Buddhism in India

The Background to Buddhism 31

otherwise. The samana tradition attested rather to an excess energy

in society; it was the existence of a material surplus in the rising

agricultural society that made it possible for many to exist without

production or to live off extracted products of the forests, and their

questioning was evidence of a dynamic society bursting the normal

bounds of its cultural and social framework.^4

There were various trends among the renouncers. According to

the report of Megasthenes, who visited the court of Chandragupta

Maurya in the 4th century BCE, there were ‘Brachmanes’ and

‘Garmanes’ (samanas), and

As for the Garmanes he says that the most honourable of them are

named Hylobii and that they live in forests, subsisting on leaves and

wild fruit, clothed with the bark of trees, and abstaining from wine

and the delight of live; and that they communicate with the kings,

who through messengers inquire about the causes of things and

through the Hylobii worship and supplicate the Divinity; and that

after the Hylobii, the physicians are second in honour, and that they

are, as it were, humanitarian philosophers, men who are of frugal

habits but do not live out of doors, and subsist on rice and barley-

groats, which are given to them by everyone of whom they beg or

whom offer them hospitality; and that through sorcery they can cause

people to have numerous offspring, and to have either male or female

children; and that they cure diseases mostly through means of cereals

and not through means of medicaments; and that among their medica-

ments their ointments and their poultices are most esteemed...and that

both this class and the other practice such endurance, both in toils and

in perseverance, that they stay in one posture all day without moving;

and that there are also diviners and enchanters...and that women, as

well as men, study philosophy with some of them, and that the women

likewise abstain from the delights of love (Majumdar 1960: 145).

This shows the diversity of those following the samana trend. It

would seem that those described as ‘physicians...engaged in the

study of the nature of man’ were very likely Buddhists, who were

too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the

fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth,

aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and

despairs (translation by Thanissaro Bhikku).

While the Buddha’s discussion takes place on a psychological
basis, the metaphor of a world in flames indeed captures what
many scholars see as the special trauma of this era of change.
Thus it can be said that Buddhism arose, not as a response to
Brahmanism, but rather as an all-embracing solution to the human
predicament in a world in transformation.

The Samana Tradition:

Striving for the Truth

There were two main contending cultural–religious currents of
the first millennium BCE which were unique to India and which pro-
vided the context for the Buddha’s teachings. These were based on
the Brahman and the samana (in Sanskrit, shramana) traditions.
The word samana is translated in many ways, as ‘ascetic’,
‘renouncer’, ‘recluse’, ‘hermit’ and so forth. The root samocan
mean either ‘tranquility’ or ‘toil, fatigue’ (Ambedkar 1992: 324).
Today, in languages like Hindi and Marathi, ‘shram’ remains
common for ‘labour’ and the ‘shramik’ is a worker. In the first
millennium BCE, however, the samanas were those who toiled not
to produce commodities or services for survival and social develop-
ment, but to find the meaning of life. They separated themselves
from the everyday world of social life, production, family involve-
ment; as the Buddhists later put it, they chose ‘the homeless life’.
But this did not mean that they were necessarily ascetics or
recluses. They went into the forests, individually or in groups, and
lived either on what they could extract in the forests or on what
people chose to give them.
Did this tradition of renunciation arise out of pessimism? Many
have interpreted it in this way. Most Marxist interpretations, for
example, see it as related to the traumas of a developing class
society and they have viewed it as a kind of falling into history out
of an earlier primordial communism. Exploitation and oppression,
they argue, led people to flee into the forests. Yet the fact that so
many of the samanas came from well-off families should suggest

30 Buddhism in India

(^4) While Uma Chakravarty argues that the samana–Brahmana groups lived off the
surplus produced by the das-kammakaras(‘slaves and workers’) who were the basic
labouring groups, in fact most only minimally lived off a socially produced surplus.
Most were ascetics living on very little extractive processes. Later both Buddhists
and Brahmans regularised through the Sangha or through priestly ritual a dependent
relationship with society, which included living off the surplus.