zation of the frontier-settling clans. The incipient growth of strong states
promoted symbiosis with monastic religions, above all Buddhism, which accu-
mulated landed property. Jainism, beginning in the same milieu as Buddhism,
found its niche in the coastal trading states. Hinduism emerged as a religion
of the second diaspora, centered on families of landholding priests. Settling in
the peripheries among pre-agricultural tribes, the Brahmans and those who
emulated them molded ritual around exclusionary lines of racial purity rather
than political hierarchy. A later phase set in when monastic religion declined
along with its strong state patrons; now Hinduism recolonized the northern
homeland, transforming itself into quasi-monastic orders and mass religious
movements of its own. In the last act, native religions were overlaid by Muslim
conquerors. Let us examine each of these phases in a little greater detail.
vedic cults and their breakdown
In the old Vedic period, incipient state organization consisted of the frontier-
settling kin group under a war leader, among whom some families acquired
hereditary succession to the kingship. The Brahman priests ritually officiated
at tribal ceremonies including the consecration of kings, making up a Brah-
man-political alliance. In the early Upanishadic period (from about 700 b.c.e.
continuing perhaps down into the 300s or later in some places), this alliance
broke down; the validity of the Vedic ideology was questioned by competing
religious and philosophical practices, while kings dispensed with Brahman
legitimation, patronized religious questioners, and sometimes claimed their
own superiority in the spiritual field. States consolidated power by military
conquest and political coup, and by ruthlessly breaking the bonds of family
and clan loyalty, dispensing with religious legitimation.^2 The prestige of the
Vedic priests declined as their political base disintegrated, spurring the forma-
tion of rival movements.
Among these movements emerged two well-organized religions: Jainism
and Buddhism. Both were centered at first in Magadha and Kosala, which is
to say the strongest of the consolidating states, where their founders had royal
connections (Mizuno, 1980). From now on for the next thousand years,
Buddhism was a strong contender for state patronage, scoring its most spec-
tacular success in the first great conquest state, the Maurya Empire. What
emerged as Hinduism—a renovated Brahmanism but with social bases which
limited the power of rulers—came later and in opposition to Buddhism; its
strength was above all on the frontiers, where states were weakest.
What does it mean to say that a given religion is “supported” by a political
regime? In India there was virtually never a question of what we might call a
state religion, along lines familiar in the Christian, Islamic, and Chinese orbits.
Typical state support consisted of building monasteries and religious monu-
180 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths