The Brahmin vs. the Sramana

How Coexistence and Not Rivalry Shaped the Great Indic Faith Revival

As the Aryans gentrified the east, i.e. the Lower Gangetic Plains, and found iron, a rapid phase of infrastructural upgrade followed, heralding what we now term the Second Urbanization. Until that point, the most influential polity on the subcontinent was the Kuru-Panchal kingdom based roughly in modern-day Haryana. With iron, the power center shifted east, and Magadha rose to prominence. With this rapid political change also came a radical doctrinal evolution.

The Aryans of the west were steeped in the Vedic code of physical sacrifice. But those in the east increasingly developed a distaste for violence and the strict regimentation of the Vedic creed which brooked no error in rituals. Instead, they gravitated to a more “inner peace” motif where self-renunciation trumped external sacrifice. While extreme ritual purity epitomized the western doctrine, the eastern doctrine championed extreme austerity and penance. The former is known as Brahminism (brāhmaṇa in Sanskrit and Pali), and the latter as the Sramana tradition (śramaṇa in Sanskrit, samaṇa in Pali). It’s the latter that would ultimately evolve into non-Vedic creeds such as Buddhism, Jainism, Ajivikas, and many others. Of these, only Buddhism and Jainism have endured. Even Brahminism absorbed elements of this doctrinal shift, integrating concepts like karma and rebirth into its first post-Vedic scriptural corpus, the Upanishads.

In sum, the conflict between śramaṇa and brāhmaṇa is not exactly a conflict between Aryans and non-Aryans, but between two Aryan bodies. It’s the classic west vs. east story in its most primitive iteration. Now the question is, was there truly a conflict in the sense we understand the term? Of course, this was no crusade where one community sought to eradicate the other, but was it even spiritually well-entrenched? Was there no common ground between the two schools of thought? These are the questions we’ll attempt to answer here. Barring a brief conversation on Jainism, we’ll confine ourselves to Buddhism as the representative of the Sramana thought in the context of this discussion. Today, Buddhism and Hinduism are at irreconcilable odds both doctrinally and politically, especially politically. Was it the same 2,500 years ago? What did the two think of each other? A relevant question that deserves a whole article unto itself but will still be touched upon here is, what was Buddhism’s relationship with caste?

Sometime in the fifth century BC, although dating him remains an exercise in educated guesswork at best, Panini became the first to corral the Sanskrit language into a formal grammar and syntax in his seminal Aṣṭādhyāyī. But Aṣṭādhyāyī was a difficult read and remained out of the lay Brahmin’s faculties for a long time. In the third century, a Vedic priest named Katyayana offered a solution with Vārttikakāra, an explanatory commentary and elaboration on Aṣṭādhyāyī. Another hundred years and Patanjali from Magadha further expanded Katyayana’s explanations with Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya. Sanskrit grammar had come one full circle, from codification in a far western Gandhara to being explication in a far eastern Magadha. This was the journey of not just a language but also of its champions and speakers, the Brahmins. The Vedic Aryans were already in Magadha long before Panini, but a significant ideological and social friction persisted between the Brahmins and the Sramanas. So much so that when Patanjali elaborated on one of Katyanaya’s varttikas, he listed Śrāmaṇabrāhmaṇam as an example of a dvanda compound—a kind of collective noun made up of two distinct singular nouns, if you will—that stands for eternal hostility:¹

Yeṣāṁ ca virodha ityasyāvakāśaḥ.
Śramaṇabrāhmaṇam.
“For those whose opposition is thus apparent.
The ascetic and the Brahmin.” (rough trans.)

While this is an interesting, even if not wholly intended, commentary on the relationship between the two broad communities in Patanjali’s Magadha, the animosity was not just limited to brāhmaṇa vs. śramaṇa, but even expanded to eastern Brahmins vs. western. By the Upanishadic period, a significant divergence had emerged even within the Vedic community. While the east came to be influenced by a strong śramaṇic substrate, the west continued to hold its fort as the more “pristine” affiliate of the Vedic creed. We see this reflected best in the famous Brihadaranyaka-Chandogya rivalry.² The former emerged in the Videha region in the east and the latter in the west, likely the Kuru-Panchala region.³ Both upheld their respective philosophy as the more authoritative.

At any rate, Patanjali’s example already establishes that the Brahmins and the Sramanas did not like each other very much. The Upanishadic rivalry also establishes that even Brahmins didn’t like very much fellow Brahmins whose ideology was colored by Sramanic influences. But was it always the case? It sure is today, especially between Brahmins and Buddhists. But was the friction just as strong back in the day? How much of it is really attributable to caste? While it’s hard to answer most of these questions given the scarcity of textual evidence from the time, we will try to glean whatever we can from whatever we have at our disposal.