Chapter 5 India 167do the stars seem to move westward? Because the earth rotates on an axis,
wrote Aryabhata in the fifth century C.E. Other thinkers developed trigonome-
try, defined zero, and calculated the solar year accurately. During this time the
great narrative cave art at Ajanta, depicting scenes from the life of the Buddha,
was produced. The Gupta age gradually reembraced Brahmanical orthodoxy,
returned to the Vedic rituals of kingship including the dramatic spectacle of the
horse sacrifice, and reinvigorated the caste system.
We have a helpful firsthand account of life in Gupta India from an unex-
pected source: A Chinese Buddhist pilgrim known as Faxian traveled all the
way across Central Asia and down into North India in search of authentic
Buddhist knowledge and texts, departing China in 399 and returning by sea
around 410. In his memoir, A Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, he described life
in Pataliputra, kings who hosted him, and large monasteries filled with shaven-
headed monks. He witnessed royal ceremonies honoring the Indic gods, bodhi-
sattvas, and the Buddha, led by Brahmans. Buddhism and Brahmanism were
equally honored, but not for long; two centuries later, another even more
famous Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang, made the same journey, but by this time
(627 C.E.) the Gupta dynasty had collapsed and Xuanzang encountered empty
monasteries and a much reduced Buddhist presence. (The religious import of
these journeys is discussed in more detail in chapter 6.)
Medieval Period (550–1210 C.E.)
Another period of decentralization began at the end of the Gupta period,
but these “between” eras were important moments in Indian history. Numer-
ous local kingdoms and monarchies arose, such as in western India, with a pro-
liferation of ruling lineages that became the Rajputs (Chattopadhyaya 1997),
who claimed lineage glory and legitimacy by projecting genealogies back to the
sun or to various gods.
The caste system expanded during this period and achieved much of the
complexity we have known in recent times. The old Vedic idea of varna got
stretched, reinterpreted, and applied to new groups of people being brought
under the control of local kingdoms. As independent tribes and cultivators got
pulled into the orbit of small states, they were assigned a position in the varna
system. Some warlike groups became Kshatriyas, but most new groups were
identified as Shudras. To the original three varnas—Brahmans (priests),
Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), and Vaishyas (merchants, artisans)—was
added a fourth category: Shudra. Vaishyas came to refer primarily to mer-
chants, and Shudras were everyone else: artisans, servants, agriculturalists.
These were little more than labels to show the rank of groups within society as
a whole and the overall structure of dominance and subordination, but the
labels did not constitute actual communities of intermarrying families; those
groups were called jati, that is, the actual group we call “caste” in English (see
the section titled “The Caste System”).