Ancient India · Topic 6 of 17
Heterodox religious movements of the 6th century BCE and their doctrines
The Basics
By the sixth century BCE, Gangetic society was prosperous but tense. Brahmanas and kings controlled the varna order, land, ritual and law. Kshatriyas, vaishyas and farmers felt the strain of a hierarchy based on birth, not wealth or merit.
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By the 6th century BCE the Ganges plain was full of wandering ascetic teachers, called shramanas, each offering their own path away from Vedic ritualism. One such tradition, older even than Buddhism, already existed before Mahavira was born. Jaina belief held that there had been 23 earlier Tirthankaras, teachers who had crossed the ocean of rebirth and shown others the ford. The 23rd of these, Parshvanatha, came from Benaras. He gave up royal life and became an ascetic. The Acharanga Sutra says Vardhamana's own parents were followers of Parshvanatha. So Mahavira did not start from nothing; he inherited a living ascetic tradition and reorganised it.
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The sangha that Mahavira had organised needed more than monks and rules of conduct; it needed a shared understanding of reality, knowledge and the self. This understanding is what Jain philosophy supplied, built around three ideas that reinforced each other: the triratna, anekantavada and syadvada.
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If every act that binds karma to the soul is wrong, then causing injury to another living being is among the worst of these acts. Jain teachers reasoned that injury harms both the victim, who suffers, and the one who causes it, whose soul is further weighed down with karma. This made non-violence, or ahimsa, the first and most important of the five vows that Jainism asked every follower to take.
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Jain monks and traders carried their faith far beyond Magadha in the centuries after Mahavira. Image worship appears early: the first century BCE Hathigumpha inscription of the Kalinga king Kharavela mentions retrieving a jina image. The Udayagiri-Khandagiri caves in Orissa became an old centre of Jaina monasticism. Mathura grew into a major stronghold, with numerous Jaina images, inscriptions and even the remains of a Jaina stupa at Kankali Tila. From Magadha the community moved westward into Mathura, Ujjain, Saurashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat, and down the west coast to Sopara, prospering wherever trade routes ran. Another branch reached Kalinga by the 4th century BCE and later gained the patronage of King Kharavela in the 1st century BCE. A further branch moved south into Karnataka and the Tamil country, where Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions show that Jaina monks and nuns there enjoyed the support of wealthy elites.
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Jain scriptures are called Siddhanta or Agama.
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Siddhartha was born to Suddhodana, chief of the republican Shakya clan ruling from Kapilavastu. His mother Maya was a princess of the Koshalan line, and gave birth to him at a grove in Lumbini. Tradition places his birth around 563 or 567 BCE. The exact century is debated, since the date of his death, the parinibbana, remains uncertain. Maya died within days of giving birth, and Siddhartha was raised by his stepmother. Brahmanas are said to have seen the thirty-two marks of a great man on the infant's body. They predicted he would become either a world conqueror or a world renouncer. His father wanted the former, so he raised Siddhartha in luxury, shielded from all suffering. Siddhartha married Yashodhara and they had a son, Rahula. Yet comfort could not satisfy his restless mind.
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At Sarnath, the Buddha laid out the core of his teaching, called the Ariya-sachchani or Four Noble Truths. First, there is suffering, dukkha: life is full of sorrow, and even pleasure is unstable because it depends on fleeting sense gratification. Second, suffering has a cause, samudaya: desire, attachment, greed, pride, aversion and ignorance keep people trapped. Third, suffering can be ended, nirodha: removing desire removes suffering and leads to nirvana, freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth. Fourth, there is a path to this end, the Atthanga-magga or Eightfold Path.
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The Buddha had already taught that craving causes suffering and that the Eightfold Path ends it. But this left a deeper question unanswered: if there is no permanent soul, what exactly suffers, acts, and is reborn?
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The Buddha created the monastic order, the Sangha, within his own lifetime, first for monks and later for nuns. This gave his followers a distinct identity among the many wandering renunciant groups of the time. The Sangha became the chief vehicle for spreading his teaching after his death.
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Buddhism treated varna as a social convention, not divinely ordained.
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After the Buddha's death, around c. 483 BCE, his teachings existed only as memory, carried by monks who had heard him speak. There was no written text yet, so there was an urgent need to fix what he had actually taught before memories drifted apart. This situation set the stage for periodic councils, each called when the growing Sangha faced a crisis of content or discipline.
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After the Second Council at Vaishali in 383 BCE, the monks who stayed close to the older discipline called themselves the Sthaviravadins, the Elders. They believed they were keeping faith with the original spirit of the Buddha's teaching. The other group, the Mahasanghikas, the Great Community, interpreted the teaching more liberally. They felt their reading better suited ordinary monks and laypeople.
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The Ajivika sect was founded by Makkhali Gosala, a contemporary of the Buddha and Mahavira.
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By the 6th century BCE, Vedic Brahmanism was the dominant order. It rested on Vedic authority, elaborate sacrifices, and the ritual status of Brahmanas. Buddhism and Jainism grew up as organised challenges to this order, so it helps to place all three side by side.
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