Buddhism, Jainism, and eastern Gangetic religious change

Detailed chapter description

Gangetic religious change Shared landscape, distinct traditions The eastern Gangetic plain was not the birthplace of one undifferentiated 'heterodox' movement. Buddhist, Jain, Ajivika, Brahmanical, and other renunciant or ritual communities shared roads, cities, courts, markets, languages, and arguments while maintaining distinct disciplines and claims to authority. Vaishali, Rajagriha, Champa, Mithila, and the wider Magadhan sphere appear repeatedly because political power, urban concentration, merchant wealth, and itinerant teaching converged there. Similar geography is therefore evidence of interaction, not doctrinal identity. A responsible history reconstructs specific institutions and debates before using broad categories such as sramana or Greater Magadha (Bronkhorst 2007; Gombrich 2006; Dundas 2002). Chronology: founders, texts, and transmitted memory The lives of the Buddha and Mahavira are commonly placed in the middle of the first millennium BCE, but exact dates remain debated. The canonical texts that narrate their lives and teachings were transmitted, organized, and redacted over time. This does not make them historically useless; it changes the kinds of claims that can safely be made. Named places, institutional vocabulary, social categories, and repeated narrative relationships can illuminate the world remembered by early communities, while speeches and event sequences require genre criticism. Absolute dates should be anchored in independently datable inscriptions or archaeology wherever possible rather than assigned merely because a canonical biography supplies a sequence (Gombrich 2006; Dundas 2002; Singh 2008). 140 The sramana field without a single origin story Renunciation, wandering, fasting, meditation, debate, and critiques of household or sacrificial life formed a broader religious field in which Buddhism and Jainism developed. Some practices may have had older precedents, and different groups explained karma, rebirth, liberation, selfhood, and ascetic effort in sharply different ways. It is therefore misleading to narrate one movement as simply copying another or to make all non- Vedic traditions expressions of a single anti-Brahmanical programme. The evidence supports sustained competition and borrowing within a shared intellectual environment whose boundaries and internal diversity remain subjects of scholarship (Bronkhorst 2007; Go