traditions of magic, now enhanced by the scale of the mass movements of
wanderers, whose concentration in great assemblies like those we find in the
early Buddhist texts constituted a social technology of Durkheimian interaction
rituals producing unprecedented amounts of emotional energy. The monks
further expanded the reach of this charisma by the emotional appeals of moral
preaching, filling a vacuum in the surrounding society of new commercial and
political relations outside the traditional kinship structures. The Buddhist-Jaina
version of mysticism now connoted the highest moral respectability, and lay-
persons gained moral status by their homage to it, and by offering material
support. By now an intellectual community had formed which interpreted the
emotional highs of meditative experience as the highest point on all religious
dimensions, a fusion of moral and ontological peaks.
It is because Buddhist mysticism, and its later Hindu counterpart, existed
in the context of these social relationships that meditation had such a charis-
matic status. For this reason, movements in the modern West to transplant
mysticism seem doomed to failure. The technique and the philosophy can be
revived, but the practice is individual, or at best takes place in religious
communities which are private and without honor from the surrounding
community. Meditative mysticism in Europe or the Americas becomes little
more than private occultism, lacking in social charisma. It is doubtful whether
anyone in our own time—at least outside of south Asia—can become enlight-
ened in the sense that ancient and medieval persons could have experienced.Anti-monastic Opposition and the Forming of Hindu Lay Culture
The consolidation of monastic organization made Buddhism the center of
religious and intellectual life. This in turn gave rise to a slowly developing
movement of opposition. The main organizational base which remained con-
sisted of the lay householders who served as teachers and ritualists, that is, the
Brahmans. But now they acquired new intellectual contents to keep up with
the monastic trendsetters. This took place in three ways.
First, the residue of the freelance sages, those who remained outside the
monastic orders, collected under the auspices of Brahmanical education. This
was the period when most of the Upanishads were formulated; that is, the
stories of various sages were collected as texts appended to one or another of
the Vedas. Although a few Upanishads (the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya)
precede Buddhism, and several others may be contemporary with its rise, the
so-called Middle Upanishads were created ca. 350–200 b.c.e., and some date
from around 200 c.e. or even later.^28 Together these constituted the set of
Upanishads that came to be considered classic texts of Hinduism, but only
after Shankara turned them into an orthodox canon around 700 c.e. There
was in fact a good deal of selection to be made, since texts calling themselves
208 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths