 500 BCE: Renunciation as an institution. Absorbed by requiring everyone to renounce — last. Source: Śramaṇa orders; the āśrama scheme in the Dharmasūtras. Confidence: consensus. ❺ c. 250 BCE" data-text="Writing" data-detail="The Vedas had already been transmitted orally for roughly a thousand years." data-hl="3">❺ c. 250 BCE: Writing. The Vedas had already been transmitted orally for roughly a thousand years. Source: Ashokan edicts, Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī. Confidence: consensus. ❻ c. 250 BCE" data-text="Vegetarianism as prestige" data-detail="A king publicly prohibits sacrificial slaughter in his own capital." data-hl="4">❻ c. 250 BCE: Vegetarianism as prestige. A king publicly prohibits sacrificial slaughter in his own capital. Source: Ashoka, Rock Edict 1. Confidence: majority. c. 300 BCE – 300 CE: Dharma, epic and the Brahmanical synthesis. Dharmasūtras, Manusmṛti, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa; the law books set out caste as a comprehensive legal order, as Brahmanical prescription rather than enforced statute. Confidence: majority. ❶ Śramaṇa renouncers · c. 600–500 BCE · majority Wandering renunciant movements of the Ganga plain, outside the Vedic ritual order: the world the Buddha, Mahāvīra and the Ājīvikas shared. From 500 BCE to 500 CE the real division is Vedic against Śramaṇa; Brahmanism absorbs renunciation through the āśrama scheme, and the line rejoins the trunk.❶ Śramaṇa renouncers c. 600–500 BCE Jainism · Pārśva, 8th–7th c. BCE · majority Jain tradition counts 24 tīrthaṅkaras. Most historians accept the 23rd, Pārśva, as a real teacher of the 8th–7th c. BCE, and date the 24th, Mahāvīra, to the 5th c. BCE; the 22 before Pārśva belong to tradition and cannot be dated. Jainism grew among the renouncers who rejected Vedic authority: it is drawn from this lane because no series covers it yet, not because it descends from it.Jainism Pārśva, 8th–7th c. BCE ❹ Ājīvikas · 5th c. BCE · named in South India to the 13th–14th c. CE · contested Makkhali Gosāla's determinists, one of the six heterodox teachers; Ashoka's Pillar Edict 7 names them as a body (c. 250 BCE) and he and Daśaratha endow their caves. Basham traced the name in South Indian inscriptions and texts into the 13th–14th c. CE; whether those late Ājīvikas held Gosāla's doctrines is uncertain.❹ Ājīvikas ❷ c. 500 BCE: Ahiṃsā as a supreme value. Enters a tradition whose central rite had been animal sacrifice. Source: Ācārāṅga Sūtra 1.4.1; Chāndogya 3.17.4 lists it earlier as one virtue. Confidence: majority. ❷ c. 500 BCE Ahiṃsā as a supreme value ❸ c. 500 BCE: Renunciation as an institution. Absorbed by requiring everyone to renounce — last. Source: Śramaṇa orders; the āśrama scheme in the Dharmasūtras. Confidence: consensus. ❸ c. 500 BCE Renunciation as an institution ❺ c. 250 BCE: Writing. The Vedas had already been transmitted orally for roughly a thousand years. Source: Ashokan edicts, Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī. Confidence: consensus. ❺ c. 250 BCE Writing ❻ c. 250 BCE: Vegetarianism as prestige. A king publicly prohibits sacrificial slaughter in his own capital. Source: Ashoka, Rock Edict 1. Confidence: majority. ❻ c. 250 BCE Vegetarianism as prestige c. 300 BCE – 300 CE: Dharma, epic and the Brahmanical synthesis. Dharmasūtras, Manusmṛti, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa; the law books set out caste as a comprehensive legal order, as Brahmanical prescription rather than enforced statute. Confidence: majority. c. 300 BCE – 300 CE Dharma, epic and the Brahmanical synthesis
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Between roughly 500 BCE and the fall of the Mauryas in 185 BCE, the Buddha, Mahāvīra (Mahavira) and other śramaṇa (shramana) movements challenged Vedic religion from within the same eastern ferment that produced the Upaniṣads, and Brahmanism survived by conceding. These movements accepted karma, rebirth and liberation but rejected the Veda, the sacrifice, and the brahmin outright. The Buddha and Mahāvīra are the two that survived; there were many more.

For four centuries these śramaṇas (“strivers”) held the intellectual initiative, won royal patronage, and forced the Vedic tradition into the most consequential set of concessions in its history. Animal sacrifice lost its prestige. Non-violence became a supreme value in a tradition that had been built on killing animals. Vegetarianism entered from outside: not caused by Buddhism alone, but adopted under Śramaṇa pressure. Renunciation, which threatened to drain society of its householders, was absorbed by inventing a scheme in which everyone renounces, but only in old age, and only after doing their varṇa duty first.

The word “Hindu” does not exist in this period. The real religious division in India from 500 BCE to 500 CE is not Hindu against Buddhist; it is Vedic against Śramaṇa, and much of what later counts as Hinduism is the settlement between them.

This chapter tells the story from the Brahmanical side. The Buddhist side, from the Buddha’s own world to Ashoka and the councils, is told in How Buddhism Evolved.

Timeline

The Śramaṇa era runs from the mahājanapadas of c. 600–500 BCE through Mahāvīra, the Buddha and Ashoka’s edicts of c. 250 BCE to the Mauryan collapse in 185 BCE.

DateEventConfidence
c. 600–500 BCEThe sixteen mahājanapadas; Magadha begins absorbing its rivals[1]​[2]Consensus
c. 8th–7th c. BCEPārśva, 23rd Jain tīrthaṅkara, the earliest Jain teacher most historians accept as historical; tradition credits him with the “fourfold restraint” the Pali canon attributes to the Jains, to which Mahāvīra added a fifth vow[3]​[4]Majority
c. 5th c. BCEMahāvīra, 24th Jain tīrthaṅkara, reforms the tradition Pārśva left; the Pali canon has him die before the Buddha[3]​[5]Majority
c. 5th–4th c. BCEThe Buddha. Tradition gives 544/543 BCE; the corrected long chronology 486/483; the current working default is c. 400 BCE[6]​[7]​[8]Contested
c. 5th c. BCEĀjīvikas under Makkhali Gosāla; Lokāyata materialism (Ajita Kesakambalī); the six heterodox teachers[4]​[9]​[10]​[11]Majority
c. 5th–4th c. BCEPāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī: roughly 4,000 rules fixing Sanskrit. The exact date is disputed[12]Contested
c. 300 BCE – 100 CEThe Dharmasūtras: Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, Vasiṣṭha (Olivelle’s dating; later than often assumed)[13]Majority
c. 321 BCECandragupta Maurya founds the empire; Megasthenes visits c. 300 BCE[2]​[14]​[15]Consensus
c. 268–232 BCEAshoka. Kaliṅga war c. 261 BCE, in his eighth regnal year[16]​[17]Consensus
c. 250 BCEThe edicts, the first securely dated writing in India (Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī)[16]​[18]Consensus
185 BCEMauryan collapse; Puṣyamitra Śuṅga performs the Aśvamedha, twice by a later inscription’s account[14]​[19]​[20]Majority

Where: Magadha and the eastern Ganga plain

Magadha, in southern Bihar, swallowed every rival yet was suspect country to orthodox brahmins, and the doctrines that define later Indian religion all appear first in this region the Vedic texts consider peripheral.

Magadha: southern Bihar, the plain around Rājagṛha and later Pāṭaliputra. Rich alluvial soil, iron ore at hand, elephants, and control of the Ganga’s traffic. It out-produced and out-fought every rival, and within two centuries had swallowed all of them.

It was also, from the orthodox brahmin point of view, suspect country. Late Vedic texts treat the far east as imperfectly brahmanized;[21] the Dharmasūtras rank Magadha’s people as of mixed and irregular status.[22]​[13] Johannes Bronkhorst’s “Greater Magadha” thesis pushes this further: that this region had its own religious culture (ascetic, rebirth-believing, non-Vedic) which was the actual soil of both Buddhism and Jainism, and from which both the Vedic and the Buddhist traditions borrowed karma and rebirth rather than either inventing it. His load-bearing claim is chronological: that parts of the older Upaniṣads (perhaps precisely the parts introducing rebirth) were composed at or after the Buddha’s time. That directly contradicts §5’s statement that BU and CU are pre-Buddhist on almost all reckonings. Bronkhorst is the dissent from that majority, and this series uses his work in both places with that tension in view: his map of an eastern ascetic culture is drawn on here, while §5 follows the majority chronology he disputes. Witzel’s rebuttal (IIJ 52, 2009) is the central one.[23] The thesis is a respectable minority position, conspicuously under-reviewed. The underlying observation is solid: the doctrines that define later Indian religion all appear first in the region the Vedic texts consider peripheral.[24] Contested

The evidence

The Śramaṇa era brings the largest single change in the evidence base, writing in Ashoka’s edicts, alongside empire, organized religious competition, the declining prestige of animal sacrifice, and renunciation as a supported social role.

DimensionWhat we can sayEvidenceConfidence
WritingAppears: the single largest change in the evidence baseAshokan edicts c. 250 BCE in Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī. The absolute date comes from Rock Edict 13’s five named Hellenistic kings; the Kandahar Greek-Aramaic bilingual shows reach, not date. Earlier claims (Anuradhapura, Tamil Nadu) are contested on sample-association grounds[16]​[25]​[26]Consensus on the Ashokan floor; Contested on anything earlier
PolityEmpire, with bureaucracy, roads, standing army, taxationEdicts naming officials (rajjukas, mahāmātras); Megasthenes; the Arthaśāstra, though its surviving text is now usually dated well after the Mauryas[27]​[25]​[14]​[28]​[29]Consensus
EconomyCoinage, guilds, urban craft specialization, long-distance tradePunch-marked coins in bulk; NBPW distribution; Buddhist texts on merchants[30]​[31]Consensus
Religious competitionMultiple organized movements competing for lay support and royal fundingPillar Edict 7 names saṅgha, brahmins-and-Ājīvikas, Nirgranthas and “various sects” as distinct bodies each needing its own officers; Ashoka’s Barabar caves are endowed to the Ājīvikas by name[32]​[33]​[17]Consensus
DietAnimal sacrifice loses prestige; vegetarianism becomes a marker of purityAshoka RE 1; Dharmasūtra ambivalence; Jain and Buddhist polemic[34]​[35]​[13]​[36]Majority
RenunciationBecomes a recognized, economically supported social roleMonastic institutions; the āśrama theory devised to regulate it[37]Consensus
SocietyVarṇa theory elaborated in normative texts as the Śramaṇas attack itDharmasūtras; Buddhist suttas mocking brahmin birth-claims[38]​[39]​[40]Consensus

Primary sources

Show the 5 primary sources

The primary sources of the Śramaṇa era record rival philosophies argued in public, an absolute ethic of ahiṃsā, an emperor banning sacrificial slaughter, an attack on hereditary brahmin status, and Brahmanism’s absorption of renunciation.

1. The rival teachers, listed by their opponents

The Buddhist Sāmaññaphala Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 2) has King Ajātasattu describe six teachers he has consulted.[4] It is a hostile source, but it is the best map we have of the intellectual landscape:

TeacherPosition
Pūraṇa KassapaAkiriya: action has no moral consequence at all
Makkhali Gosāla (Ājīvika)Niyati: strict determinism; effort changes nothing, liberation comes when the allotted cycles run out[41]
Ajita KesakambalīMaterialism: a person is four elements; nothing survives death (DN 2.22–23)
Pakudha KaccāyanaSeven eternal substances; killing merely rearranges them
Sañjaya BelaṭṭhaputtaRadical scepticism; refuses to affirm any position
Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta (Mahāvīra)Fourfold restraint; extreme asceticism to burn off karma

What it proves. By the fifth century BCE northern India supported a genuinely open marketplace of systematic philosophies, including determinism, materialism and scepticism, argued in public and patronized by kings. This is the intellectual environment in which classical Indian philosophy (including Brahmanical philosophy) learned to argue. Consensus

The Ājīvikas outlived Gosāla by a long way. Ashoka and his grandson Daśaratha gave them caves in the third century BCE, and A. L. Basham traced the name in South Indian inscriptions and Tamil texts into the 13th–14th century CE, including a tax on Ājīvikas in Chola-period records. Whether those late Ājīvikas still held Gosāla’s determinism, or the name had passed to other ascetics, cannot be settled from what survives.[9] Contested

The Lokāyata materialists deserve a separate note. (The school-label Cārvāka is not attested until roughly the 6th–8th c. CE; using it of a 5th-century-BCE thinker is an anachronism, and the 5th-century materialist in the record is Ajita Kesakambalī.) They denied rebirth, karma, the efficacy of ritual and the authority of the Veda, and remained a standard opponent in Indian philosophical writing for well over a millennium, yet we know them almost entirely through summaries written by opponents in order to refute them. Almost, but not quite: Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha (c. 8th c.) survives,[42] though Eli Franco argues its author is a radical sceptic rather than a doctrinaire materialist,[43] and fragments of the Cārvāka author Purandara survive in quotation.[11] Consensus on the loss; Contested on Jayarāśi

The single best surviving glimpse of the other side is Dīgha Nikāya 23, the Pāyāsi Sutta, in which a sceptical chieftain argues against rebirth by experiment: weighing a man before and after death, sealing a criminal in a jar to catch the escaping soul, dissecting a body to find the jīva.[44] A Jain parallel, the dialogue of King Paesi, survives in the Rāyapaseṇaijja.[45] Two traditions preserved his arguments at length in order to defeat them, which is the only reason we have them.

2. Ahiṃsā, stated absolutely

Ācārāṅga Sūtra 1.2.3.4 (Jain, Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit). Its first book is the oldest surviving Jain text:[3]

सव्वे पाणा पियाउया सुहसाया दुक्खपडिकूला अप्पियवहा पियजीविणो जीविउकामा । सव्वेसिं जीवियं पियं ॥

savve pāṇā piyāuyā suhasāyā dukkhapaḍikūlā appiyavahā piyajīviṇo jīviukāmā | savvesiṃ jīviyaṃ piyaṃ ||

“All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear.” (trans. Hermann Jacobi)[46]​[47]

What it proves. Compare Chapter 4, where the Aśvamedha kills a horse and Yājñavalkya, told not to eat cow or ox, answers that he eats it “provided it is tender.”[48] Within a few centuries, one Indian tradition has articulated a universal claim about the interests of all living things and made it the foundation of its ethics. Jainism pushed it furthest (filtering water, sweeping the path, the sallekhanā fast), but the principle spread far beyond Jainism, and it is the single most successful Śramaṇa export into what became Hinduism.[3] Consensus

Stone relief of Mahavira seated in meditation, framed by smaller carved seated Jain figures
Mahāvīra in an eleventh-century sculpture. Jain art gives the tīrthaṅkara the motionless ascetic bearing that follows from the Ācārāṅga’s claim about all living things; it is an iconographic type, not a portrait, and no contemporary likeness exists.Unknown 11th-century sculptor; photograph Seattle Art Museum · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

3. A king renounces sacrifice: in stone

Ashoka, Rock Edict 1 (Girnar recension, Prakrit in Brāhmī script, c. 257 BCE):

iyaṃ dhaṃma-lipī devānaṃpriyena priyadasinā rāñā lekhāpitā | idha na kiṃci jīvaṃ ārabhitpā prajūhitavyaṃ |

“This rescript on morality has been caused to be written by king Devānāṁpriya Priyadarśin. Here no living being must be killed and sacrificed.” (trans. E. Hultzsch, who glosses “here” as “in my territory”)[34]​[25]

The edict goes on to record that the royal kitchen, where “many hundred thousands of animals were killed daily for the sake of curry,” is now down to three (two peacocks and a deer, “even this deer not regularly”), and that even these three will not be killed in future.[34]​[25]

Close-up of Brahmi letters of an Ashokan edict carved on a polished stone pillar
An Ashokan inscription cut into the pillar at Lauriya Araraj in Bihar. This is a different recension and a different edict from the Girnar rock quoted above, but the same programme: royal dhamma published in the local vernacular, in public, in stone.Sachin kumar tiwary · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

What it proves. Three things, and they are all large:

  • It is a hard date. These are the first securely datable texts in Indian history, anchored by Rock Edict 13’s naming of five Hellenistic kings (Antiochus, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexander), whose reigns are known independently. Everything else in Indian chronology hangs off this peg.[16]​[18] Consensus
  • State power turns against the Vedic sacrifice. The śrauta system of Chapter 4 required royal patronage. Here an emperor publicly prohibits sacrificial slaughter in his own territory, and a later pillar edict extends protection to whole lists of species.[49]​[25] Whatever Ashoka’s personal motives, large-scale animal sacrifice never regained its central place, though it survived as royal display: Puṣyamitra Śuṅga performed the Aśvamedha, and a Sātavāhana queen’s Nāneghāṭ inscription lists two Aśvamedhas among many śrauta sacrifices.[19]​[50]​[20]​[14] Majority
  • A new vocabulary of rule. Ashoka’s dhamma is deliberately non-sectarian: restraint, generosity, care for parents and servants,[51]​[25] and (Rock Edict 12) honouring other sects, since praising your own by disparaging others harms your own.[52] This is a novel idea about how a plural society should be governed, and it is being addressed to everyone, in the local vernacular, in public, in stone.

4. Birth against conduct: the argument that landed

The Śramaṇa attack on brahmin status was relentless and specific. The Buddha’s standard move is to concede the word brahmin and redefine it by conduct.[53]​[54]

Dhammapada 393 (Pali):

na jaṭāhi na gottena na jaccā hoti brāhmaṇo | yamhi saccañ ca dhammo ca so sucī so ca brāhmaṇo ||

“Not by matted hair or family, or birth is one a brahmin. Those who are truthful and principled: they are pure, they are brahmins.” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato)[55]

What it proves. The attack is not on ritual technique but on hereditary claim, and it is made in the vernacular, in public, to lay audiences including merchants and low-status people who had money and no standing. Brahmanism’s answer was not to abandon birth-status; it was to systematize it, which is what the Dharmasūtras of this same period do. The competition made both sides more explicit.[40] Majority

5. Absorbing renunciation: the āśrama system

The oldest Dharmasūtras (Āpastamba, Gautama; Olivelle dates them c. 300 BCE onward) present the four āśramas (permanent studentship, householder, forest-dweller, renouncer), but not as stages of a life. They present them as four alternatives, chosen once, after a temporary studentship that everyone passes through. The first option is a lifelong vocation, the naiṣṭhika brahmacārin, and that distinction is load-bearing: flatten it into “studentship” and the argument disappears. Gautama reports the option-scheme as the view of “some” (3.1), notes that the householder is the source of the others, “because the others do not produce offspring” (3.3, trans. Bühler), and then rejects the scheme outright on a different ground: that only the householder order is explicitly prescribed in the Veda (3.36).[56]​[13] The fiercest single-āśrama polemic is Baudhāyana’s (2.11.9–34), where an asura, Kapila the son of Prahlāda, is said to have made the division into orders to thwart the gods.[57]

Only in later texts does the scheme become the familiar sequence: study, then marry and raise sons, then withdraw, then renounce.

What it proves. The result is Patrick Olivelle’s, put here in paraphrase. The sequential scheme concedes that renunciation is the highest path while requiring you to complete your social duties first: nobody is forbidden to renounce; everybody is required to do it last.

Two cautions Olivelle himself insists on. The āśrama system is a theological construct, to be sharply distinguished from the social institutions it classifies; he warns explicitly against reading it as a description of how people lived. And he attributes the shift to the classical sequential form largely to scriptural hermeneutics rather than to a neat sociological manoeuvre. The functional reading above is a real one, but it is a gloss on his evidence, not his thesis.[37] Majority on the textual history; Contested on the functional explanation

The puruṣārthas, the aims of life, later perform the identical trick at the level of goals. The older triad (trivarga) of dharma, artha and kāma is extended to four by adding mokṣa: liberation is admitted as the highest aim, and placed after the other three.[58]

The gods in the age of the Buddha

Very little happens to the pantheon in this period, and that is itself the finding. The Śramaṇa movements are non-theistic in structure. The Buddha and Mahāvīra do not deny that gods exist, they deny that gods matter, since gods are themselves inside saṃsāra and need liberating.

Within the Vedic stream, meanwhile, the sacrificial deities continue their decline, and the deities who will matter later (Vāsudeva-Kṛṣṇa, Nārāyaṇa, Rudra-Śiva, and the yakṣa and nāga cults of popular religion) are gathering strength largely outside the texts we have. They surface abruptly in Chapter 7 with inscriptions and sculpture, which suggests they were already well established before anyone wrote them down. Majority

Red sandstone standing yaksha figure from Mathura holding a club
A club-bearing (mudgarpāṇi) yakṣa from Mathura, c. 100 BCE, among the earliest large stone cult figures from India. The yakṣa cults it belongs to are nearly invisible in the literature of this period and were plainly established long before they surface in it.Statue: Biswarup Ganguly Background: Gary Todd · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Two concrete signals from this period:

  • Pāṇini (c. 5th–4th c. BCE) gives a grammatical rule forming the word for a devotee of Vāsudeva (Aṣṭādhyāyī 4.3.98), which implies that Vāsudeva was already an object of devotion.[59] Majority
  • Megasthenes (c. 300 BCE), reporting on India for the Greeks, describes, as Strabo reports him, worship of a “Herakles” in the plains and a “Dionysus” in the mountains, usually read as Kṛṣṇa/Vāsudeva and Śiva.[15] Contested

What is absent

The age of the Buddha still has no temples in durable materials, no Purāṇas or Gītā, no word “Hindu”, no avatāra doctrine and no fully formed untouchability.

  • Temples in durable materials and image worship: still not established. Ashoka builds stūpas and pillars, not temples.[60] Consensus
  • The Purāṇas, the epics in their surviving form, the Gītā: all later (§7).
  • The word “Hindu”: the operative categories are brāhmaṇa and śramaṇa, or Vedic and non-Vedic. Consensus
  • Devī as supreme goddess, avatāra doctrine, bhakti as a developed path: all §7 and §8.
  • Untouchability as a fully formed institution: the Dharmasūtras have impurity rules and excluded groups: Āpastamba already makes it sinful to touch, speak to or look at a caṇḍāla. The elaborated system comes later.[61]​[13]

Debates

Debates about the Śramaṇa era concern the Buddha’s dates and historicity, whether Buddhism caused Hindu vegetarianism, whether Ashoka was a Buddhist or a pluralist king, and whether the Śuṅgas persecuted Buddhists.

When did the Buddha live?

Four schemes circulate, and conflating them is the commonest error in popular accounts:

SchemeParinirvāṇaBasis
Uncorrected long544/543 BCEThe Sri Lankan chronicles; still the Theravāda Buddhist Era[7]
Corrected long486/483 BCEA nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century emendation keeping the chronicles’ 218-year interval but refixing Ashoka’s consecration at c. 268 BCE[7]
Shortc. 368 BCENorth Indian, Chinese and Tibetan sources putting Ashoka about a century after the Buddha; Bechert’s own preference[6]
Median (current default)c. 400 BCEConvergence after Bechert’s 1988 symposium[6]​[7]

So 483 BCE is not “the traditional date”; it is a corrected scholarly one; the tradition says 544/543. Bechert’s symposium reached no consensus; what it produced was convergence within about twenty years either side of 400 BCE. Gombrich argues 404 BCE; Prebish accepts the approximate date while attacking the reasoning.[8]​[62] Contested

Was the Buddha a historical person?

A livelier current debate is historicity, not chronology. David Drewes (“The Idea of the Historical Buddha,” JIABS 40, 2017) argues that two centuries of scholarship have failed to establish anything about the man;[63] Alexander Wynne and Oskar von Hinüber have answered that the names, places and legal details in the early texts make most sense as memories of a real person.[64]​[65] Contested

Did Buddhism cause Hindu vegetarianism?

Not by itself. Ahiṃsā appears in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad,[66] and Jainism pushed it harder than Buddhism ever did: an early Buddhist verse has a past Buddha tell a vegetarian brahmin that killing, theft and lying are the real defilement, “not eating meat.”[67] The most defensible statement is that vegetarianism became a marker of high status in a competitive religious environment where the Śramaṇas had made non-violence the measure of virtue, and that Brahmanism adopted it because the argument was being lost, not won.[36] Beef-eating in the Vedic period is well attested and was a significant embarrassment to later tradition.[48]​[68] Majority / Political

Was Ashoka a Buddhist king or a pluralist one?

The edicts endow Buddhist institutions, record a pilgrimage to Lumbinī,[69] and address the saṅgha directly[70], but they also fund Ājīvika caves, tell his officers to honour all sects, and define dhamma in terms nobody could object to.[33]​[32]​[52] Both readings have textual support; the safest is that he was a Buddhist layman pursuing a deliberately non-sectarian civic ethic.[71] Romila Thapar reads that dhamma as a political instrument for holding a diverse empire together, Patrick Olivelle as Ashoka’s own moral philosophy, and D. R. Bhandarkar as simply the Buddhist ethic for householders.[14]​[72]​[73] Contested

Carved arched entrance of the rock-cut Lomas Rishi cave at Barabar, Bihar
The entrance to the Lomas Ṛṣi cave at Barabar. The Lomas Ṛṣi, left unfinished, bears no Mauryan dedication, but neighbouring caves on the hill were given to the Ājīvikas by name by king Priyadarśin, Ashoka, and the nearby Nāgārjunī caves by his grandson Daśaratha: the hardest single piece of evidence that Mauryan patronage ran well beyond the Buddhist saṅgha.Photo Dharma from Penang, Malaysia · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Did Pushyamitra Shunga persecute Buddhists?

Buddhist sources (the Divyāvadāna) accuse him of destroying monasteries and offering bounties for monks’ heads.[74]​[75] John Marshall suggested that the Mauryan brick stūpa at Sanchi was damaged before its rebuilding, the strongest archaeological point for the charge. But archaeology shows Buddhist construction continuing at Sanchi and Bharhut under the Śuṅgas, and the Bharhut gateway was given “in the reign of the Śuṅgas.”[76]​[77] The accusation is late, hostile, and poorly supported, and Étienne Lamotte judged it unproven;[78] a Brahmanical revival under the Śuṅgas is plausible, a persecution is not established. Contested

Carved sandstone railing relief from Sanchi Stupa 2 showing a figure beside a rearing animal, with rosettes
A carved railing relief from Stūpa 2 at Sanchi, built and enlarged in the Śuṅga period. Buddhist construction of exactly this kind, during the reign of the ruler accused of destroying monasteries, is the main reason the accusation is not accepted.Kevin Standage · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Further reading

Show further reading (8 works)
  • Johannes Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India (2007).
  • Patrick Olivelle, The Āśrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (1993).
  • Patrick Olivelle, trans., Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Ancient India (Oxford, 1999).
  • Richard Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History (2nd ed., 2006), strong on the Brahmanical background the Buddha was arguing with.
  • Paul Dundas, The Jains (2nd ed., 2002).
  • Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (3rd ed., 2012).
  • E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum I (1925): the primary edition.
  • D. C. Sircar, Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization, vol. I (1965).

References

  1. ^ AN 3.70 — Mūluposatha Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya). c. 400–200 BCE. Pali. Lists the sixteen great countries, from Aṅga to Kamboja, as the measure of the greatest worldly power, worth less than one day's observance of the eight precepts. read the text
  2. ^ a b Romila Thapar Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002. full text The best single-volume political and social history for this whole span.
  3. ^ a b c d Paul Dundas The Jains. Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002. open library The standard survey.
  4. ^ a b c DN 2 — Sāmaññaphala Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya). c. 400–300 BCE. Pali. The six heterodox teachers — determinism, materialism, scepticism, atomism — the best map we have of the intellectual landscape, written by a rival. read the text
  5. ^ DN 29 — Pāsādika Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya). c. 400–200 BCE. Pali. Opens with news that Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta (Mahāvīra) has just died at Pāvā and his followers have split into quarrelling factions: the Pali canon's evidence that Mahāvīra died before the Buddha. read the text
  6. ^ a b c Heinz Bechert, ed. The Dating of the Historical Buddha. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 3 vols., 1991. The symposium that unsettled the traditional dates — and reached no consensus.
  7. ^ a b c d L. S. Cousins "The Dating of the Historical Buddha: A Review Article". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 6, 1996. doi Where the c. 400 BCE working default comes from.
  8. ^ a b Richard Gombrich "Dating the Buddha: A Red Herring Revealed". In The Dating of the Historical Buddha, part 2, ed. H. Bechert, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992. Argues from the chronicles' teacher lineages for a death c. 404 BCE.
  9. ^ a b A. L. Basham History and Doctrines of the Ājīvikas: A Vanished Indian Religion. Luzac, 1951. full text Still the only monograph on the third Śramaṇa movement.
  10. ^ Piotr Balcerowicz Early Asceticism in India: Ājīvikism and Jainism. Routledge, 2016. The first full reassessment of the Ājīvikas since Basham.
  11. ^ a b Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. Anthem Press, 2011. Why "Cārvāka" is anachronistic before the mid-first millennium CE.
  12. ^ Aṣṭādhyāyī — Pāṇini. c. 5th–4th c. BCE. Sanskrit. Roughly 4,000 ordered rules generating Sanskrit — the most rigorous grammar written anywhere before the modern era, and itself a dating anchor. about
  13. ^ a b c d e Patrick Olivelle, trans. Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Ancient India. Oxford University Press, 1999. Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, Vasiṣṭha in one volume.
  14. ^ a b c d e Romila Thapar Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 2012. open library
  15. ^ a b Indica — Megasthenes. c. 300 BCE. Greek. A Seleucid ambassador's report on Mauryan India, surviving only in quotation by Arrian, Diodorus and Strabo. Describes worship of a "Herakles" and a "Dionysus," usually read as Kṛṣṇa and Śiva. about
  16. ^ a b c d Rock Edict 13 — Ashokan edicts. c. 256 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Names five Hellenistic kings whose reigns are independently dated — the peg the entire Indian chronology hangs from. read the text
  17. ^ a b Nayanjot Lahiri Ashoka in Ancient India. Harvard University Press, 2015. open library The current biography, strong on the archaeology.
  18. ^ a b Richard Salomon Indian Epigraphy. Oxford University Press, 1998. open library The standard handbook for inscriptions and their dating.
  19. ^ a b Ayodhyā inscription of Dhanadeva — Ayodhyā. c. 1st c. BCE. Sanskrit. Names Puṣyamitra Śuṅga as dvir-aśvamedha-yājin — independent epigraphic confirmation that the Aśvamedha was actually performed, twice.
  20. ^ a b D. C. Sircar Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization. University of Calcutta, 1965. full text Where to find the Heliodorus, Ghoṣuṇḍī and Ashokan texts in the original.
  21. ^ ŚB 1.4.1.10–17 — Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. c. 900–600 BCE. Vedic Sanskrit. Videgha Māthava, starting on the Sarasvatī, follows Agni east to the Sadānīrā, which "even now forms the boundary of the Kosalas and Videhas": the tradition's own memory of the frontier moving into the Ganga plain. read the text
  22. ^ Baudhāyana DhS 1.2.13 — Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra. c. 150 BCE. Sanskrit. Names the people of Magadha, Aṅga and Surāṣṭra as "of mixed origin" — the normative text behind §6's "suspect country." read the text
  23. ^ Michael Witzel "Moving Targets? Texts, Language, Archaeology and History in the Late Vedic and Early Buddhist Periods". Indo-Iranian Journal 52: 287–310, 2009. doi The central chronological rebuttal to Bronkhorst.
  24. ^ Johannes Bronkhorst Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India. Brill, 2007. full text The strongest case for an eastern, non-Vedic origin for karma and rebirth. Influential and contested.
  25. ^ a b c d e f E. Hultzsch Inscriptions of Asoka. Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum I, Clarendon Press, 1925. full text The primary edition of the edicts. Public domain.
  26. ^ R. A. E. Coningham, F. R. Allchin, C. M. Batt & D. Lucy "Passage to India? Anuradhapura and the Early Use of the Brahmi Script". Cambridge Archaeological Journal 6, 1996. doi The one genuinely live claim for pre-Ashokan Brahmi. Never retracted, never formally rebutted.
  27. ^ Rock Edict 5 — Ashokan edicts. c. 256 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Creates officers of dhamma (dhamma-mahāmātras) and sends them among all sects and into the households of the king's brothers and sisters, which tells against the legend that he killed his brothers. about
  28. ^ Patrick Olivelle King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra. Oxford University Press, 2013. doi A new translation whose introduction dates the surviving Arthaśāstra to the early centuries CE, well after the Mauryas.
  29. ^ Mark McClish The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
  30. ^ Upinder Singh A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India. Pearson, 2008. open library The best textbook on the archaeology-plus-text synthesis.
  31. ^ Robin Coningham & Ruth Young The Archaeology of South Asia: From the Indus to Asoka. Cambridge University Press, 2015. The standard synthesis for §§1–6.
  32. ^ a b Pillar Edict 7 — Ashokan edicts. c. 242 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Names saṅgha, brahmins-and-Ājīvikas, Nirgranthas and "various sects" as distinct bodies each needing its own officers — the best contemporary evidence for a plural religious economy. read the text
  33. ^ a b Barabar cave dedications — Ashoka and Daśaratha. c. 250–230 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Rock-cut caves endowed to the **Ājīvikas** by name — the only contemporary documentary evidence for the sect. At one cave the word "Ājīvika" was later effaced. read the text
  34. ^ a b c Rock Edict 1 (Girnar) — Ashokan edicts. c. 257 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. "Here no living being must be killed and sacrificed" (trans. Hultzsch, who glosses "here" as "in my territory"). The royal kitchen is cut to two peacocks and a deer. A king turns state power against the Vedic sacrifice. read the text
  35. ^ DN 5 — Kūṭadanta Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya). c. 300 BCE. Pali. The Buddha reframes "the great sacrifice" as bloodless — the Śramaṇa attack on animal sacrifice made by capturing the vocabulary of sacrifice rather than rejecting it. read the text
  36. ^ a b Ludwig Alsdorf, ed. Willem Bollée, trans. Bal Patil The History of Vegetarianism and Cow-Veneration in India. Routledge, 2010. doi The classic study (German original 1962) of how vegetarianism and cow-veneration entered Brahmanical norms, with the Jain contribution at its centre.
  37. ^ a b Patrick Olivelle The Āśrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution. Oxford University Press, 1993. Establishes that the āśramas began as alternatives, not stages.
  38. ^ DN 27 — Aggañña Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya). c. 300 BCE. Pali. The four varṇas originate by contract and labour, not from a primal being's body — a direct counter-narrative to the Puruṣa Sūkta, read by Gombrich as satire. read the text
  39. ^ MN 93 — Assalāyana Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya). c. 300 BCE. Pali. The fullest argument against brahmin birth-claims: brahmin women give birth like everyone; among the Yonas masters become slaves; a fire kindled by an outcaste burns identically. read the text
  40. ^ a b Richard Gombrich Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History. Routledge, 2nd ed., 2006. A social history of Theravāda from the Buddha to modern Sri Lanka: strong on the Brahmanical background, the monastic-royal compact and caste in the saṅgha.
  41. ^ Bhagavatī Sūtra 15 — Viyāhapannatti. c. 300 BCE. Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit. The Jain account of Makkhali Gosāla and his rupture with Mahāvīra — the fullest Ājīvika narrative anywhere, hostile but detailed. read the text
  42. ^ Tattvopaplavasiṃha — Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa. c. 8th c. CE. Sanskrit. The one surviving text transmitted as Lokāyata — though Franco argues its author is a radical sceptic rather than a doctrinaire materialist. read the text
  43. ^ Eli Franco Perception, Knowledge and Disbelief: A Study of Jayarāśi's Scepticism. Franz Steiner, 1987. full text On the one surviving Lokāyata-transmitted text.
  44. ^ DN 23 — Pāyāsi Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya). c. 300 BCE. Pali. A sceptical prince argues against rebirth by experiment — weighing a man before and after death, sealing a criminal in a jar to catch the escaping soul. Preserved by opponents in order to refute it. read the text
  45. ^ Willem B. Bollée The Story of Paesi (Paesi-kahāṇayaṃ): Soul and Body in Ancient India. A Dialogue on Materialism. Harrassowitz, 2002. Text, translation and notes of the Jain Rāyapaseṇaijja dialogue with King Paesi, the parallel to the Pāyāsi Sutta.
  46. ^ Ācārāṅga 1.2.3.4 — Ācārāṅga Sūtra. c. 500–400 BCE. Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit. "All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear" (trans. Jacobi, SBE 22, Book I, Lecture 2, Lesson 3). The oldest Jain text states ahiṃsā as a universal claim about all living things. read the text
  47. ^ Hermann Jacobi, trans. Jaina Sūtras, Part I: Ācārāṅga Sūtra, Kalpa Sūtra. Sacred Books of the East 22, 1884. full text The oldest Jain text in English.
  48. ^ a b ŚB 3.1.2.21 — Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. c. 900–600 BCE. Vedic Sanskrit. "Let him therefore not eat (the flesh) of the cow and the ox. Nevertheless Yājñavalkya said, 'I, for one, eat it, provided that it is tender'" (trans. Eggeling). The prohibition and its casual violation in one passage. read the text
  49. ^ Pillar Edict 5 — Ashokan edicts. c. 243 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. A detailed species-protection list, with fish inviolable on specified days and no burning of forests containing living creatures. Far more concrete than Rock Edict 1. read the text
  50. ^ Nāneghāṭ cave inscription of Nāganikā — Nāneghāṭ, Pune district. c. 2nd half of 1st c. BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. An early Sātavāhana queen's record listing the śrauta sacrifices performed at court, with their fees, including two Aśvamedhas and a Rājasūya: large-scale Vedic sacrifice survives as royal display after Ashoka. Text in Sircar, Select Inscriptions I, no. 82.
  51. ^ Rock Edict 9 — Ashokan edicts. c. 257 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. "Women are practising many and various vulgar and useless ceremonies" — the only contemporary description of ordinary, gendered domestic religion in the 3rd century BCE. read the text
  52. ^ a b Rock Edict 12 — Ashokan edicts. c. 257 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Honour other sects; praising your own by disparaging others harms your own. A novel theory of plural government. read the text
  53. ^ Sn 650 — Vāseṭṭha Sutta (Sutta Nipāta). c. 300 BCE. Pali. "Not by birth is one a brahmin, but by action" — and the surrounding verses argue it empirically: species differ among plants and animals, but not among humans. read the text
  54. ^ Uttarādhyayana 25 — Uttarādhyayana Sūtra. c. 300 BCE. Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit. One does not become a brahmin by the syllable oṃ but by action — the Jain counterpart to Dhammapada 393. read the text
  55. ^ Dhp 393 — Dhammapada. c. 300 BCE. Pali. "Not by matted hair, not by lineage, not by birth" — the Śramaṇa attack lands on hereditary claim, not on ritual technique. read the text
  56. ^ Gautama DhS 3.1–2 — Gautama Dharmasūtra. c. 500–300 BCE. Sanskrit. The four āśramas presented as alternatives, not stages — the evidence that the sequential scheme was a later device to absorb renunciation. read the text
  57. ^ Baudhāyana DhS 2.11.28 — Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra. c. 150 BCE. Sanskrit. "There was, forsooth, an Asura, Kapila by name, the son of Prahlāda" who, striving against the gods, made the divisions of the āśramas: the polemic for a single householder order (trans. Bühler, SBE 14). read the text
  58. ^ Charles Malamoud "On the Rhetoric and Semantics of Puruṣārtha". Contributions to Indian Sociology 15: 33–48, 1981. doi How the three aims of life (trivarga) became four with the addition of mokṣa, and what the scheme does.
  59. ^ Aṣṭādhyāyī 4.3.98 — Pāṇini. c. 5th–4th c. BCE. Sanskrit. A grammatical rule forming the word for a devotee of Vāsudeva (and of Arjuna), in a section on objects of devotion (bhakti): Vāsudeva was already worshipped centuries before the Gītā. read the text
  60. ^ Harry Falk Aśokan Sites and Artefacts: A Source-book with Bibliography. Philipp von Zabern, 2006. The archaeological handbook for the edicts.
  61. ^ Āpastamba DhS 2.2.8–9 — Āpastamba Dharmasūtra. c. 300–200 BCE. Sanskrit. "As it is sinful to touch a Caṇḍāla, (so it is also sinful) to speak to him or to look at him," with bathing as the penance for touch (trans. Bühler, SBE 2): early rules of untouchability before the elaborated system. read the text
  62. ^ Charles S. Prebish "Cooking the Buddhist Books: The Implications of the New Dating of the Buddha". Journal of Buddhist Ethics 15, 2008. Accepts the c. 400 BCE date while attacking the reasoning behind it.
  63. ^ David Drewes "The Idea of the Historical Buddha". Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 40, 2017. Argues scholarship has established nothing about the man. Answered by Wynne, Levman and von Hinüber.
  64. ^ Alexander Wynne "Did the Buddha Exist?". Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 16, 2019. The reply to Drewes.
  65. ^ Oskar von Hinüber "The Buddha as a Historical Person". Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 42: 231–264, 2019. A specialist's reply to Drewes: personal names, place details and legal practice that make most sense as memories of a real person.
  66. ^ CU 3.17.4 — Chāndogya Upaniṣad. c. 700 BCE. Sanskrit. Ahiṃsā listed among the virtues — present in the Vedic stream before the Śramaṇas made it central. read the text
  67. ^ Sn 2.2 — Āmagandha Sutta (Sutta Nipāta). c. 400–200 BCE. Pali. A vegetarian brahmin ascetic accuses the past Buddha Kassapa of eating 'putrefaction'; Kassapa answers that killing, theft and lying are putrefaction, 'not eating meat'. read the text
  68. ^ D. N. Jha The Myth of the Holy Cow. Verso, 2002. Assembles the textual evidence for beef-eating in early India; politically contested in India.
  69. ^ Rummindei pillar — Lumbinī. c. 249 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Lumbinī freed of the bali tax and liable to only an eighth share because "here the Buddha was born, the Sakyamuni" — the earliest datable evidence for veneration of the birthplace.
  70. ^ Calcutta-Bairāṭ edict — Bairāṭ, Rajasthan. c. 250 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Ashoka addresses the saṅgha directly and names seven texts he wants monks, nuns and laypeople to hear often. The only Ashokan list of Buddhist texts, and several can be matched to suttas that still survive. read the text
  71. ^ Minor Rock Edict 1 — Ashokan edicts. c. 258 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Names the king as Asoka personally and records that he has been a lay follower for over two and a half years — his Buddhist affiliation in his own voice. read the text
  72. ^ Patrick Olivelle Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King. Yale University Press, 2023. Reads Ashoka's dhamma as his own moral philosophy, shaped by Buddhism but addressed to everyone.
  73. ^ D. R. Bhandarkar Asoka (Carmichael Lectures, 1923). University of Calcutta, 1925. full text The classic case that Ashoka's public dhamma was the Buddhist ethic for laypeople, modelled on the Sigālovāda Sutta.
  74. ^ Aśokāvadāna — Divyāvadāna. c. 2nd c. CE. Buddhist Sanskrit. The North Indian legend of Ashoka: the dirt offering of his past life, the hell-prison, conversion by a monk, 84,000 stupas, the pilgrimage with Upagupta, and the half myrobalan given at his death. about
  75. ^ John S. Strong The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton University Press, 1983. Translation and study of the North Indian legend, read as a theology of kingship and gift rather than as failed history.
  76. ^ John Marshall & Alfred Foucher The Monuments of Sāñchī. Manager of Publications, Delhi, 3 vols., 1940. The excavation and building history of Sanchi, with the inscriptions, from the 1912–19 restoration.
  77. ^ Bharhut gateway inscription — Bharhut stupa. c. 100 BCE. Prakrit in Brāhmī. Records the gateway as the gift of Vātsīputra Dhanabhūti 'in the reign of the Śuṅgas' (suganaṃ raje), the usual reading. Buddhist building under the dynasty accused of persecution. about
  78. ^ Étienne Lamotte History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Śaka Era. Trans. Sara Webb-Boin, Institut Orientaliste, Louvain, 1988. Still the fullest survey of the councils, schools and early inscriptions.

Quick answers

Short answers drawn from the chapter above; the evidence for each is cited there.

What was the Shramana movement?
Shramanas, 'strivers,' were renunciant movements, including the Buddha, Mahavira, the Ajivikas and materialists, that accepted karma, rebirth and liberation but rejected the Veda, sacrifice and brahmin authority. From about 500 BCE to 500 CE the real religious divide in India was Vedic against Shramana, not Hindu against Buddhist, and much of later Hinduism is the settlement between them.
Why did Hindus become vegetarian?
Vedic religion was built on animal sacrifice, and beef-eating in the Vedic period is well attested. Ahimsa appears in the Chandogya Upanishad, but Jains pushed it much further. Most scholars hold that vegetarianism became a marker of high status in a competitive environment where the Shramanas had made non-violence the measure of virtue, and Brahmanism adopted it under that pressure. Full answer
When did the Buddha live?
It is contested. The Sri Lankan chronicles give 544/543 BCE for his death; a corrected long chronology gives 486/483 BCE; Indian and Tibetan sources suggest about 368 BCE. Since Heinz Bechert's 1988 symposium, the working default is about 400 BCE, give or take twenty years. That symposium produced convergence, not consensus.
Where did the four ashramas (stages of life) come from?
The oldest Dharmasutras, from about 300 BCE on, present the four ashramas, lifelong studentship, householder, forest-dweller and renouncer, as alternative vocations chosen once, not stages. Only later texts turn them into a life sequence. Paraphrasing Patrick Olivelle's argument: nobody is forbidden to renounce; everybody is required to do it last. He stresses it is a theological construct, not a description of life.
What do Ashoka's edicts say about religion?
Carved around 250 BCE, they are India's first securely dated writing. Rock Edict 1 bans sacrificial slaughter 'here', which Hultzsch reads as throughout the king's territory, and cuts the royal kitchen to two peacocks and a deer. Rock Edict 12 urges honouring other sects, and Ashoka endowed caves for the Ajivikas. Most read him as a Buddhist layman with a deliberately non-sectarian civic ethic, though this is debated.

Questions this chapter answers in depth

Cite this page
APA 
Paudel, A. (2026). The Shramana Challenge. In How Hinduism Evolved. How It Evolved. https://howitevolved.com/hinduism/shramana-buddhism-jainism/
MLA 
Paudel, Amrit. “The Shramana Challenge.” How Hinduism Evolved, How It Evolved, 27 October 2026, howitevolved.com/hinduism/shramana-buddhism-jainism/.
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@misc{howitevolved2026shramanabuddhismjain,
  author = {Paudel, Amrit},
  title = {The Shramana Challenge},
  howpublished = {\url{https://howitevolved.com/hinduism/shramana-buddhism-jainism/}},
  year = {2026},
  note = {How Hinduism Evolved. Last modified 2026-10-27}
}
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