Śramaṇa

• 1. Introduction

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  Śramaṇa: the word translates, roughly, as "one who labours or toils for some higher religious purpose." That definition alone tells you something striking. Not a chosen one, not a believer by birth, but a worker, a striver. The śramaṇas were wandering ascetics who walked the dusty plains of ancient India, and from their circles emerged some of the most consequential ideas in human history: the cycle of death and rebirth called saṃsāra, the aspiration toward liberation called moksha, the ethic of non-violence called ahimsa. Buddhism and Jainism were both born from this tradition. So was the rival school that held everything is predetermined, and the one that denied the soul entirely.

  Who were these wanderers? Were they rebels against the priestly Vedic order, or part of it? Did they invent the great ideas of Indian philosophy, or receive and transform them? And why does the 3rd century BCE Dhammapada define a śramaṇa simply as "someone who has pacified evil"? The chapters that follow trace those questions through ancient texts, contested scholarly debates, bitter sectarian conflicts, and the remarkable afterlife of a tradition whose name may even have given the world the word "shaman."

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• 2. A Word and Its History

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  The earliest known explicit use of the term "śramaṇa" appears in section 2.7 of the Taittiriya Aranyaka, a layer within the Yajurveda, dated to around 1000 BCE. There it describes śramaṇa Rishis and celibate Rishis, placing these figures firmly inside the Vedic ritual world. A second reference appears in verse 4.3.22 of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, composed in the 7th-6th centuries BCE, where the term describes a class of mendicant. Scholars have since debated whether that mendicant belonged to a non-Vedic order or not.

  Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Indology known for his translations of major Sanskrit works, argued in his 1993 study that the original śramaṇa tradition was part of the Vedic one, not separate from it. He wrote that the word placed its bearers "right at the center" of the Vedic ritual tradition. Those who read the early śramaṇa sages as anti-Brahmanical or non-Aryan precursors, he insisted, were drawing conclusions that "far outstrip the available evidence."

  The semantic narrowing of the word came later. It was only in certain post-Vedic texts considered canonical by Buddhists and Jains that "śramaṇa" came to denote a person who specifically rejected the authority of the Vedas. Olivelle suggested this shift may have been driven by Buddhism and Jainism appropriating the term for their own members. Before 3rd century BCE ruler Ashoka, Brahmana and śramaṇa were neither clearly distinct nor openly opposed in early Indian texts.

  One intriguing thread runs beyond India altogether. The Pali form of the word, samaṇa, has been proposed as the ultimate origin of the Evenki word samān, meaning "shaman," possibly transmitted through Middle Chinese or Tocharian B. The etymology remains controversial, and scholars note that the word appears across multiple Tungusic languages with its own complex history.

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• 3. Greater Magadha and the Ascetic Ferment

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  Johannes Bronkhorst placed the birth of the śramaṇa culture in "Greater Magadha," a region that was Indo-Aryan but not Vedic in orientation. In that culture, Kshatriyas ranked above Brahmins, and both Vedic authority and Vedic ritual were rejected.

  Several śramaṇa movements existed before the 6th century BCE, predating both the Buddha and Mahavira. Martin Wiltshire described the tradition as evolving through two phases: a Paccekabuddha phase of solitary individual ascetics, and a Savaka phase of organized disciples. Reginald Ray agreed that śramaṇa movements were established traditions in pre-6th century BCE India, but disputed that they were nonsectarian before the Buddha's arrival.

  The Rig Veda, in Book 10 Chapter 136, already describes wandering mendicants with kēśin, meaning long hair, wearing mala clothes in soil-hued yellow, orange, or saffron, engaged in meditation. One hymn reads: "The Munis, girdled with the wind, wear garments of soil hue; they, following the wind's swift course, go where the Gods have gone before." The term vātaraśana, meaning "girdled with wind," prompted some scholars to interpret the Munis as naked monks linked to the Digambara sect of Jainism. Olivelle argued against this, reading the phrase as describing the monks moving like the wind, their garments pressed by it.

  Indian anthropologist Ramaprasad Chanda traced śramaṇa origins further back, to pre-Vedic and pre-Aryan cultures that practiced magic, linking the discipline of asceticism to initiatory phases of seclusion and abstinence observed by shamans. The Vedic scholar Govind Chandra Pande attributed the origin of Buddhism itself not entirely to the Buddha, but to what he called a "great religious ferment" toward the end of the Vedic period, when Brahmanical and Shramanic traditions intermingled.

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• 4. Six Schools Before the Buddha

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  The Buddhist text called the Samaññaphala Sutta names six pre-Buddhist śrāmana schools, identifying each by its leader. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta contains a speech by a śramaṇa named Subhadda who lists these leaders by name: Pūraṇa Kassapa, Makkhali Gosāla, Ajita Kesakambalī, Pakudha Kaccāyana, Sanjaya Belatthiputta, and Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta, the last being Mahavira.

  The six schools spread across the philosophical map in ways that still astonish. Pūraṇa Kassapa's school held that there are no moral laws at all: nothing is moral or immoral, there is neither virtue nor sin. Makkhali Gosāla's Ajivika school was a strict fatalist movement: everything is preordained, free will is an illusion, karma cannot alter outcomes, and everything including one's composition is fixed by cosmic principles. Ajita Kesakambalī's movement denied the afterlife, samsara, karma, and any fruit of good or evil deeds, holding that humans are simply composed of elemental matter that scatters at death. Pakudha Kaccayana's school argued that everything is made of seven eternal building blocks, including earth, water, fire, air, happiness, pain, and soul, and that even death is merely a rearrangement of one set of substances into another.

  Sanjaya Belatthiputta's Ajñana school practiced absolute agnosticism, refusing any opinion on the existence of an afterlife, karma, free will, soul, or creator. Each of these six leaders is described in the Samaññaphala Sutta as a Sanghi, a head of an organized order, a teacher, a recluse of repute. These were not lone eccentrics but leaders of structured monastic communities. Padmanabh Jaini cautioned that the Buddhist text's portrayal of these rival schools may be "a biased picture" that does not give a true account of the śrāmana schools it was competing against.

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• 5. Jainism's Fierce Inheritance

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  Jain literature independently confirms several of the same names, mentioning Pūraṇa Kassapa, Makkhali Gosāla, and Sañjaya Belaṭṭhaputta as contemporaries of Mahavira. The Jain Agamas hold that the Jainas, referred to in Buddhist texts as the Niganthas, were a well-established sect when the Buddha began preaching.

  The Ācārāṅga Sūtra, one of the oldest Jain texts, gives Mahavira three names. His parents called him Vardhamana. The gods called him Venerable Ascetic Mahavira. And because he "sustains dreadful dangers and fears, the noble nakedness, and the miseries of the world," he was called Sramana. That same text offers a definition of the good śramaṇa: "not hurting the movable and immovable beings, not killing, bearing all." A vow in the renunciation chapter pledges: "I shall become a śramaṇa who owns no house, no property, no sons, no cattle, who eats what others give him."

  The text's compilation history is itself layered. It was principally edited in its current form by Acharya Devardhigani Kshamashraman around 454 CE, though it may have originated as an oral tradition after Mahavira's death. The Digambara sect, which went naked as a religious practice, maintains that the original Ācārāṅga Sūtra is lost, and that the Mulachara, composed around 150 CE, is the closest surviving document to Mahavira's original teachings.

  Jainism distinguishes itself from all other śrāmana traditions through what Jaini described as the belief in the independent existence of soul and matter, a denial of any creative God, a vision of the universe as eternal and uncreated, and above all a commitment to nonviolence stronger than any other śrāmana school. Its philosophical doctrine of anekantavada holds that truth is perceived differently from different points of view, and that no single perspective is complete.

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• 6. Buddhism's Middle Path

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  It was as a śramaṇa that Gautama left his father's palace. He practiced severe austerities, fasting himself nearly to death. His eventual conclusion was that extreme self-mortification was useless in attaining enlightenment, and he recommended instead a "Middle Way" between hedonism and austerity.

  The moderate terms of Buddhist monastic life contrasted deliberately with Jain practice. Buddhist rules recorded in the vinaya specified that a person could not join a monastic community without a parent's permission, and that at least one son remained with each family. Lay people who gave alms to Buddhist renunciants accumulated merit toward good rebirth, maintaining a web of mutual obligation between monastery and household. Randall Collins argued that these arrangements made Buddhism more a reform movement within the educated religious classes than a rival from outside them, and noted that in early Buddhism, the largest number of monastics were originally Brahmins. Virtually all came from the two upper social classes, Brahmins and Kshatriyas.

  Buddhist philosophy departed sharply from Jainism on the question of the soul. Where Jain philosophy affirms an eternal self or atman in every being, Buddhist philosophy asserts the doctrine of Anatta, or no-self, one of the Three Marks of existence alongside suffering (Dukkha) and impermanence (Anicca). The Brahmajāla Sutta lists many śramaṇas with whom the Buddha disagreed. Within the Buddhist community itself, Devadatta, a cousin of Gautama, caused a split in the sangha by demanding more rigorous practices, demonstrating that disputes about the intensity of asceticism were not confined to inter-school rivalry.

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• 7. The Ajivikas and Sectarian Violence

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  Makkhali Gosala founded the Ājīvika movement in the 5th century BCE. It reached the height of its prominence in the late 1st millennium BCE, with the ancient city of Savatthi, located in what is now the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, identified in Buddhist and Jain texts as the hub of the movement.

  The Ājīvikas' central doctrine, called Niyati, held that absolute determinism governs all existence: no free will, no karma that can be altered, every detail of every life preordained by cosmic principles. They were atheists who rejected Vedic authority but affirmed the existence of an atman in every living being. Their metaphysics included an atomic theory resembling the Vaisheshika school, in which all things are composed of atoms whose aggregation is fixed by cosmic forces. Original Ājīvika scriptures once existed, but are now lost. Everything known about Ājīvika philosophy comes from Buddhist and Jain secondary sources, written by competing traditions.

  The Ājīvikas survived far longer than most of their śrāmana rivals. Inscriptions in the South Indian state of Karnataka and in the Kolar district of Tamil Nadu confirm that the movement continued to exist until the 14th century CE. At their earlier peak, according to the 2nd century CE text Ashokavadana, the Mauryan emperor Bindusara was a patron of the Ajivikas. His son Ashoka converted to Buddhism, became enraged at a picture depicting the Buddha in negative light, and issued an order to kill all Ajivikas in Pundravardhana. Around 18,000 followers of the Ajivika sect were executed.

  Jain texts also record violent conflict, describing an occasion where the Jaina and Ajivika monastic orders "came to blows." Arthur Llewellyn Basham cautioned that these accounts were written centuries after the events by śrāmana opponents of the Ajivikas, and that the Buddhist and Jain versions diverge from each other, making their reliability questionable.

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• 8. Ideas That Crossed Every Border

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  The concepts that śrāmana movements developed did not stay within their own traditions. Karma, samsara, and moksha became the common currency of nearly all Indian philosophy, including orthodox Hinduism. The Chāndogya Upanishad, dated to around the 7th century BCE, contains the earliest known use of the word Ahimsa in the sense familiar from Hinduism, verse 8.15.1, where it bars violence against "all creatures" and promises the practitioner escape from the cycle of metempsychosis.

  Geoffrey Samuel, surveying the evidence, concluded that yogic practice "developed in the same ascetic circles as the early śrāmana movements, Buddhists, Jainas and Ajivikas, probably in around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE." Patrick Olivelle proposed that the Hindu ashrama system, created probably around the 4th century BCE, was itself an attempt to institutionalize renunciation within the Brahmanical social structure, borrowing the voluntary principle found in Buddhist and Jain monastic orders.

  Some Brahmins joined śrāmana movements directly. Cānakya and Sāriputta were among them. According to Jain tradition, eleven Brahmins accepted Jainism and became Mahavira's chief disciples, known as ganadharas. Randall Collins went so far as to argue that "the basic cultural framework for lay society which eventually became Hinduism" was laid down by Buddhism.

  The scholar Wendy Doniger captured the entanglement with a striking comparison: the interaction between Vedism and Buddhism in the early period was so constant that sorting out the earlier source of many shared doctrines is "fruitless." She compared it to Picasso and Braque in their shared Cubist period, who in later years were themselves unable to say which of them had painted certain works. The Western record preserves its own traces of śrāmana encounter: Clement of Alexandria, writing between 150 and 211 CE, named the "Samanaeans among the Bactrians" in a list of ancient philosophical traditions, alongside Egyptian prophets, Chaldean astronomers, Celtic druids, and Persian magi. Porphyry, writing between 233 and 305 CE, gave an extended account of the Samanaeans' diet of rice, bread, autumnal fruits, and pot-herbs, their individual cottages near the river Ganges, their daily hymns and prayers, and their view of the present life as "a certain servitude to nature" that the soul should be freed from as soon as possible. The novelist Hermann Hesse, who had a long interest in Indian spirituality, made his protagonist Siddhartha a Samana upon leaving home, reaching a Western readership with a portrait of the wandering ascetic tradition that the Taittiriya Aranyaka had recorded more than two thousand years before.

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