Indian Buddhist Attitudes toward Outcastes
Rhetoric around caṇḍālas
Jonathan A. Silk
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
J.A.Silk@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Indo-Iranian Journal 63 (2020) 128–187 content in the following to understand all claims made about “the Buddha” to refer to the statements found in Indian Buddhist literature (of all periods), and in this respect, despite the wide chronological and doubtless also geographical range of their composition, we find there a largely consistent rejection of the validity (though not the social reality) of the caste system. The present study, being devoted to ideology and rhetoric, will therefore largely set aside questions about how and indeed even if such rhetoric was actualized in the daily life of Indian Buddhists or Indian Buddhist communities (a question concerning which, on the whole, we lack good evidence).
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Abstract
Indian Buddhist literary sources contain both systematic and casual rejections of,
broadly speaking, the caste system and caste discrimination. However, they also provide ample evidence for, possibly subconscious, discriminatory attitudes toward outcastes, prototypically caṇḍālas. The rhetoric found inIndian Buddhist literature regarding caṇḍālas is examined in this paper.
Keywords
caṇḍāla – caste – Buddhism – prejudice – ancient India – discrimination
1 General Issues
Much attention has been devoted both from scholarly and other points of view
to the proposition that the Buddha (and implicitlyIndian Buddhismtout court)
propounded an anti-caste ideology.1 Since I believe that we know precisely
nothing about the Buddha as an individual, and moreover since serious questions may be raised about the earliest situation of Buddhism in India,2 I am
1 There is no point to offer a bibliography here, but see for instance Chalmers 1894; Law 1937:
11–26; Barua 1959; Fujita 1953; Ellis 2019. The topic of caṇḍālas in Indian Buddhism has also
not been ignored; see for instance esp. Miyasaka 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995a; Ujike 1985.
2 I refer particularly to the questions raised by Johannes Bronkhorst (for a brief summary see
Bronkhorst Forthcoming) about the unlikelihood of actual contact at the time of the Buddha
between brahmanical communities and the region where the Buddha is held to have lived.
Bronkhorst argues that there was, at the time of the Buddha, a cultural divide between the
indian buddhist attitudes toward outcastes 129
Where we do have ample
evidence is in regard to textual expressions, through which, I maintain, we
can detect reflections of the attitudes of their authors. These then, rather than
any actual socially embedded situation, form the central focus of this study.
However, in the conclusion I will dare to offer some speculations about what
relation there might be between attitudes and actions.
