Whence karma?

Abstract

How did the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution come into existence? W. D. Whitney called it ‘one of the most difficult questions in the religious history of India’, and Richard Salomon described it, a century later, as ‘the single greatest problem of Indological studies’. Scholars have proposed textual continuities leading up to texts that give expression to this belief, but questions can be and have been raised about such continuities. Worse, these studies do not deal with the observation made by A. B. Keith almost a century ago, viz., that ‘while the ideas thus recorded are of some value … the importance of transmigration lies precisely in the fact that the doctrine is an ethical system’. The one scholar who fully recognises the importance of ethicisation is Gananath Obeyesekere. Unfortunately, his theory is based on some disputable assumptions, which weaken it, as they weaken Richard Seaford’s theory, which builds on Obeyesekere’s ideas. This article offers an altogether different approach that puts this belief in line with beliefs that accompanied the appearance of social complexity elsewhere in the world.

I Introduction

The Indian belief in rebirth and karmic retribution ¹ did not originate in Brahmanical circles, and its earliest testimonies in Vedic literature borrowed the idea from a different milieu. This much I have argued elsewhere (Bronkhorst 2007), where I proposed that this belief originally belonged to a region of northern India that had not yet been brahmanised: Greater Magadha. ² However, I had no answer to the question how and why this belief had come into being to begin with. This is yet an important question. W. D. Whitney called it ‘one of the most difficult questions in the religious history of India’ in 1873, and Richard Salomon described it as ‘the single greatest problem of Indological studies’ a century later (in 1982). ³ Today the question still has no generally accepted answer, even though attempts have been made. The present article will look at some possible answers.

I drew attention, in my book Greater Magadha (Bronkhorst 2007), to the fact that the doctrine of rebirth and karmic retribution as it occurs in some early Upaniṣadic passages was ‘dressed up in a Vedic garb’ (ibid.: 120). A number of attempts made by various scholars to show the continuity between earlier Vedic passages and those Upaniṣadic passages do little beyond reconstructing the history of the ‘Vedic garb’, not of the doctrine that is dressed up in it. ⁴ Moreover, few of those studies take into account that traditional views on the chronology of those texts can no longer be maintained. ⁵ The present study will start from the assumption that the explanation of a major change in religious culture and, presumably, society such as the introduction of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution requires more than mere textual continuity.

It is in this context good to recall what Keith wrote a century ago (1925: 571–72): ⁶

The effort to find suggestions of the origin of transmigration in Vedic beliefs is worthy of more consideration. [Certain ideas have been] adduced … as suggesting the groundwork on which the Indian belief developed. It is not necessary to brush these ideas lightly aside, …. What is necessary is to point out that, while the ideas thus recorded are of some value … the importance of transmigration lies precisely in the fact that the doctrine is an ethical system. (emphasis added)

The question as to how ethics got into the picture must indeed be central in any attempt to explain the origin of karma. ⁷ In this article, I will explore two possible explanations: monetisation and urbanisation.

II Brahmanism and money

Before turning to monetisation and its connection with karma, some related issues must be dealt with, first of all the connection between Brahmanism and money.

The Maurya Empire was not particularly sympathetic towards Brahmanism and may indeed have been an existential threat to it. The collapse of this empire brought respite to its Brahmin subjects in some regions. The Śuṅgas reintroduced respect for Brahmins and their traditions. We have some contemporary evidence about this. The grammarian Patañjali informs us in his Mahābhāṣya that he officiated at a Vedic sacrifice of Puṣyamitra, the first Śuṅga ruler. ⁸ He further refers to a region called Āryāvarta that may coincide with the central part of the Śuṅga realm and is depicted as a Brahmanical dream world: the Brahmins who live there ‘store just a basketful of grain, … are not greedy, and [have] without any motive … attained the highest wisdom in some branch of learning’. No need to add, their Sanskrit is faultless. ⁹ Inscriptional evidence states that Puṣyamitra performed the Aśvamedha sacrifice, twice over. ¹⁰

With this information in mind, let us look at the following lines in Shailendra Bhandare’s (2006) numismatic overview of the Maurya–Gupta interlude, published in the volume Between the Empires:

The historical picture that coins offer is entirely contrary to the accepted notion of a Śuṅga empire. In a stark contrast with the puranic accounts reflecting a linear succession to an “imperial” throne, what we see is a spurt in urban centers, supporting localized money economies and a gradual demise of the “uniform” silver coinage into several regiospecific coinages that are a quaint mixture of civic and nominative … series. (Ibid.: 97)

Bhandare lists some further discrepancies between the puranic and the numismatic sources, then concludes:

“Śuṅgas,” if they ever existed, were probably as localized as the rest of the groups we know from coins in terms of their political prowess. Coins offer an entirely different picture of the post-Mauryan fragmentation, which links two singularly important phenomena of ancient Indian history—the fall of an empire and a concomitant spurt in urbanization with an increase in localized money economy. (Ibid.)

Bhandare’s observations inevitably raise the question whether and to what extent the numismatic evidence may distort the historical picture. Is it possible that the Śuṅga empire is not strongly present in the surviving numismatic evidence because its rulers had a different attitude toward money, and to coinage in particular?

The Brahmanical sympathies of the Śuṅga rulers might explain such a different attitude to at least some extent. It is known that Brahmanism had a dislike for city-life. Its literature either criticised it or went to the extent of pretending that there were no cities. ¹¹ Their attitude toward the new skill of writing was no different: they did as if it did not exist and pretended to stick to orality. ¹² It seems reasonable to expect that this ultra-conservative attitude also made them reject another recent invention, namely, the use of coins. Following this line of reasoning, one may wonder whether the Śuṅgas failed to invest in the production of coins for ideological reasons.

Bhandare’s article provides further evidence that may agree with this. It draws attention to the regiospecificity of the surviving coins. In the post-Maurya epoch, we learn, ‘each such regiospecific area is characterized by the presence of one or more urban centers. Indeed, coins of low metallic value constitute the basis of a monetized economy of such centers at a very basic level’ (Bhandare 2006: 83). This fits in well with a neglect of coins outside urban centres, that is, in the kingdom as a whole. This continued ‘until a gradual establishment of a uniform currency system under the Kushanas’ (ibid.: 84).

Another contribution to the same volume, this one by Harry Falk, may confirm the dislike for coinage on the part of rulers with Brahmanical sympathies. Falk distinguishes four phases in Indian history from the Mauryas to the Guptas. He characterises them as follows: ¹³

-The first phase comes with the Mauryas proper. … They came to power when Hellenistic culture was spreading widely. …

-The second phase was indigenous, covered by the succeeding dynasties of the Śuṅgas, the Kaṇvas, the so-called Mitras, Dattas, and other. …

-The third phase is dominated by intruding Westerners, be they of Iranian, Scythian, or Kushana stock. …

-The fourth phase is another phase of Indian resurrection. We recognize a dispersal of foreign rule and the return to traditional values.

Falk discusses a number of features that characterise these phases, many of which fit into an oscillating model. One of the features considered is coinage. This is what he says about it: ¹⁴

The oscillating model is obvious: the foreign or foreign-inspired dynasties aim at a high-value currency of precious metals, whereas the first indigenous dynasties, the Śuṅgas and their contemporaries, tend to neglect the issue, and the second indigenous wave, the Guptas and their affiliates, soon lose their way economically.

The attitude toward large-scale enterprise apparent in this scheme reminds us of the traditional arch enemies, i.e., the Paṇis in the Ṛgveda or the Asuras in the Upaniṣads: the Paṇis are the rich merchants, as are the Asuras. ¹⁵ The people responsible for the Vedas and Upaniṣads maintained ideals of a very different nature: having a thousand cows was treasured, but making riches through trade and barter was disdained. Acquiring riches as dakṣiṇā at a sacrifice was accepted, but organizing production units involving possibly impure cooperators was not the core interest of those defining what Vedic dharma is and what it is not.

These observations confirm that Brahmins in ancient India avoided monetary matters, and above all, we may assume, coins that had passed through so many impure hands. The gifts they received from political patrons were almost exclusively in the form of agrahāras, the use of land and villages. Such transactions were not monetary transactions, presumably for the very good reason that Brahmins avoided the impurity they associated with money.

The early treatises on Dharma confirm this. ¹⁶ They rarely mention money, and where they do, it is usually in connection with the payment of taxes or tolls for ferries (Brahmins were exempted from both) and fines. ¹⁷ However, they mention it often enough to let us know that in their world coins were in circulation, perhaps widely so. But Brahmins, it appears, stayed away from them, or at least they tried to.

The Arthaśāstra provides further information. According to this text,

special privileges are intended for [the Brahmin], particularly for a Śrotriya, that is, a Brahmin learned in the Vedas. It is recommended, for example, that land free from taxes and fines should be granted to a Śrotriya, just as such lands are to be granted to the priests and preceptors of the ruler (2.1.7). It is also laid down that the property of a Śrotriya, even when he dies without an heir, cannot escheat to the state like the property of other citizens (3.5.28). Brahmins in general are, it seems, to be exempted from payment at ferries and pickets (3.20.14). ¹⁸

It is clear from the above that money was used in India during the centuries surrounding the beginning of the Common Era, but that Brahmins were not among its most important users. In fact, traditional Brahmins avoided it. The use of money belonged primarily to other members of society, predominantly those living in cities and involved in trade.

This conclusion is not without consequences. It is known that the use of money—and monetisation in general—can affect people’s minds. ¹⁹ If, therefore, monetisation played a role in the appearance of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution, it is only fair to assume that it affected, first of all, the minds of those who actually used money on a day-to-day basis. This would be in line with our earlier finding according to which the new belief arose among city-dwellers and tradesmen, not among traditional Brahmins.

III From simple rebirth to karmic retribution

Let us now look at the explanation for the origin of karmic retribution that has been proposed by Gananath Obeyesekere in his book Imagining Karma (2002). ²⁰ Obeyesekere starts from the assumption that belief in rebirth (without karmic retribution) is so widespread in the world that it must have occurred in India too, though perhaps outside the Vedic tradition. As he puts it:

I will use the term rebirth eschatology to refer to theories of rebirth in societies that have no theory of karma, and I will use the term karmic eschatology to those that combine rebirth with karma. An overwhelming number of societies the world over have ‘rebirth eschatologies’; ‘karmic eschatologies’ are found only in Indic religions. (Obeyesekere 2002: 17)

What happened in India, according to Obeyesekere, is that the notion of karmic retribution came to be added to circular ‘rebirth eschatologies’. The reason this happened is ethicization:

I use the term ethicization to conceptualize the processes whereby a morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person’s destiny after death. Ethicization deals with a thoroughgoing religious evaluation of morality that entails delayed punishments and rewards quite unlike the immediate or this-worldly compensations meted out by deities or ancestors. (Ibid.: 75) ²¹

Two elements are missing in Obeyesekere’s model. He gives no arguments to support his claim that India’s karmic eschatology arose out of rebirth eschatologies. Nor does he answer the question why ethicisation took place. The statement that ‘a morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person’s destiny after death’ does not explain anything and gives, at best, a name (‘religious’) to the problem. In other words, Obeyesekere’s model does not explain the origin of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution.

Richard Seaford (2019; 2020: ch. 10) follows Obeyesekere in assuming—again without evidence or argument—that karmic eschatology, which he calls ethicized indiscriminate reincarnation (EIR), had its origin in rebirth eschatology; he calls the latter lineage reincarnation (LR). However, he rightly points out (as I did) that Obeyesekere ‘can explain neither why and how this development occurred in India and Greece nor why it occurred nowhere else’. ²² Instead he offers reasons to think that monetisation favoured the transition from LR to EIR. Since, contrary to Obeyesekere and Seaford, I do not postulate in this article that EIR (ethicized indiscriminate reincarnation, karmic eschatology) must have arisen out of LR (lineage reincarnation, rebirth eschatology), there is no reason to look for reasons why people made that transition (a transition that may have never taken place). The main thrust of Seaford’s arguments becomes this way irrelevant to our query. ²³

Seaford does however list 16 similarities between karma and money, which are quite independent of his postulated transition from lineage reincarnation (LR). ²⁴ These similarities are suggestive and may well have facilitated the adoption of the new belief once introduced. But the question why it was introduced remains open. ²⁵

IV A different approach

A comparison with developments elsewhere may help. Alan Bernstein and Paul Katz, in an article titled ‘The rise of postmortem retribution in China and the West’ (2010: 249), draw attention to ‘the roughly contemporaneous appearance, across great distances and cultural divisions, of moral death’ (my emphasis). ‘Moral death’, they explain, ‘imagines and postpones punishments that an evil-doer’s contemporaries and victims could not achieve themselves’ (ibid.: 201).

A particularly interesting feature that Bernstein and Katz’s article brings to light is the legalistic side of the judgments that the deceased must undergo in those different cultures. In connection with early China, they mention ‘legalistic procedures to judge the deceased (and in some cases the living)’ (ibid.: 226). The existence of a legal system, they propose, appears to have been behind the arrival of punishment after death:

One factor underlying the advent of the punitive underworld in China appears to have been the development of a standardised bureaucratic legal system during the Qin-Han era, when a highly centralised bureaucratic state superseded the decaying feudal system of the Warring States period and written legal texts began to be used in place of oaths in order to command assent and obedience. (ibid.: 240)

Developments in the West (primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) were not altogether different: ‘In Christianity, as in indigenous Chinese religion and religious Taoism, donations to religious personnel, like taxes to rulers, supported the very elites who allied in propagating an afterlife, a postmortem judicial system constructed in parallel with the secular government.’ (ibid.: 243). And again:

Western eschatological beliefs also have legalistic features, including infernal punishments similar to those in this world and the belief in a final judgement conducted in the manner of a court of law with adversarial testimony on both sides … Nonetheless, the idea that the underworld serves as both a court for postmortem judgement and as a subterranean prison seems more prevalent in China than in the West. (ibid.: 226). ²⁶

In the conclusion of their article, Bernstein and Katz state:

At both ends of the Eurasian landmass, in China and in the Mediterranean world of Israel, Greece, and Rome, at various times from the mid-eighth century BCE on, changes in views of death and justice combined gradually to segregate the otherworld, thereby introducing the concept of moral death. … The hope that evil-doers who had escaped human justice will suffer retribution after death sublimates frustrated longings for vengeance. In the West, Plato in philosophy, Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam adopted eternal punishment. (ibid.: 243)

It goes without saying that the Indian belief in karmic retribution is parallel to the beliefs in China and the West here considered in that it concerns punishment and reward after death (‘moral death’). We may assume that the Indian belief, like the other ones, projected beyond death legal or semi-legal procedures that were in place among the living. More recent descriptions of the fate of the deceased in India make them face post-mortem courts with various functionaries—including the scribe Citragupta who keeps accounts of their sins. ²⁷ However, there are differences. To the best of our knowledge there was no regular legal system in North India at the time when the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution came into being. Worse, it appears that writing did not exist in northern India until later. ²⁸

This is where monetisation might come in. Monetary transactions are only possible in situations where participants respect each other’s property, at least in principle, and abstain from interpersonal violence; without these there is no need for monetary transactions. ²⁹ A monetary economy is also likely to produce new differences in wealth, due to commercial success (or failure). Those who live and participate in such an economy necessarily interiorise the values without which it cannot function, and if they do not, they will be called to order. ³⁰ Moreover,

exchange, unless it’s an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts linger over time. If you imagine all human relations as exchange, then insofar as people do have ongoing relations with one another, those relations are laced with debt and sin. (Graeber 2014: 422)

In such an economy, debtors will have individual obligations and creditors will have individual rights. We may hypothesise that the values of a monetised economy are the values that people tended to project beyond death.

This takes us to a point where karmic retribution after death makes sense, and where monetisation might conceivably play a role. However, something important is missing. Karmic retribution in India is part of a belief in a cycle of rebirths that succeed each other potentially without beginning or end. Where does that belief come from? Do we have to return to the notions defended by Obeyesekere and Seaford according to which the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution derives from an earlier belief in rebirth without karmic retribution?

We do not. Note that the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution as we find it in India can be analysed into two parts: (i) a forward projection, and (ii) a backward projection. Ideas that people had come to apply to the future beyond death (‘forward projection’) were also applied to the past before birth (‘backward projection’). The present life itself is this way conceived of as the outcome of what one has done in earlier lives. Such an extension—the addition of backward projection—turns a linear process (a single life followed by retribution) into a circular one covering life after life after life, a process that stretches forward and backward in time potentially without limit. ³¹ The transition at death toward a life determined by one’s sins and virtues now becomes one step in a process that repeats itself in a potentially infinite series.

It stands to reason that the backward projection—that is, the extension of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution into the past before birth—exerted an attraction to those who were subjected to the newly arisen monetary economy of early Indian cities. It offered an explanation for the social inequalities it created and, perhaps, hope to those who found themselves at its losing end.

To avoid misunderstanding, let it be clear that there may be no way to prove beyond doubt that there was no belief in ‘lineage reincarnation’ or ‘rebirth eschatology’ in ancient India before the belief of rebirth and karmic retribution, as claimed by Obeyesekere and Seaford. ³² It is even possible that it existed and exerted some influence on the latter. The point here made is that we do not need to make such an assumption. Nor is it necessary to assume that ethicisation mysteriously came to be added to this hypothetical earlier belief. What I propose is the exact opposite. For a society to become monetised, it must interiorise certain values, which we may call its ethics. What presumably happened in India is that these values were projected into the future beyond death (not surprising in view of what happened elsewhere) and into the past before birth. No ethicisation needed to be added, because ethical considerations were the point of departure of this development. It led to a circular vision of life and death. ³³

V Chronology

The promising theory just described is seriously threatened by chronological considerations. Since Buddhism and Jainism presuppose the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution (their teachings are responses to the challenge posed by it), that belief must have been around before the Buddha and Mahāvīra started their teaching careers. Recent research has come to believe that the Buddha died around 400 BCE, perhaps a bit later; Mahāvīra was a contemporary who died before him. If we accept the highly plausible hypothesis that Mahāvīra had a precursor called Pārśva, ³⁴ we cannot but conclude that the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution was widespread in the appropriate region in around 500 BCE at the latest.

And yet, many scholars agree with Cribb (2005: 19) that ‘[i]t would not be impossible to push the date of [the earliest cup-shaped Indian coins] into the late fifth century BC …, but earlier seems implausible’. ³⁵ Others would place the origin of the punch-marked coins at about 430 BCE, or somewhat earlier, ³⁶ but this is still too close to the end of the careers of the Buddha and Mahāvīra (not to mention Pārśva), who must have grown up with the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution. Seaford (2020: 20) is aware of the problem, and, following Olivelle, opts for the latest possible date for the death of the Buddha, viz. 375–355 BCE. This, of course, does not save the situation: coins arrive too late to explain the origin of the belief of rebirth and karmic retribution.

It is no doubt for this reason that Seaford does not emphasise the role of coins, but rather that of incipient monetization. He says the following about it (2020: 21–22):

The movement of population into towns and cities was in all likelihood accompanied by a tendency towards the dissolution of kinship groups and of traditional culture, and by an increase in impersonal institutions, commerce, specialisation and individual property. One would also expect these developments to favour the convenience of using certain items — eventually a single item — as means of exchange and as measure and store of value, … Whether incipient monetisation in northern India used gold or silver (or both), or even some other item, is impossible to say. Gold and silver were — unless buried and never recovered — always too valuable to be left for archaeology to discover.

What can we conclude from all this? In principle, monetisation could be a cause, or an auxiliary cause, to the appearance of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution in India. It would even be a strong candidate, were it not that we know little, too little, about the degree of monetisation at the time when this belief arose. ³⁷ As it is, monetisation is a possible candidate, but one that cannot be accepted without serious reservations.

VI Urbanisation

Where does this leave us? It is appealing to think that monetisation might have played a role in the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution. However, the little we know about chronology seriously challenges this thought. Are there other factors that could have played a role?

Recall at this point that a comparative study of many different societies at various periods of time shows that ‘beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment only appear after the largest increases in social complexity’ (Whitehouse et al. 2019/2021). ³⁸ This remark also covers karmic retribution (which is, at least in part, supernatural punishment) and justifies us in looking for an increase in social complexity in ancient India. This inevitably takes us to India’s ‘second urbanisation’. ³⁹ Remember that ‘the earliest urban centres acted above all as agents of social change’, involving ‘the gradual replacement of kin groups with territorial units … paralleled by increasing status differentiation first within the kin groups … and then in the newly organised society’. ⁴⁰ There is a ‘connection between the rise of cities and the development of stratified societies’. Moreover, ‘[i]n order to maintain control in society and protect the emerging social order new instruments of control are required, and this results in the rise of territorially organised states, whose leaders are now sanctioned to use physical as well as moral resources to protect the rule of the law’. ⁴¹ The following passage indicates that the earliest cities of India’s second urbanisation were not primarily economic centres, but royal capitals: ⁴²

[T]he earliest signs of urbanisation come in the shape of massive fortifications, found at Kauśāmbi, Ujjain, Rājghat (ancient Varanasi), Campā, and possibly Rajgir. These fortifications can all be dated to the sixth century B.C., except Ujjain’s, which was dated to 650 B.C. by its excavator. They clearly represent enormous investments in manpower, testifying to the organising capacity of the janapadas, whose capitals they were built to protect. …

It is … tempting to see in these fortified settlements the formative state of urbanisation, where cities were royal capitals.

Whether or not order in these early cities was maintained with the help of legal courts, it seems impossible to doubt that there was order maintenance of some sort, ⁴³ and that this order and the way it was enforced was not identical with the kinship-based patterns that immigrants into the cities had been used to in their rural places of origin. ⁴⁴

Let us now return to our analysis of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution into two parts: forward projection and backward projection. Forward projection beyond death of the values of the present life, the so-called ‘moral death’, is not confined to India, as we saw. We also saw that the projected values elsewhere (i.e., in China and in the West) tended to be the legal values upheld in this-worldly courts. In our discussion so far, we deemphasised those legal values and concentrated on the values without which no monetised economy can function. However, chronological considerations put this proposal in peril. Might we be luckier concentrating, as in the other cultures considered, on legal values?

Consider now the backward-looking part of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution. Backward projection allowed urban dwellers to make sense of the inequality they found in their new surroundings. This was presumably very different from their rural experience, where family or kin group largely determined one’s status. Differences in status were henceforth believed to be the result of deeds one had performed in previous lives; they were to a large extent independent of family and kin.

The belief in rebirth and karmic retribution conflicted no doubt with the view that differences in status are due to differences concerning the essences of individuals. Karmic retribution allowed the lowest creature to rise, in a next life, to the highest status, as it might cause the fall of the highest members of society. It undermined the idea that individuals in society owed their elevated (or low) status to inherent features that inseparably belonged to them.

Interestingly, the composers of Vedic literature were partisans of this alternative belief. A famous hymn from the Ṛgveda, the Puruṣa-sūkta (10.90), explains how social hierarchy was part of creation in that Brahmins were the mouth of the primordial being, the Kṣatriyas (here called rājanyas) his arms, the Vaiśyas his thighs, and the Śūdras his feet. This cosmogonic myth is repeated (with minor variations) in numerous other Brahmanical texts. ⁴⁵ And the Brahmanical tradition was slow in abandoning this idea to make place for full karmic retribution. The Mānava Dharmaśāstra—better known as Manusmṛti ‘Laws of Manu’—dates from more than half a millennium after the beginning of the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution; ⁴⁶ yet it invokes an act of the creator to explain the differences between living beings: ⁴⁷

As they are brought forth again and again, each creature follows on its own the very activity assigned to it in the beginning by the Lord. Violence or non-violence, gentleness or cruelty, righteousness (dharma) or unrighteousness (adharma), truthfulness or untruthfulness — whichever he assigned to each at the time of creation, it stuck automatically to that creature. As at the change of seasons each season automatically adopts its own distinctive marks, so do embodied beings adopt their own distinctive acts.

In the immediately following verse, the creation myth mentioned above is referred to:

For the growth of these worlds, moreover, he produced from his mouth, arms, thighs, and feet, the Brahmin, the Kṣatriya, the Vaiśya, and the Śūdra.

It is not surprising that the early Buddhist texts criticise the very idea that Brahmins are born from the mouth of the creator god. ⁴⁸ They do not only criticise it because it is literally impossible, ⁴⁹ but also, and no doubt primarily, because they reject the Brahmanical claim of inherent and essential superiority. Indeed, another text of the early Buddhist canon contains the following verses: ⁵⁰

Not by birth does one become a Brahmin; not by birth does one become a non-Brahmin. By action one becomes a Brahmin; by action one becomes a non-Brahmin.

By action one becomes a farmer; by action one becomes a craftsman; by action one becomes a merchant; by action one becomes a servant.

By action one becomes a thief too; by action one becomes a fighting-man too; by action one becomes a sacrificer; by action one becomes a king too.

Note that the word translated ‘action’ is karma (Pāli kamman). In the opinion of the early Buddhists, therefore, there is nothing essential in the social status of individuals.

It would perhaps be going too far to maintain that the ‘inventors’ of the original doctrine of rebirth and karmic retribution did so in order to challenge the Vedic notion of social order, in which every individual’s position in society was part of their very essence. But it is not impossible either. It certainly seems plausible that the new doctrine was meant to replace a vision of society (perhaps an implicit vision) in which status and essence were somehow identified. There is in any case nothing ‘Vedic’ or ‘Brahmanical’ in the new doctrine, given that it challenges some fundamental notions of that tradition.

One could even argue that the new doctrine was profoundly un- Brahmanical, in that it is based on the idea that every person is individually responsible for their actions. This is not the Brahmanical way of thinking, as is particularly clear from the way the doctrine is brahmanised in the Bhagavadgītā. This text teaches that everyone, like the warrior Arjuna, ⁵¹ must abide by the rules of their caste, even if this goes against their ethical judgment. Since this issue will be dealt with at length in another publication, I will not say more about it here. ⁵² The doctrine of rebirth and karmic retribution appears to have been once an expression of a profound sense of individuality. If so, it subsequently made place for developments in which the individual had to move into the background.

VII Cyclicity

Let me conclude with some words about cyclicity. Cyclicity, as we have seen, is one of the distinguishing features of the Indian belief in rebirth and karmic retribution. Interestingly, it does not only characterise the potentially eternal cycle of rebirths. It also characterises succeeding world periods. Theoretically, cycles of rebirths and cycles of succeeding world periods could exist independently of each other. It seems however far more likely that the two are parallel expressions of a particular way of looking at the world. In other words, those who believed in the one also believed in the other.

This, in its turn, confirms the impossibility of a Brahmanical origin. ⁵³ Unlike the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution—which is mentioned a few times in some early Upaniṣads—cyclical time is unknown to Vedic literature. It is, on the other hand, part of Buddhist and Jaina thought right from the beginning. The first hint at long time periods in Brahmanical literature occurs in Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya, which can be dated to the second half of the second century BCE. This is more than three centuries after the beginnings of Buddhism and Jainism. Names for time periods (yuga at the end of certain compounds) appear for the first time in Brahmanical literature probably toward the end of the first century BCE, in the Yugapurāṇa. The lengths of long time periods in Buddhist and Jaina literature are often calculated in terms of multiples of the number 84; ⁵⁴ this number is absent from Vedic literature and appears for the first time in Brahmanical literature in connection with notions (such as Mount Meru) that it clearly borrowed from the tradition of Greater Magadha. ⁵⁵ The notion of cyclical time existed in Buddhism and Jainism (and their predecessors?) before it appeared in Brahmanical literature. It seems safe to conclude that the cyclical notion of rebirth and karmic retribution, too, existed in those circles well before it appeared in Brahmanical literature.