Chapter 7

Lineages, Emerging
Exemplars, and
Movements
JAMES M. HEGARTY

The present chapter considers early South Asian religious history through the
lens of its recurrent and particular concern with lineage and with exemplars.
We will explore, by means of the analysis of a series of narratives drawn not
just from Brahmanical, but also Buddhist and Jain traditions, how competing
accounts of the nature of the cosmos, the significant past, and the role of
human and divine agents developed in the latter part of the period of inquiry
of this volume. We will argue that the differing approaches to lineage and to
exemplification were competitively elaborated by the three traditions in such a
way that they are better read together than apart.
It is important when seeking to reconstruct the religious history of South
Asia to acknowledge not just the limitations of the data, but also the role of
theory in determining, for the most part, what we do and do not pay attention
to. There is, in particular, a recurrent desire for discernible boundaries in the
historiography of early South Asia. These include boundaries between religions,
between peoples, between social estates, and between modes of production.
These boundaries are often analytically rather than empirically founded. What
we certainly find in South Asia to the second century BCE is a competitive
and dynamic religious economy. We will see, however, that boundaries and

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categories are more fluid than has often been imagined and that, when they are
asserted, it is often in relation to the idea of lineage and the powers of great
exemplars.
It is also worth noting that a focus on discreet religions, all too often, leaves
us dealing only with those traditions that maintained a steady rate of growth and
longevity. Thus, the success of a given religion often leads to a disproportionate
concern with the recovery of its narrative of development rather than that
of the society in which it developed (a fact that has been long known, and
corrected for, in the study of Christianity. See Brown 1964: 1109; Stark 1997:
93). Buddhism, Jainism, and Brahmanism are well known to the general reader
if much contested, but the very awkwardness of the neologisms Lokāyatism and
Ājīvikism, for example, demonstrate that not all systems of thought fared so
well. It is also the case that a focus on distinct “-isms” leads us to underestimate
the complex ways in which religious practitioners interacted with one another.
It is an implicit argument of this paper that the story of the development of
the Hindu traditions that we know today cannot be told without exploring
the complex, and plural, religious context of early South Asia. Armed, then,
with the categories of lineage and exemplar, we must throw ourselves into the
maelstrom of social and political life in early South Asia, if we are to appreciate
the full dynamism and complexity of the history of its religious movements.
The approach taken here is not a chronological one. Instead, we will explore
a series of case studies that demonstrate the complex and revealing ways in
which lineages and exemplars were deployed within competing religious
movements—chiefly Brahmin, Buddhist, and Jain—in early South Asia. Sanskrit
texts are notoriously difficult to date, as is well known. In the present paper, we
make use of late Vedic and Epic sources, as well as Buddhist and Jain materials.
While some of these texts are likely to post-date the period of inquiry of this
volume (2000–200 BCE), at least in their more developed forms, we take them
to represent currents of thought (however imperfectly) that were significant in
the latter half of the first millennium BCE, as the three traditions took shape in
the context of the pax Maurya and its aftermath.

CASE STUDY 1: FROM ETYMOLOGY TO

GENEALOGY IN THE BR̥ HADDEVATĀ
Our inquiry will commence with the Br̥ haddevatā, which is a post-Vedic text
that retains a strong commentarial connection to Vedic sources and narrative
connections to the Mahābhārata. The work is closely related to the Nirukta,
the earliest Indian manual of etymology. The earliest portions of the text date
to sometime about a century after the Nirukta (Tokunaga: 1998), which is
itself dated between the fifth and third centuries BCE (see Sarup 1984 [1920];
Bronkhorst 2001). The text itself is taken up with grammatical theory, the

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naming of the deities of various Vedic hymns and mantras, the seers that are
responsible for various hymns, and the orders in which the hymns might
be read. This is combined with a considerable amount of narrative material
(about one-quarter of the whole) much of which is found, in variant form,
in the Mahābhārata. Stories are introduced to explain both the content and
context of Vedic hymns. The Br̥ haddevatā is an important transitional text; in
it, commentary on Vedic terminology is connected to the origin and history
of important people (much mentioned, but little described in the Vedas
themselves). It is thus instrumental in the forging of a cosmo-history that is
built on Vedic foundations.
The transition from words to people is made clear if we take up one of the
Br̥ haddevatā’s many birth narratives (all translations from the Bṛhaddevatā are
those of Macdonell 2007 [1904]: 128–215):

There were (once) two seers’ sons, Ucathya and Br̥ haspati. Now Ucathya’s
wife was Mamatā by name, of the race of Bhr̥ gu. Br̥ haspati, the younger
(of the two), approached her for sexual intercourse. Now at the time of
impregnation the embryo addressed him: Here am I previously engendered;
you must not cause a commingling of seed. Br̥ haspati, however, could not
brook this remonstrance about the seed. So he addressed the embryo: ‘Long
darkness shall be your lot.’ and (hence) the seer, Ucathya’s son, was born
with the name Dīrghatamas (long-darkness). He when born distressed the
gods, having become suddenly blind. The gods, however, gave him (the use
of) his eyes; so he was cured of his blindness. (4.11–15)

Here the movement from etymology to history is very clear; the story we are told
is an elaborate “back-formation” from the sage’s name. The Vedic commentator
Dviveda, in his Nītimañjarī, repeats this material as an explicit commentary on
R̥ gveda 1.47.3 (which are among the sixteen hymns attributed to Dīrghatamas
in the anukramaṇīs, from R̥ gveda 1.140–156). In the Br̥ haddevatā, Vedic hymns
become jumping off points for narrative exploration of the significant past
and, in particular, birth and family histories. This implicitly models a mode of
ongoing inquiry into the past. The Br̥ haddevatā takes up the origin of the sages
to which earlier texts, such as the aforementioned Nirukta, referred only in
passing. Here is the account of the birth of the great sage Bhr̥ gu, for example:

Prajāpati, desirous of offspring, offered a sessional sacrifice (sattra) lasting

three years, accompanied by the Sādhyas and the All-gods, we are told.
There came Vāc in bodily form to the ceremony of the initiation. On seeing
her there, Ka’s (Prajāpati’s) and Varuṇa’s semen was simultaneously effused.
Vāyu scattered it in the fire at his will. Then from the flames Bhr̥ gu was born,
and the seer Aṅgiras among the coals (aṅgāra). (5.97–9)

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The story continues with the birth of Atri. It then moves to the descendants of
Aṅgiras:

Br̥ haspati was the son of the seer who was born from the coals (Aṅgiras).
Br̥ haspati’s son was Bharadvāja, who is called Vidathin,
And who was a preceptor (guru) amongst the Maruts, was (thus) the grandson
of Aṅgiras (5.102–3)

In telling of the births of Agastya and Vasiṣṭha, the Br̥ haddevatā emphasizes the
descendants of the latter:

Vasiṣṭha and the Vasiṣṭhas thus (became) Brāhmaṇas in the office of Brahmin
priest, most worthy of fees in all rites and sacrifices.
Therefore one should honor with fees (dakṣiṇa) all such descendants of
Vasiṣṭha who may at any time even today be present at a sacrificial assembly
(5.158–9)

Later we shall see, in a text whose connection to Vedic source materials is

much more tenuous, the Rāmāyaṇa, that it is Vasiṣṭha who will be a stalwart
defender of the royal and religious status quo. In the material just cited, the line
of descent is emphasized to the present day (adyāpi, meaning “even today” or
“even now”) and this is done with a pronounced focus on proper payment. In
this way, we are moving from an emphasis on the narrative expansion of the
etymologies of proper names, as in our first example, to a fully-fledged sense of
vaṃśa, of lineage, genealogically conceived. Thus, as the Br̥ haddevatā extends
and develops its Vedic source materials, it does so with a consciousness of the
realia of the religious life of its period of composition (and, in particular, its
economic dimensions). Laurie Patton’s (1996: 27) perspective on “narrative
commentary” is instructive here: “the function of narrative as commentary is
the opposite of the Eliadean escape from time. In the itihāsa explanations,
mantra is inserted into the progression of events (one might say inserted into
time) in order to provide a credible framework for its efficacy.”
As this happens, we see also the Vedic seers of the mantras “inserted into
time,” as Patton puts it, and, if the mantras are shown to be efficacious, this
cannot but empower the original seers and their descendants. We are moving
further away from commentary on the minutiae of the Vedas (and in particular
the R̥ gvedic hymns) towards a much fuller construction of the significant
past. This is something that is happening in a piecemeal fashion across Vedic
commentarial literature. For example, the creation of the great sage Bhr̥ gu is
taken up again in the opening of the Gopatha Brāhmaṇa (1.1.3), while there
is a tale of his youthful exploits, and cheekiness, in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa

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(11.6.1.1). It is, however, in the Sanskrit epics that this process of the narrative
consolidation of Brahmanical thought is taken much further. This development
cannot, however, be read in isolation. The establishment of a preferred account
of the significant past, focused as it is on a rich blend of lineages and exemplars,
is part of a larger process of narrative production in a deeply competitive
religious environment in the latter half of the first millennium BCE.

CASE STUDY 2: LINEAGE AND

DEBATE IN THE RĀMĀYAṆA
The role of religious competition as a stimulus for narrative is made very clear
in the second book of the Rāmāyaṇa. Our first speaker is a man called Jābāli,
who is not without confidence in the veracity of his own opinions. However,
when we join him, he is on the back foot: he started strongly, with a series of
pithy aphorisms that reflect a strongly atheistic vision of the cosmos. It is a
vision that repudiates the idea of lineage—conceived in genealogical terms—in
its very opening (translations are from Goldman 2007: 299–305):

kaḥ kasya puruṣo bandhuḥ kim āpyaṃ kasya kena cit |

yad eko jāyate jantur eka eva vinaśyati || Rām.2.100.3
“What man is kin to anyone, what profit has anyone in anyone else. A person
is born alone, and all alone he must die.”

arthadharmaparā ye ye tāṃs tāñ śocāmi netarān |

te hi duḥkham iha prāpya vināśaṃ pretya bhejire || Rām.2.100.12
“The men I grieve for, and I grieve for no one else, are all who place
‘righteousness’ above what brings them profit. They find only sorrow in this
world, and at death their lot is annihilation just the same.”

However, Jābāli’s audience is King Rāma and he gives our hapless sage short
shrift: Rāma summarily rejects Jābāli’s views:

bhavān me priyakām ārthaṃ vacanaṃ yad ihoktavān |

akāryaṃ kārya-saṃkāśam apathyaṃ pathya-saṃmitam || Rām.2.101.2

“What you have said in the hopes of pleasing me is wrong with only a
semblance of right; it is harm that simulates help.”

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Rāma strenuously defends the productivity of the pursuit of virtue. He cites the
example of the divine king, Indra, who performed a hundred sacrifices to obtain
his lordship over the gods, and of the asceticism of the great sages. He invokes, in
short, a divine exemplar to justify his rejection of Jabāli’s views. He finishes with
a somewhat pietistic conclusion. It is delivered in a different meter to the bulk
of his speech: the triṣṭubh. This is in contrast, of course, to the majority-meter of
the Rāmāyaṇa, the anuṣṭubh. The triṣṭubh carries Vedic associations (though one
would not want to push this too far); Rāma’s conclusion is thus metrically as well
as religiously conservative. It is certainly marked as an authoritative hymn-like
composition and is somewhat Polonius-like in its register:

satyaṃ ca dharmaṃ ca parākramaṃ ca; bhūtānukampāṃ priyavāditāṃ ca |

dvijātidevātithipūjanaṃ ca; panthānam āhus tridivasya santaḥ ||
Rām.2.101.30
“Truthfulness, righteousness, and strenuous effort, compassion for creatures
and kindly words, reverence for Brahmins, gods, and guests is the path, say
the wise, to the highest heaven.”

dharme ratāḥ satpuruṣaiḥ sametās; tejasvino dānaguṇapradhānāḥ |

ahiṃsakā vītamalāś ca loke; bhavanti pūjyā munayaḥ pradhānāḥ ||
Rām.2.101.31
“Those men who are earnest in righteousness and keep company with the
wise, who are supremely generous, nonviolent, and free from taint, those
supreme and mighty sages are the ones truly worthy of reverence in this
world.”

If this was not enough, Valmīki, the putative author of our text and, of course,
the ādikavi or first poet himself, in the opening line of the present dialogue
describes our nihilistic sage as dharmāpetya, “at variance with the law”
(although Northern manuscripts describe him as quite the opposite, which adds
a note of ambivalence to proceedings). In contrast, he describes our righteous
king—and sometimes god incarnate—as dharmajña (law-knowing). There is
thus no doubt—at least in the critically reconstituted text—as to which way
our author leans in this clash of contending ideologies. Yet it is worth noting
that Jābāli is described as a high-ranking Brahmin (brāhmaṇa-uttamaḥ) in the
opening of this dialogue, so he is not without a certain status.
So upset is Rāma at the words of Jābāli, another even more prominent sage,
Vasiṣṭha, has to explain away the latter’s words as an aberration (the result
of how upset Jābāli is at Rāma’s banishment from his ancestral kingdom). He

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assures king Rāma that Jābāli “knows the comings and goings of this world”
(jānīte lokasyāsya gatāgatim). This is perhaps a lightly humorous comment,
as Jābāli’s philosophical stance is one that does not admit of gatāgati, which
can refer, not just to general activities, but, more metaphysically, to death and
rebirth. Vasiṣṭha follows this assertion, not with a contending philosophical
viewpoint, at least not explicitly, but with a genealogy, which spans from the
origin of the cosmos to that of the royal house of Rāma. For Vasiṣṭha, lineage
is everything:

imāṃ lokasamutpattiṃ lokanātha nibodha me |

sarvaṃ salilam evāsīt pr̥ thivī yatra nirmitā |
tataḥ samabhavad brahmā svayambhūr daivataiḥ saha ||
sa varāhas tato bhūtvā projjahāra vasuṃdharām |
asr̥ jac ca jagat sarvaṃ saha putraiḥ kr̥ tātmabhiḥ ||
ākāśaprabhavo brahmā śāśvato nitya avyayaḥ |
tasmān marīciḥ saṃjajñe marīceḥ kaśyapaḥ sutaḥ ||
vivasvān kaśyapāj jajñe manur vaivastavaḥ smr̥ taḥ |
sa tu prajāpatiḥ pūrvam ikṣvākus tu manoḥ sutaḥ || Rām.2.102.2–5

“I want you now, master of the world, to learn from me the origin of the
world. Everything was once just water, and within this water the earth was
fashioned. The self-existent Brahmā then came into existence with the gods.
He then became a boar, raised up the treasure-laden earth, and created the
whole moving world with the help of his accomplished sons.
Brahmā the everlasting, the eternal and imperishable, arose from space. He
begot Marīci, and Marīci a son named Kaśyapa.
Kaśyapa begot Vivasvan, the Sun. Manu is recorded as the son of Vivasvan—
he was the first lord of creatures—and the son of Manu was Ikṣvāku.”

The genealogy continues for a further twenty-six verses and, as it does so, it
enshrines—none too subtly—primogeniture as the law of kings. The speech is,
of course, ideological. The house of Rāma is connected to the primary creative
act of Brahmā; a theistic universe is thus established (a thousand miles from
the materialism of Jābāli, who said there was nothing beyond the world of our
immediate experience). Even as the universe is presented with all its gods and
kings in good order, a teleological history is asserted: generations of gods and

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 154 A Cultural History of Hinduism in Antiquity

kings bring us to righteous Rāma. Vasiṣṭha—the Br̥ haddevatā’s Brahmin par

excellence—knows, then, in the Rāmāyaṇa, which side his bread is buttered on.
In his paper on the Jābāli episode, Walter Ruben (1965) considers Vasiṣṭha
to be Jābāli’s defender; there is some truth in this, though Ruben rather misses
the point by considering Vasiṣṭha to be philosophically tolerant. He certainly
defends Jābāli’s status as a Brahmin and he cleverly refocuses the debate. Yet,
in so doing, he utterly sidelines and implicitly rebuts Jābāli’s philosophical
position (contra Ruben 1965: 458–9). Vasiṣṭha presents a hierarchical model
of the cosmos as a means of avoiding philosophical debate. Moreover, he
suppresses a position that metaphysically conduces to realpolitik (by means
of a denial of transcendental ethics and inherited status). Such a realpolitik
would have been useful in Rāma’s present predicament (of banishment to the
forest), but it poses a long-term danger, as it might lead to social and religious
anarchy. Rāma and Vaṣiṣtha know this. Vaṣiṣtha’s vision of cosmos and dynasty
is thus heavy-handedly monarchical. It is also territorialized in its mention of
both rival tribes and, in its culmination, vassal kingdoms. This conclusion is
delivered, once again, in ponderous triṣṭubh:

sa rāghavāṇāṃ kuladharmam ātmanaḥ sanātanaṃ nādya vihātum arhasi |

prabhūtaratnām anuśādhi medinīṃ prabhūtarāṣṭrāṃ pitr̥ van mahāyaśāḥ ||

Rām.2.102.31

“This is the age-old custom of your own house, the House of the Rāghavas,
and you must not abandon it now. You must govern the earth with its
abundant treasures and abundant vassal kingdoms, and like your father win
great fame.”

Vasiṣṭha’s speech thus constitutes a theistic and royalist history, a genealogy,

a geography of conquest, and, implicitly, a model of both royal honor (“great
fame”) and heresy (precisely that which is rejected). The semi-pastoral world
of R̥ gvedic religion and politics (richly examined by Caley Smith in Chapter
1) is distant from this territorialized and centralized monarchical vision. What
the Br̥ haddevatā shows in a transitional state, the Rāmāyaṇa reflects in a much
more developed form. It furthermore explicitly places this narrative expansion
of lineal history in the context of religious debate. This, in turn, reflects a
social and historical context that is both increasingly urbanized (from 600
BCE onwards) and increasingly competitive in religious terms (Erdosy 1988;
Chakravarthi 1987; Olivelle 1992).
Jābāli’s views reflect, of course, those of the Lokāyata or Cārvāka school,
whose system of thought is marked for its studied skepticism. It finds mention

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in Buddhist, Brahmin, and Jain sources, but no major independent works

survive. The canonical Buddhist work, the Dīgha Nikāya, includes a Lokāyata
sage and one Ajitakeśakambala, who was a contemporary of the Buddha. The
Buddhists associate him with the doctrine of “annihilationism” or ucchedavādha
(literally “the doctrine of destruction”), of which they also hold a low opinion.
The Lokāyatas emphasized the transience of existence and the importance of
happiness in one’s lifetime.
The dialogue between Jābāli and Rāma is an interesting one for an inquiry
into the saliency and power of lineage and exemplars in early South Asia.
It sets the scene for the case studies that follow this one and dramatizes the
interaction of contending religious ideologies in early South Asia; the Lokāyata
philosophy comes into conflict with conservative Brahmanical ideas and, at
least on this occasion, it is showered with opprobrium by both hero and author.
Rāma’s response is a neat synthesis of sacrificial and ascetic elements; kings
sacrifice while sages engage in ascetic activities and all is as it should be, while
Vasiṣṭha presents cosmo-historical tableaux. Our text is thus propagandistic.
It stages religious debate in order to emphasize the superiority of a particular
viewpoint, which focuses on the exemplification of virtue only in the context
of a correctly ordered and maintained lineage (of gods and kings). There is
little real openness in the presentation—the dialogue form is used to present a
monarchical and genealogically dependent vision of the reciprocity of the king
and the Brahmin, as holders respectively of temporal and ritual authority. Jābālī
is, in short, talked at rather than with.
Whether the Jābāli episode is a foil for a triumphalist state charter or the
hyperbole of an elite in decline, or something again entirely, is a matter of
historical inference beyond the scope of the present chapter (for debates
concerning regional cultural and religious differences and competition over the
category of Brahmin, see, respectively, Bronkhorst 2007 and McGovern 2019).
Yet the very presence of such a dialogue in the Rāmāyaṇa suggests the powerful
appeal, or at least the literary profile, of even the most radical strains of thought
in early South Asia, as well as a means of contesting them.

CASE STUDY 3: LINEAGES TEXTUAL AND

DIVINE IN THE MAHĀBHĀRATA
The Mahābhārata, the other great early South Asian narrative poem, in its
twelfth book, offers us a little more detail with regard to the creative agency of
Brahmā and the Vedas:

vedā me paramaṃ cakṣur vedā me paramaṃ balam |

vedā me paramaṃ dhāma vedā me brahma cottamam ||

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mama vedā hr̥ tāḥ sarve dānavābhyāṃ balād itaḥ |

andhakārā hi me lokā jātā vedair vinākr̥ tāḥ |
vedān r̥ te hi kiṃ kuryāṃ lokān vai sraṣṭum udyataḥ || MBh.12.335.29–30

“The Vedas are my supreme eyes, my supreme strength,

My supreme refuge; and the Vedas are my highest truth.
Yet my Vedas, by the power of the two Demons, were stolen.
For, without the Vedas, my worlds are born and built in darkness.
For, without the Vedas, how, indeed, should I diligently act to create the
worlds?”

What is made clear here is that the world is predicated on the agency of Brahmā
and the presence of the Vedas. The Rāmāyaṇa narrative made no such mention
of the Vedas as the blueprint of creation. The Mahābhārata synthesis presented
here is thus one in which textual authority and divine and human agency are
more fully integrated. The cyclical understanding of cosmic time—the idea of
the mahāyuga and yuga, the eon and era respectively—is fleshed out in both
the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata. However, it is done somewhat inconsistently.
Both texts more or less subscribe to the idea of there being four distinct eras
in each eon (the well-known kr̥ ta, dvāpara, treta, and kali yugas, whose moral
and religious character vary), but even this is subject to variation (see González-
Reimann 2002).
The Mahābhārata combines accounts of creation and, indeed, recreation
with a vast amount of concrete genealogical detail and a dependency on
prophecy, oath, and curse to act as the engine of narrative progression. It is
less concerned with reincarnation based on the operation of karma, which is
the driver of much narrative in Buddhist and Jain texts, as we shall see. The
Rāmāyaṇa’s central narrative, of the trials and tribulations of Rāmā and Sītā, is
largely unconcerned with issues of reincarnation or karma (setting aside divine
incarnation for a moment). The Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata are only
lightly seasoned with transmigratory narrative. In the Mahābhārata, the story
of Ambā, the reason for Draupadī’s five husbands, the birth of Vidura, and a
few other isolated tales are all that we are provided with (Vidura’s particular
life history is, as I have argued elsewhere, a considered response to Buddhist
and Jain thought. See Hegarty 2019). In the Rāmāyaṇa there is even less in
the way of rebirth stories: Kausalyā adduces an earlier birth to explain her
misfortune and Sītā’s past life as Vedavatī is mentioned in the context of a
prophecy of Rāvaṇa’s eventual demise. However, there is sometimes mention

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of the transmigratory benefits of the hearing of the Rāmāyaṇa or Mahābhārata

in the two texts in their phalaśruti—enumerations of the benefit of the hearing
of a religious text. These, as often as not, focus instead on healthy offspring and
other more this-worldly benefits. This is notwithstanding the fact that rebirth is
well established in other Brahmanical texts of the period. The probably largely
contemporaneous Dharmasūtras are full of material related to reincarnation and
karma. For example, the Āpastamba Dharmasūtra (2.2.6) states, in Olivelle’s
translation:

When a thief or a heinous sinner, whether he is a Brahmin, a Kṣatriya or

a Vaiśya, completes his sojourn in the next world living in an interminable
hell, he is born here again—a Brahmin as a Cāṇḍāla, a Kṣatriya as a Paulkasa,
and a Vaiśya as a Vaiṇa. In like manner, others, when they fall from their
castes as a result of sinful acts, are born as outcastes in wombs that are the
aftermath of their sins.

Indeed, Dharmaśāstric literature presents us with vast lists of the transmigratory

consequences of wrongdoings of various types. This does not translate,
however, into a transmigratory narrative web, such as we find in broadly
contemporaneous Buddhist or Jain literature (see Appleton 2015 for details of
the narrative universe of Buddhists and Jains).
In the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, rebirth is more or less cosmologically
and doctrinally integrated (though the details of this integration and where its
philosophical loyalties lay are open to question and are the subject of much
scholarly debate), but there is a distinct lack of narrative that capitalizes on
this. Instead, lineage dominates. Great characters embody and exemplify the
characteristics of their class and pedigree (or subtly undermine them).
What the Rāmāyaṇa mentions in passing, and the Mahābhārata deals with
more fully, is the matter of divine incarnation. Rāma’s divine status is by no
means emphasized in the Rāmāyaṇa, but it is mentioned (in, for example, books
six and seven of the text). Kr̥ ṣṇa’s divinity is more clearly established in the
Mahābhārata (there are too many references to list here, in and outside of
the Bhagavadgītā). Indeed, the Mahābhārata is perhaps more than anything
the story of divine incarnation. All of its major characters are deities that
have taken birth to help in the project of the unburdening of the earth of a
fractious warrior class (in a fashion that does not seem to sit well with the
idea of ethicized karmic-transmigration of either the Buddhist or Jain type).
It is also the case that the heroes of the Mahābhārata, the Pāṇḍavas, are, of
course, individually fathered by gods (in a process quite separate from their
incarnation). This provides them with a dual lineage, both human and divine.
The Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata provide, then, an account of a longue durée of
Indian cosmo-history. It is a history that demonstrates a recurrent commitment

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to detailing the lineages of prominent kings and sages. This is undertaken in

parallel with a concern to present the gods (and God on occasion) as capable
of intervention in human life (by means of birth, manifestation, or something
that blends these two things). We thus have two pedigrees: of ritual specialists
(Brahmins) and temporal leaders (Kṣatriyas), and an understanding of divine
beings as capable of cosmo-political intervention (as, for example, in the
unburdening of the earth) and emancipatory religious instruction (as is offered
in the Bhagavadgītā). All of this is anchored in the authority of the Vedas, as
the paramount blueprint of ritual and cosmic order. It is this narrativization
of much that is explicit and implicit in the Vedic vision of religious obligation
and the divine and social order (and much that comes from outside of it) that
lays the foundations for the emergence, in the early Common Era, of Hindu
devotional traditions that are substantially similar to many that are practiced to
this day. Lineage is thus elegantly entwined with divine and human agency in
such a way that, at least ideally, suchlike agency is delimited by status and the
perception of a connection to Vedic authority.

CASE STUDY 3: LINEAGE WITHOUT

GENEALOGY IN THE BUDDHAVAṂSA
It is in the Buddhavaṃsa, the narrative of the Buddha’s life and prophecy of his
enlightenment, that we find a ringing rejoinder to the cosmo-historical ambition
of the Sanskrit epics. In it, the relationship between lineage and exemplification
is of primary importance, but it is dealt with very differently. Exploring the
way in which the Buddhavaṃsa creates a significant past for Buddhists will
help us to discern further the context of competing narrative accounts of the
nature and purpose of the human subject, the universe, and preferred religious
ideology in our period of inquiry.
The Buddhavaṃsa, or “the chronicle of Buddhas,” tells of the spiritual
progress of Gotama Buddha, and specifically his progress towards
“bodhisattahood,” in his various lives under the dispensations of various
previous Buddhas. The bodhisatta (Sanskrit bodhisattva) is a person on the
path to Buddhahood (in the context of early Buddhist sources, it is a person
who has resolved to become a Buddha and has had their ambition confirmed
by a living Buddha). It is thus a history of the Buddha and of buddhas. The
Buddhavaṃsa is considered to be a late addition to the Pāli canon and forms
part of the Khuddaka Nikāya, which itself, of course, forms part of the
Suttapiṭaka of the Tipiṭaka. What this means in terms of its precise dating
is not clear, but it probably puts it around the second century BCE. It bears
restating that we cannot know who speaks first or last in the intertextual
dialogue we are delineating in this present chapter; there is, however, no
doubt that the Buddhavaṃsa is an important contribution to it.

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The Buddhavaṃsa recounts, in a formulaic and truncated fashion, the lives of

twenty-five Buddhas: from Dīpaṅkara to Gotama. To this, it adds a justificatory
prologue, as well as an introductory account of the birth of a Brahmin by the
name of Sumedha, the future Śākyamuni, who resolves to become a Buddha. It
also contains two final sections: a brief summary of the succession of Buddhas
(including some that come before Dīpaṅkara and one that comes after Gotama)
and a brief disquisition on the distribution of Gotama’s relics. Sumedha means
“nourishing,” which nicely reflects the concern of the Bodhisatta-to-be for the
enlightenment of all beings. It also means “good sacrifice” and “good offering,”
which, we suspect, is because Buddhist sources are unable to resist a dig at
the Vedic yajña. It thereby underscores, none too subtly, the superiority of the
bodhisatta path to that of the Vedic ritual system, which the Rāmāyaṇa and
Mahābhārata, as we saw, provide a rich narrative setting for.
The Buddhavaṃsa opens with an extraordinary image: that of a jeweled
footbridge across the ten-thousand worlds. Its supporting pillars are sunk
into the summits of each Mt. Sumeru that exists in each of the many worlds
(translations of the Buddhavaṃsa are from Jayawickrama 1995):

The Conqueror created a Walk spanning the ten-thousand; all golden were
the sides of that Walk which was made of jewels.

The junction of (each pair of) beams was symmetrical, the floor-boards
covered with gold; all golden were the railings, well-fashioned on both sides.
(1.13–14)

This golden footbridge was created at the behest of Brahmā and is the subject
of much approbation by all classes of beings, from the devas to the nāgas
and kiṇṇaras. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect evocation of Buddhist
omniscience: a vantage point from which all may be observed, but only by
fixing one’s attention upon something in particular (the omniscience of the
Jain equivalent of Buddhas, tīrthāṅkaras, is in contrast simultaneous and
all-encompassing). It is equally a powerful image of the cosmic reach of a
transcendent ideology (a bridge spanning ten-thousand Mt. Sumerus is hardly
what one could call understated). Notwithstanding all this cosmic bluster
and fanfare, even as the Buddha is described as travelling along his golden
footbridge, the narrative is brought firmly down to earth:

Sāriputta, of great wisdom proficient in concentration and meditation,

attained to the perfection of wisdom, asked the leader of the world:
Of what kind, great hero, supreme among men, was your resolve? At what
time, wise one, was supreme Awakening aspired by you? (1.74–5)

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The text is thus committed to a double opening; the first is that of the bejeweled
walkway, surrounded by a panoply of divine beings, and the second is that
of Vulture peak, in which the Buddha is surrounded by his chief disciples.
The two contexts are upheld simultaneously. On the one hand, it is Brahmā’s
request for the Buddha to teach that is the stimulus for the Buddhavaṃsa, on
the other hand, it is the request of Sāriputta for specific instruction. Note also
that in both the Sanskrit epics and our present text, the agency of Brahmā is
preserved (this may have historical roots in the prominence of Brahmā cult in
the latter half of the first millennium BCE. See Bailey 1983). Indeed, the divine
walkway itself finds a mundane reflection in the walk constructed by Sumedha
in his hermitage (the word for both the walkway and the walk being caṅkama).
This simultaneity of worlds, and of scales, reflects a commitment to divine
and human contexts of explanation. This is a double exemplification. Such a
commitment to the divine and human stage is not a prominent feature of earlier
Pāli canonical materials. For example, the Dīghanikāya, tells of former Buddhas
in a less grandiose fashion, in the Mahāpadāna Sutta. It is a prominent feature
of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, however, as we saw. In this way, the
pattern of narrative and counter-narrative is becoming clearer. The opening
of the Buddhavamṣa is thus something of a fusion; in it, sutta-style discourse
maintains a vestigial grip on something of an emergent epic of transmigratory
progress toward buddhahood.
Just as there is an initial movement between divine and human realms, so
too is there an opening vacillation between third- and first-person narrative
in the Buddhavaṃsa. Sarah Shaw (2010) has commented on the movement
between third- and first-person verbal constructions in accounts of the life of
the Buddha. The situation in the Buddhavaṃsa is complicated; the opening of
the Buddhavaṃsa, as well as much of its basic narrative content, is told in the
third person. However, the resolve to build the golden walkway, is expressed in
the first person (the Pāli is added in brackets):

Come, I will display (dassayissāmi) the unsurpassed power of a Buddha; in

the zenith I will create (māpayissāmi) a walk adorned with jewels. (1.5)

First-person constructions, which express the agency of he-who-will-be Gotama

Buddha, dominate the Buddhavaṃsa at critical moments, such as moments
of cosmic insight, spiritual resolution, and transmigratory self-identification.
Thus the bejeweled walkway, as a structure of actualized cosmic insight must
be anchored directly to the agency of the Buddha, even if the shift is somewhat
grammatically abrupt. Similarly, when the Brahmin Sumedha is introduced, as
a minister (mahāmantrin), knower of the Vedas (vedavid) and knower of the
significant past (aitihasika), amongst other things, he is described in the third
person. In the verse that immediately follows this characterization, however,

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which is a moment of cosmic insight, there is, again, a shift to the first person.
The Buddha says:

Sitting in seclusion I thought thus then: ‘Again-becoming is anguish, also the

breaking up of the physical frame.’ (2.7)

This is immediately followed by a spiritual resolution, which is, once again, in

the first person. The Buddha says:

Liable to birth, liable to ageing, liable to disease am I then; I will seek the
peace that is unaging, undying and secure. (2.8)

This is again the case when the Gotama Buddha identifies himself in a former
birth. The following example is drawn from the period of Koṇḍañña Buddha.
The Buddha says:

I at that time was a warrior-noble named Vijitāvin. I held sway from end to
end of the sea. (3.9)

The first person is also used for moments when, the Buddha-to-be, makes
offerings to the Buddhas of the past. The following example is drawn from the
period of Piyadassin Buddha. The Buddha says:

When I heard his dhamma I conceived belief. With a hundred thousand

crores I constructed a park for the Order. (14.9)

The Buddha thus personally engages in exemplary acts of idealized giving,

which are rendered in what we might refer to as the “emphatic first person.”
He does so through a transmigratory narrative of precisely the type that the
Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa largely eschew. On reading this sort of account,
one feels vertiginous: as people gave to the Buddha so the Buddha gave to other
Buddhas, who presumably gave to other Buddhas. The line of Buddhas is thus a
never-ending lineage of exemplary deeds, which have a salvific force:

As men crossing a river, but failing to ford the bank opposite, taking a ford
lower down, cross the great river.
Even so, all of us, if we miss (the words of) this conqueror, in the distant
future we will be face to face with this one. (2.74–5)

The text thus establishes its own longue durée of Buddhist cosmo-history, which
centers both on the presence and authority of the Buddhas of the past and the

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spiritual progress of the most recent Buddha, Lord Gotama. The closing two
chapters of the work emphasize both the chronology as established (including
its extension into the future) and the lingering presence of Gotama Buddha
in his relics, which are distributed across India. Jonathan Walters (1997)
speaks of a “cosmic society” that emerges in these sources, which he associates
with the consolidation of the stupa cult in the period, which centered on
the construction of sites for ritual interaction with the relics of the Buddha.
Certainly, in the Buddhavaṃsa, as we have heard, the end of nirvāṇa for Gotama
Buddha is followed by a summary chronology of the Buddhas from Dīpaṅkara
to Metteyya (Skt. Maitreya) and a short account of the distribution of the relics
of Gotama Buddha. The relics are thus placed in a position of emphasis in
the Buddhavaṃsa; they are, along with the buddhavācana—the word of the
Buddha—itself (another relic of sorts), the current point of access to the power
of the Buddha. The text thus integrates a ritual order that could compete with
that of the Brahmanical traditions.
Even as the Buddhavaṃsa establishes a distinctively Buddhist cosmo-history
and an emergent ritual order (for anyone from a future bodhisatta to someone
of more limited spiritual ambition), a destabilizing refrain runs through the text:
nanu rittā sabbasaṅkhārā. We can translate this as, “Are not all constructions
void?” It also can be translated less elegantly, but perhaps more dogmatically
as, “Are not all conditioned things empty?” In this way, the shaggy dog story of
the lives of former and future Buddhas is offset by the recurrent achievement
of a definitive end to the personal story of a dedicated minority (who thirst
no longer). We move between lineage and salvific exemplification. The lineage
is there for those who wish it (and it is karmic rather than genealogical), but,
ultimately, it is the exemplification of an end to any and all engagement with
the world as commonly experienced that is emphasized. Genealogy and birth
status play only a minor role in all this. Indeed, John Strong (2011) has shown
that across Buddhist literature, although the Buddha’s okkhaka (in Sanskrit,
ikṣvāku) lineage is acknowledged (he is of the same pedigree in this regard as
Rāma), the Buddha terminates his own line by ordaining his son. Subsequently,
the Śākya clan from which he came is also exterminated completely. Strong
(2011: 185) argues that the destruction of the Buddha’s genealogical allows
any who joins the saṃgha (monastic community) to become part of his lineage.
He says: “the Buddha Śākyamuni in effect opens up the lineage of the Buddhas
to all devotees, who connect with them by becoming part of their sociokarmic
family and attaining enlightenment (or even Buddhahood) themselves in the
future.”
Thus the Buddhavaṃsa presents a teaching lineage of Buddhas offering
karmically-configured salvific exemplification. This, if not a lineage in the
strictest sense is nonetheless lineal. The bright thread of Sumedha’s journey to
Buddhahood runs right through the text. The Jātaka stories of the former lives

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of the Buddha offer us hundreds of further tales while the Avadāna literature
offers us stories of the former lives of prominent Buddhists. The Buddhavaṃsa
offers us a more integrative vision; it presents both cosmo-historical tableaux
and something of a multi-life bildungsroman, by providing a history of the
personal, multi-life spiritual journey of Sumedha to Buddhahood. Its vision,
directly or indirectly, very clearly competes with that of the Rāmāyaṇa and
the Mahābhārata. Narrative, it seems, is a weapon of choice in the religious
economy of early South Asia. The Jains, notwithstanding their deep aversion to
literal violence, were less averse to literary tussles with their various opponents,
as we shall see.

CASE STUDY 5: LINEAGE AND EXEMPLIFICATION

UNBOUND IN THE KALPA SŪTRA AND
THE UTTARADHYĀYANA SŪTRA
An obvious place to start for the Jains is the Kalpa Sūtra attributed to
Bhadrabāhu. This text accompanies the Śvetāmbara canon (it is a Cheda
Sūtra). The canon is said to have taken on something like its present form at
the council of Valabhī in the middle part of the 6th century CE. Paul Dundas
(2003: 23) dates the Kalpa Sūtra itself to the first or second century BCE, which
places it in the post-Aśokan world of the Sanskrit epics and the Buddhavamṣa.
The Kalpa Sūtra offers, amongst other things, the earliest accounts of the
lives of the twenty-four tīrthāṅkaras (ford-makers who are at the heart of Jain
tradition in much the same way as the Buddhas are in Buddhist thought.1 The
Kalpa Sūtra, in complete contrast to the Buddhavaṃsa, begins with the present
tīrthāṅkara and works backward. It closes with a very long pedigree of senior
monks, which it calls a therāvalī, and an account of the monastic prescriptions
for the rainy season retreat (parjuṣanā, which is a much-celebrated time of
year across early Indian literature). The text is something of a middle term
between the Buddhavaṃsa and the Sanskrit epics; it combines an emphasis on
transmigration and karma with more concrete mention of figures well known
to the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata. The text tells us, in detail, of the birth and
actions of four tīrthāṅkaras, as well as listing the other twenty.
There is no sense of the personal transmigratory journey of Mahāvīra, such
as we find in the progress of Sumedha in the Buddhavaṃsa. Of course, this
has to do with differences between Jain and Buddhist understandings of the
karmic process that leads to liberation (we will not explore this issue here).
The accounts of the lives of the tīrthāṅkaras and the enumeration of their
followers are formulaic, like those of the Buddhavaṃsa, and have largely the
same cumulative impact: a cosmo-historical teaching pedigree is established.
The text creates a vast chronological framework, once again, for salvific
exemplification. The inclusion afterward of a list of senior monks extends this

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list into the arena of immediate history. The final chapter, on the monastic
discipline appropriate to the rainy season retreat, grounds the text in ritual
practice once again, but this time focusing on the monastic community as
the locus of insight and ritual power. All the texts we have considered return
repeatedly to concrete religious duties however, they roam in time or in space.
We find, in the Kalpa Sūtra, descriptions of Brahmanical lineages, as well as of
Kṣatriya ones. These genealogies are placed in a transmigratory framework (I
provide some Ardhamagadhī terms for clarity’s sake; the translation is that of
Lalwani 2014):

After the liberation of 21 tīrthāṅkaras who were born in the race of Ikṣvāku
(the ikkhāga-kula) in the line of Kaśyāpa (kāsava-gotta) and of two others
born in the race of Hari (hari-vaṃsa) and the line of Gautama (goyam-
sagotta), 23 tīrthāṅkaras in all. (2.1)

Here the lineages of kings and sages are combined in the pedigree of the
tīrthāṅkaras as a collective.
The Kalpa Sūtra is more detailed in its coverage of the lives of the first
tīrthāṅkara, R̥ ṣabha, and the last one, Mahāvīra. The text presents a rather odd
birth narrative for Mahāvīra, in which he is transferred, as an embryo, from the
womb of a Brahmin woman to that of a Kṣatriya at the behest of Indra. Paul
Dundas has interpreted this as a part of a pattern of Brahmin-Kṣatriya rivalry.
While this may be the case, it is to the “fathers” of Mahāvīra that I would
like to turn, specifically to their interpretation of the portentous dreams of
their wives when they are pregnant with Mahāvīra. On hearing of the fourteen
auspicious signs that accompany the birth of a tīrthāṅkara, the first “father” of
Mahāvīra, the Brahmin R̥ ṣabhadatta, anticipates the great achievements of his
son in Vedic learning. While his kṣatriya father, Siddhārtha, looks forward to
his son’s martial achievements. Both fathers offer us textbook interpretations
of their wives’ prophetic dreams in terms of the idea-typical preoccupations
of their varṇas or social estates. The movement between wombs, as well as
perhaps expressing rivalry, also allows for Mahāvīra to assimilate some of the
qualities of both varṇas, just as the tīrthāṅkaras as a collective encompassed the
lineages of both great kings and great sages. It allows Mahāvīra to partake in the
virtues of both estates and, like Sumedha, to establish himself as a worthy heir
of the very traditions his teachings supersede.
In the tale of R̥ ṣabha, who shares many descriptions with that of Mahāvīra,
we hear that he introduced, before his renunciation and during his period of
earthly rule, the fundaments of civilization, from agriculture to the written
word. He also left one-hundred sons to rule after him, amongst them Bharata,
the founder of the lineage at the heart of the Mahābhārata, of course. The
Kalpa Sūtra thus does much that the Buddhavaṃsa does, in terms of linear

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chronology, but speaks also to the genealogical and political emphases of the
Sanskrit epics more directly. The Kalpa Sūtra does not offer us a rich or full
integration of Jain tradition with that of the Sanskrit epics, however. To see
something more of this sort of activity, we must move to the Uttarādhyayana
Sūtra of the Śvetāmbara Jain canon (in its eighteenth chapter).
The date of the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra text is uncertain, but it preserves
material that is likely to have circulated in our period of inquiry. We will begin
with an interesting encounter between a King Sañjaya and an unnamed Jain
mendicant (in Ardhamagadhī, an aṇagāra), which will illustrate the combination
in Jain sources of religious polemic and appeal to lineal authority that has
been such a prominent feature of the foregoing materials. King Sañjaya is out
hunting, we are told, and comes upon the aforementioned ascetic in a forest
grove. He greets the sage, but receives no answer (translations are mine):

āsaṃ visajjaittāṇaṃ aṇagārassa so nivo |

viṇaeṇa vandae pāe bhagavaṃ ettha me khame || US.18.5.5

“Unhorsed, the king bowed down before the sage.

He said, ‘O holy one, forgive my fault.’”

The king is afraid that he will be reduced to ashes. However, the sage
emerges from his meditation and asks a question, which is perhaps somewhat
predictable from a homeless mendicant: “why do you cling to your kingdom?”
(in Ardhamagadhī, kiṃ rajjammi pasajjasi). What follows (in crisp ślokas or
eight-syllable poetic lines) is in marked contrast to the genealogical emphasis
of Vasiṣṭha in the Rāmāyaṇa. Indeed, we are offered a calculated rebuttal of
genealogy, but not quite the studied materialism of Jābāli:

dārāṇi ya suyā ceva, mittā ya taha bandhavā |

jīvantam aṇujīvanti mayaṃ nāṇuvvayanti ya || US.18.5.14

“Not wives, not sons, not friends, nor relations,

Though dependent now; at death, none will follow.”

The sage goes on to describe the way that others will enjoy one’s material
possessions after one’s death. In contrast, the deceased is said to enjoy only
the fruits of his or her karma in their next existence. After this short, sharp
reminder of the transience of our social bonds and the enduring nature of

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karmic consequences, king Sañjaya immediately becomes a Jain monk. This

somewhat abbreviated exchange lacks the richness of content of the dialogues
of some of our preceding texts, but it establishes an agenda of persuasion and
propagandizing nonetheless, which, as we shall see, becomes the foundation for
something of triumphalist Jain charter.
Returning to the narrative of the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, our erstwhile king
comes upon another unnamed Jaina monk. The monk immediately begins to
discourse on the superiority of the teachings of Mahāvīra. Here the locus of
persuasion is not the inevitability of karmic consequences, but a combination
of the display of supra-normal powers of perception and the criticism of rival
views. King Sañjaya is told, first, of the past life of the sage. He tells Sañjaya
that, in the life immediately before this one, he was a god in the highest heaven.
He goes on to criticize those traditions that do not accept the idea of an
enduring self or transmigrating essence (i.e. Lokāyatas, Buddhists, and others)
and those that accept only one view (ekāntavādī), which presumably includes
a wide variety of religious opponents. What then follows is a long list of kings
who have become Jain monks. The list reads like a who’s who of Brahmin
and Jain myth-history. The list opens with king Bharata and follows with king
Sagara, who looms large in epic and Purāṇic sources; and King Maghavā, who
is prominent in Jain narratives. The list then names a variety of kings known
to have accepted the central tenets of Jainism. As the list proceeds, instead of
mythic kings of the distant past, we find regional monarchs (that are, largely,
no easier to historically locate); the list includes regions from all over South
Asia: Daśārṇa, Videha, Pāṇcāla, Sauvīra, and Kāśī, to name only a few. We see
in this list a high degree of narrative ambition; the great kings of the past are
claimed as followers of the Jinas. Indeed, almost the entirety of subcontinental
South Asia is claimed as Jain (at least in the past). This sort of list recalls those
that we find in the epic sources, but inflected now to create something of a
genealogically self-conscious anti-lineage; important kings are listed as they
renounce their power and lineal connections (even as, in the Kalpa Sūtra, the
tīrthāṅkaras were shown to encompass them). There is clear movement from
lineage to exemplification, as the defining feature of both religious status and
the purpose of the religious life. But lineage is by no means forgotten; instead,
we witness the text elegantly co-opting the great and the good as each king
renounces their throne. What we therefore find in the Uttarādhyayana is a
vestigial dialogue of persuasion acting as a foil for something of a narrative
conquest of South Asia. When read with the Kalpa Sūtra, as subsequent Jains
certainly did, we see the third of our emergent and competing accounts of the
significant past. It is as polemical as that of the Buddhist, but shares much more
content with the Sanskrit epics than that of the Buddhist materials we have
considered.

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CONCLUSION
It should be clear by now that the narrative competition in post-Vedic South Asia
was intense; Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jain movements sought to develop
and consolidate competing accounts of the significant past and of significant
knowledge that centered on lineages (genealogical, pedagogical, and karmic),
as well as exemplary activity (in the performance of ritual or the origination
of transformative insight). The difficulties regarding relative chronology and
textual dating make it difficult to decide who spoke first, who came from where,
and what social estates were involved. However, the present analyses have
shown how important it is to look not just within, but also across early South
Asian religious traditions. They have also made it clear that the competition for
the narrative possession of the past was a profoundly productive one for the
philosophy, ritual, and literature of early South Asia.

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