Hinduism did not precede Buddhism

Now that I'm trying to describe the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, I feel a lot of sympathy for all the scholars to whom I’ve posed simple questions, only to be met by a brick of verbiage that makes a lot of artificial distinctions that, to me, don’t seem terribly important.

Because the differences between Buddhism and Hinduism are quite clear at least in my mind, but they're also quite difficult to articulate.

The explanation requires going back twenty-five hundred years, to the time when Buddhism arose. And at that time, there wasn't really a Hinduism either. It's debatable whether Hinduism exists even today, but it certainly didn't exist 2500 years ago.

Back then, there was a Vedic priestly caste. And this caste had a certain body of knowledge—the Vedas. And these Vedas were largely about how to intercede with the the Gods and perform rituals to make good things happen. There were other religions too—other priesthoods, other Gods, other rituals—but we're talking about the Vedic priesthood here.

And there was definitely a cosmology associated with the Vedas. There's some mention of dharma, some mention of reincarnation, etc. But it's kind of vague. It's sort of like the Greek afterlife—pretty vague—not a huge part of the Greek religion.

A much bigger part of the Vedic religion was the idea that through personal purity—abstaining from meat-eating and intercourse, in particular—the priest could attain great spiritual power on Earth. That was really the focus of the Vedic religion. Either you interceded with the Gods to gain their favor on Earth, or you undertook fasting and austerity to gain spiritual merit that you could, again, use to get good things on Earth.

The caste system sort of existed, but since it wasn't tied in a particular way to dharma and reincarnation, it didn't have a lot of shape. The Vedic priests were important because of their birth, but they also had a lot of learning! And the learning was what really counted—that's what allowed them to intercede with the Gods.

Then, in an area of India where the Vedic priesthood wasn't as prominent, these two guys were born, Buddha and Mahavira.¹ Neither of them were born in the priestly caste. Both of them preached doctrines that very much de-emphasized the kind of knowledge that the Vedic priests had.

Of the two, the one I understand the best (although I'm not an expert) is Buddhism. Buddha said through meditation we can achieve moksha, release from the earthly realm.

Now...he was definitely working with a concept that existed at the time—the idea that the world itself was an illusion, and that there was some underlying unity to all reality that was obscured by our focus on the earthly. These were certainly concepts that existed.

But...they weren't part of the Vedic religion in any actionable way. It's kinda like Hell. That idea was definitely lying around, but Christianity made use of it in a way that prior faiths hadn't. Because Judaism didn't really need the threat of hell to enforce compliance, since the Jewish God would quite literally just destroy your kingdom if you were out of line.

And that's generally how most people thought—if the Gods were unhappy with someone, then they would do something about it! If someone was prosperous, then the Gods must approve of them.

It took Christianity to make use of this concept—the afterlife—that already existed somewhat in peoples’ minds, and to turn it into a place of punishment where the mighty would be brought low.

Similarly, Buddhism took all these concepts that existed, about the fundamental one-ness of existence, and they turned them into a different path. You didn't need to gain power on Earth, either through fasting or through prayer, because power on Earth didn't matter! It was fundamentally pointless.

It's not that Buddhism opposed the Vedic religion in particular. It was just that all religions were kind of beside the point. You could definitely engage in commerce with the Gods, if you wanted, but ultimately you'd need to move past it.

The Vedic religion that existed at the time when Buddhism arose didn't bear a lot of resemblance to the Hinduism that we have today. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana existed as stories, maybe, but they hadn't been written down and imbued with spiritual meaning. Key elements of Hindu belief—dharma and reincarnation, hadn't yet been clearly elaborated. And key parts of Hindu practice also didn't yet exist. Right now, in 2024, the practice of Hinduism often involves Vaishnavism—giving your devotion to a god, Vishnu, who is your route to the godhead, your conduit to the one-ness of all things. In the 5th century BC, Vaishnavism probably didn’t exist yet.

A lot of elements of belief and practice weren’t yet developed, but what definitely existed was the Vedic priesthood. And those guys wanted to retain their jobs. They wanted patronage by kings and nobles and wealthy people.

Previously, they had this body of knowledge, the Vedas, that was very inaccessible. That was the point—they knew it, they'd memorized it. They could intercede with the Gods and other people couldn't. Even 2500 years ago, this knowledge was very old and very impressive! Like, can you imagine, someone who has these formulas that are hundreds and hundreds of years old? The age and depth of their knowledge is a very concrete evidence of their power.

But if you're a powerful person who's not a priest, you're liable to be quite impressed by Buddhism too. Because...you know, Buddhists had some teachings that they actually wanted to share! They were willing and able to teach you something! Their proselytizing and instruction was just a fundamentally very different activity from what the Vedic priesthood was engaged in.

Over time...the Vedic priesthood was forced to confront the critiques raised by Buddhism, and as a result the Vedic priesthood created the triad that defines contemporary Hinduism: dharma, the caste system, and the cycle of reincarnation. People on earth accrue merit by fulfilling the dharma of their particular caste, and this merit allows them to reborn in a higher station in a subsequent life. That’s the core Hindu belief, and it wasn’t really developed until after Buddhism arose.

I see the Mahabharata as being the record of the questioning that the Vedic priesthood undertook—why do we exist? What do we have to offer? It's the Vedic priesthood's sustained argument for its own existence. They elaborated a cosmology and a vision of the world that, although it provides room for moksha, also acknowledges that earthly existence is important, and that, for instance, Kings are still going to make war and conquer other people, because that is the kshatriya dharma.

It's not that Buddhists don't also believe that! But the emphasis is different. And Buddhists didn't also have a really cool story (the Mahabharata) to offer.

Then, of course, there's Vaishnavism (also a major element of the Mahabharata) which provides a route to the thing that, nowadays, we consider the core of religion: personal religion. You go and you have some direct experience of God. Through devotion to Krishna, all people can have an experience of the Godhead, even if they're not educated. And this becomes a progressively larger part of Hinduism over the years.

There was obviously a lot of political power involved. Buddhism was allied to some monarchs, who supported Buddhism, and the Vedic priesthood (who became the brahmin caste) were allied to other monarchs. The key thing is that prior to Buddhism, the Vedic priesthood didn’t necessarily have a coherent teaching to offer other people. After Buddhism arose, it did.²

The faiths grew together. They created each other. And eventually, Hinduism kind of took over Buddhism's doctrines.³ Most Hindus, if you were to talk about enlightenment or moksha, they'd say yes, those are important goals. It's not that Hindus don't believe the stuff Buddhists do—it's just that Hindus also believe other stuff.

Of course, right now, in 2024, Hinduism is inextricably linked with this very oppressive social system: the caste hierarchy. Such that it's quite impossible to talk about Hinduism without talking about caste. Hinduism is fundamentally about this hereditary class of people, the brahmins, who've convinced a lot of other people that they, the brahmins, are important and that they are worth keeping because they are inherently better, by reason of birth.

But this caste of people has responded over the past three thousand years to challenges. Today, this caste of people dominates the civil service and learned professions. They value learning. They have definitely constructed some very convincing rationales for why they're better than other people. The proof, ultimately, is in the learning they've preserved.

If the Buddha had prevailed, and the Vedic priesthood had lost their power, then...we would not have the Mahabharata, Ramayana, the Puranas, and all the literature that they subsequently wrote down and preserved.

Maybe that would be better for the world. I have no idea. But it was because people thought this knowledge was valuable—that's why the Vedic priesthood survived and, with it, the caste system.

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I wrote previously about the question of whether our current secular university system is superior to the caste system in terms of preserving knowledge. It's kind of an open question. But, as I've written before, the translation of the Mahabharata itself constitutes a kind of proof. Secular academics tried and failed to translate the complete Mahabharata into English for a century. Because, fundamentally, the interest wasn't really there. It took a powerful brahmin, living in India, a man who’s the epitome of the caste system as it currently exists, to do the task. And that's why I have the book to read.

T.S. Eliot believed that unless it was the property of a hereditary ruling class, high culture was meaningless. That high culture exists to shape the mores and principles of a ruling class. It's not just a text to read, in other words, it's a book to live by—one they regard as their own peculiar property. He believed that high culture must be the peculiar property of a certain ruling class, and that if you don't have a hereditary elite, then high culture will die, because...it's simply not needed.⁴

I’ve written before about how I think this ideal overstates the degree to which Victorian-era gentlemen actually valued, say, The Iliad. When Greek and Latin requirements were finally dropped from the entrance requirements from Harvard, it was because Harvard Pres. Charles Eliot pointed out that these institutions were graduating students who didn’t actually know that much Latin and Greek and who didn’t know that much of anything else either! Functionally, it was a system for creating uneducated people. This is a criticism many throughout history have made of the Oxbridge-style education. In his memoirs, Edward Gibbon in the 18th-century railed against Oxford for being quite bad at teaching Greek and Latin.⁵

But…at least in giving lip-service to the idea that you might need to know these texts, and that knowing these texts is important, that system did its part to perpetuate high culture. Obviously most of these 19th century Oxbridge or Harvard grads did not really know Greek or Latin, and they did not really read the classics. But…they valued it, because it was their particular property as a class. That’s, I think, what T.S. Eliot was saying.

And this class itself was supplanted. Those requirements were dropped, in America, because it just started to seem silly. In late 19th and early 20th-century America, there was such a demand for technical know-know. These old-fashioned institutions were comically behind in recognizing the importance of the applied sciences and how an institution that trains engineers and agriculturists needs to be different from that which trains gentlemen. That’s what the other Eliot, Charles Eliot, argued rather forcefully—right now we are training bad classicists. Let’s instead train good specialists. Let every person pick their specialty, and let them actually excel at the thing they pick.⁶

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In the late 19th-century, our top universities were making claims for themselves that they maybe couldn’t back up. They claimed to value knowledge, but they weren’t doing a particularly good job of safeguarding classical knowledge, and they were doing a terrible job of safeguarding scientific and technical knowledge.

Nowadays, these institutions face a similar crisis. If our top institutions genuinely feel like they're admitting students who are incapable of reading and understanding serious literature—then why do these universities exist? Their main purpose in life should be to find whatever students are capable of reading and then...teaching them to read better. That's the goal.

We are a nation of 350 million or so people. The kids exist. They can be taught. But our whole system would need to slowly, fitfully, calibrate itself for the task of finding and nurturing those kids.

The fact is, if loving the classics would get you into Columbia, then there'd suddenly be seven zillion kids who love the classics (just like for a while every striver had their own nonprofit).

But there's a broader question of...what are we even educating those people for? When lovers of literature enter academia, they often find it’s just another punishing realm of competition, with no heart, no care for individuals, and no genuine love for the texts—friends who’ve made the jump from academia to, say, the tech industry or to big corporate law firms tell me that in academia they were actually treated worse, because nobody valued their work,

Even if someone was to enter this institution with a genuine love of learning, and even if they were to excel and to get a PhD, then what? Ultimately the hope would be that they would get a job at one of these institutions and someday safeguard our culture themselves.

But in reality it's highly likely that they'd end up at age thirty-five as an adjunct professor, earning forty thousand a year, with no job security, and regarded as somewhat of a failure compared to their peers who went to law school or became doctors or entered the civil service (to say nothing of those who entered finance or consulting or tech).

This is something everyone can see! Our culture as a whole sends the message that if you love ancient texts (at least within the context of a university system) then you will be punished for that love. When the people who most love something end up being the most embittered and most harmed by it, then you wonder...is it a good thing to love?

Personally, I love ancient texts, but I am (on an economic level) supported by my wife and family. Is that really a viable path for our culture as a whole?

Maybe.

It does seem like, in India, love for the ancient texts is supported by a much more ad-hoc, less formal system. For instance, my grandmother has a guru she's been paying for decades, in part to teach her about the texts (I remember a lot of lessons about the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, which is a part of the Mahabharata).

My grandmother's patronage allows this man to survive. But it's of course tied up in a very concrete feeling of spiritual consolation she gets from learning about these texts and being exposed to truths about the nature of reality. Which is that everything ultimately is one, it is unified, and that although there is a lot of suffering in our earthly existence, there is some meaning in fulfilling your dharma—first as a wife and mother, and now, as a seeker after wisdom.

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Further Reading

In my reading about the history of the classics and of the liberal arts education, few books have been as succinct and readable as Eric Adler’s Battle for the Classics. It’s about the 19th-century fight to end the Greek and Latin requirements at elite institutions. But it’s also about the whole sweep of liberal arts education and about how the same debates have endlessly recurred. Which is…does a liberal arts education actually teach kids anything at all? And, even if it does, is gaining that knowledge actually the best use of their time in college?

The answers to these questions are very complex. It’s not a polemic at all. The man is a classics professor. It wasn’t written to get you riled up, the way most people write books like this. It’s just a careful and thoughtful disquisition on the topic. As you know, I hate giving quotations from a book, because ultimately a book consists of a totality that you can only get by reading the book itself. In this case, that totality is the very humane worldview of the author and a deep desire to grapple with the complexity of these questions. Amongst other things, the book is just extremely valuable as a reference! I feel very grateful that an author actually took the time to learn and summarize so many of the debates on this topic, and to present them so reasonably. Highly encourage you to read the book yourself.

Milestones

Over the weekend Woman of Letters got both its 2,000th subscriber and its 100th paid subscriber. I do actually send out a paid post roughly every other Sunday, though you only get those emails if you’re a paid subscriber. Usually they’re a bit more personal in nature than stuff on the main feed. This one has a long aside about my (over)use of exclamation points. My archives also get pay-walled after about two months. I keep my prices as low as Substack will let me, but $30 a year is not a small amount of money—it’s about cost of a digital subscription to The Paris Review, which would obviously be a lot more content!

Personally I’m just happy that you’re around. I recently also celebrated publishing my two-thousandth post. Something like the first 1900 of those were on Wordpress, where I had maybe one-twentieth the number of readers as I do on Substack. Thank you so much for your time and your interest.

1. Both of these people had given names, but they’re mostly known by their epithets.

2. It’s also worth noting that the Vedic priesthood was often not supported by state power! The heartland of India was ruled by Muslims for five hundred years, and yet the Vedic priesthood endured. The British had a closer relationship than the Mughals did to the brahminical caste, but still…it was not a Hindu regime. It was a foreign power. The British even went through a phase where they encouraged conversion to Christianity, before the cost (in terms of upsetting Indians) was not remotely worth the benefits.

3. Sometime in the tenth or eleventh century, Buddhism died out in India. Virtually all of the contemporary practicing Buddhists in India today are descendents of people who converted in the early 20th-century as part of the neo-Buddhist movement.

4. I’m taking these ideas from T.S. Eliot’s Notes Toward A Definition Of Culture.

5. Gibbon’s memoir is really entertaining and readable. I listened to the audiobook, personally. Definitely worth a look, if you’re interested in learning what kind of person would undertake to write something like Decline and Fall. The answer is that although he was a member of a certain social class, Gibbon was certainly not a typical member of it! In college he converted to Catholicism, for one thing, which resulted in his father stealing him away to Switzerland and putting him under the tutelage of a reverend who essentially kept him secluded from popery. He got so bored that he started filling in the gaps of his Oxford education, teaching himself Greek and Latin for real, through a series of exercises. And once he had something else to occupy him, he kinda forgot all about being Catholic. He was looking for meaning, and he found it in the education that Oxford neglected to give him.

6. The ideas in this paragraph are basically drawn Eric Adler’s Battle of the Classics.