The concept of Shramanic religions, with particular reference to Buddhism, had their roots in Upanishadic ideas. Discuss.

Answer:

The Shramanic religions, Buddhism and Jainism above all, arose in the sixth century BCE as movements of wandering renouncers. They shared much of their vocabulary and many of their central preoccupations with the Upanishads, though they departed from them on fundamental points of doctrine.

Shared ground with the Upanishads

• Both took karma and rebirth (samsara) as the framework of existence.
• Both made liberation, moksha or nirvana, the supreme goal of life.
• Both preferred knowledge, meditation and inner discipline to external sacrifice.
• Both criticised the efficacy of elaborate Vedic ritual for attaining salvation.
• The Upanishadic renouncer prefigures the shramana who leaves household life.

Common intellectual milieu

• Both emerged in the same eastern Gangetic region of intense speculation.
• Debate (shastrartha) among teachers was the shared method of enquiry.
• Kshatriya figures such as Ajatashatru and Janaka appear as teachers in the Upanishads.
• The Buddha and Mahavira were themselves of kshatriya birth.

Points of departure

• The Buddha rejected the atman, teaching anatta, the absence of a permanent self.
• He denied the authority of the Vedas and the necessity of the Brahmana.
• The Upanishads remained esoteric; Buddhism preached openly in Prakrit to all castes.
• Buddhism substituted an ethical and psychological analysis for metaphysical monism.
• The Middle Path rejected both indulgence and the extreme asceticism some ascetics practised.

The material context

• Iron tools, surplus agriculture and a money economy transformed the eastern Ganga plains.
• Urbanisation and trade created a mercantile class receptive to new ideas.
• Brahmanical ritual, with its costly sacrifices and animal slaughter, hindered agrarian and commercial life.
• R.S. Sharma connected the rise of these sects with these material changes.
• The eastern region lay outside the older heartland of Brahmanical orthodoxy.

The Shramanic traditions therefore grew out of the same intellectual ferment as the Upanishads and shared their key concerns, yet Buddhism in particular transformed that inheritance. As A.L. Basham observed, it is best seen not as derived from the Upanishads but as a parallel and partly critical response to the same questions, one that carried the discussion to a wider public.