Buddhist critique of varna

Topic: Society in Early India: Kinship, Varna-Jati, Women · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 3 "Kinship, Caste and Class - Early Societies"; Class 12, Ch 4 "Thinkers, Beliefs and Buildings"

Meaning

The Buddhist critique of varna was the early Buddhist view that differences between people are real, but they are made by humans. They are neither natural nor fixed. So no one could claim high rank just by being born into a varna (one of the four social orders: Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra).

It matters because it was one of the first open challenges to the Brahmanical idea that rank was given by god at birth. It shows that early Indian society argued about its own social order and did not simply accept one fixed system.

Explanation

Background: the claim the Buddhists attacked

• Brahmanical texts said the four varnas came from the body of the first, primeval man. This story is in the Purusha sukta (a hymn) of the Rigveda.
• This made rank divine and fixed:
• Rank was set by god, not by people.
• You were born into your varna.

• You could never leave it.

• From about the 6th century BCE, new thinkers questioned this claim. The Buddhists attacked it most directly.

What the Buddhists said

• They did not say all people were equal in society. They accepted that social differences existed.
• They said these differences were neither natural nor inflexible.
• God had not made them.

• They were not permanent.

• They rejected birth as a ground for high rank. Being born a Brahmana gave no special claim to be "the best".

• They also rejected inequality as oppression. When the strong ruled over the weak, the Buddhists called it wrong. They did not accept it as a divine order.
• In the sangha (the Buddhist order of monks and nuns), the old labels did not count. People who joined gave up their earlier social identity, and members were treated as equals.

The Majjhima Nikaya test: wealth, not birth

• The Majjhima Nikaya ("middle-length sayings", part of the Sutta Pitaka, the collection of the Buddha's teachings) records a talk between King Avantiputta and Kachchana, a disciple of the Buddha.
• Avantiputta asks whether Brahmanas are the best varna.
• Kachchana answers with a simple test:
• Can a rich Shudra make another Shudra work for him as an obedient servant? Yes.

• Can the same rich Shudra make a Kshatriya, a Brahmana or a Vaishya serve him? Also yes.

• Conclusion: on this point the four varnas are "exactly the same".

• The lesson:
• In real life, wealth and power decided who obeyed whom.
• Birth, as the Purusha sukta described it, did not.

The same logic applied to kingship

• Buddhists used the same human-made logic to explain where kings came from. The Agganna Sutta ("the discourse on origins") in the Sutta Pitaka tells this story [2][3].
• At first people lived in an ideal state. Then greed, anger and deceit grew [3].
• Theft and quarrels followed. So the people met and chose one person to punish wrongdoers and keep order [3]. They paid him a share of their rice.
• He was called mahasammata — "the great elect" [3].
• The result: both social rank and kingship were human arrangements. Divinity played no part [3]. What humans had made, humans could change.

Time, place and evidence

• Period: from about the 6th century BCE, when the Buddha and other new thinkers were active. It belongs to the broader period c. 600 BCE – 600 CE.
• Region: mainly the Gangetic valley, where Buddhism first spread.
• Key people:
• Kachchana, a disciple of the Buddha.

• Avantiputta, the king who questioned him.

• Evidence (texts of the Pali canon):

• Majjhima Nikaya: the Avantiputta–Kachchana dialogue about the rich Shudra.

• Sutta Pitaka / Agganna Sutta: the origin myth of society and of the mahasammata [2][3].

• Caution: these are religious texts. They show what the Buddhists argued and hoped for. They do not prove how far society actually changed.

Don't confuse with

• Purusha sukta: this is the target of the critique, not part of it. It is a Rigvedic hymn that makes varna divine and birth-based. The Buddhists said varna was human-made.
• Agganna Sutta: it criticises divine kingship through human choice (the mahasammata) [3]. The Majjhima Nikaya dialogue criticises birth-rank through wealth. Do not swap the two texts.
• Purananuru (Sangam poetry): this is a Tamil critique, not a Buddhist one. It ranks people by generosity, as with the poor chief of Irantai, "an enemy to the hunger of bards". It does not use wealth or human choice to make its point.
• Social equality: the Buddhists did not say that differences in society did not exist. They said the differences were not natural and not fixed.

Prelims Hooks

• The dialogue between King Avantiputta and Kachchana (a disciple of the Buddha) about the four varnas is in the Majjhima Nikaya.
• In that dialogue, the argument rests on a wealthy Shudra who can command servants from all four varnas.
• The Majjhima Nikaya is part of the Sutta Pitaka, the basket of the Buddha's discourses in the Pali canon [2].
• Mahasammata means "the great elect". He is the chosen ruler in the Agganna Sutta [3].
• Buddhist and Jain accounts of how the state began leave out divinity [3].
• Trap: the Buddhists accepted that social differences existed. They rejected only the claim that these differences were natural, fixed and based on birth.

Mains Points

• Early India held several competing social ideas, not one.
• Brahmanical varna theory said rank was divine and fixed at birth.
• The Buddhists said difference was real but made by humans.
• Tamil Sangam chiefdoms ranked people by how much they gave away.

• So varna should not be treated as the single social system of ancient India.

• Normative texts versus real practice:

• Normative texts (texts that lay down how society should work, such as the Dharmashastras) based rank on birth.
• The Majjhima Nikaya's rich Shudra shows that the Buddhists themselves saw that real life ran on wealth and power.

• A historian should read rule-making texts as statements of ideals, not as proof of everyday life.

• A human-made view of society and the state:

• The Majjhima Nikaya made social rank human-made.
• The Agganna Sutta made kingship human-made [3].
• Together they form an early Indian idea that social order is open to reform. This is useful in GS-I answers on social reform traditions and on ideas of the state in early India.

Related concepts

• Mahasammata

Read more

• Critiques and alternative social visions