Two teachers from the eastern Ganga plains — Gautama the Buddha and Vardhamana Mahavira — challenged sacrifice and caste with an ethic of non-violence and self-conquest that still shapes the world.
§1Why They Arose
The new religions were born of the sixth-century BCE crisis. Vedic ritual had become costly and cattle-sacrificing; the varna order ranked the Kshatriya below the Brahmana; and the new urban economy of Vaishya merchants and artisan guilds resented cattle-killing sacrifice. Buddhism and Jainism answered with simple doctrines preached in Prakrit — the speech of ordinary people — open to all castes and to women.
§2The Buddha and His Path
Siddhartha Gautama (c. 566–486 BCE), a Shakya prince of Kapilavastu, attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya and taught for forty-five years across the Ganga plains. His first sermon at Sarnath set out the Four Noble Truths — that life is suffering, suffering has a cause in craving, it can end in nirvana, and the way is the Eightfold Path of right view, resolve, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and meditation — the Middle Way between luxury and austerity.
His order, the sangha, grew into history's first great missionary community. The teaching was gathered in the Tripitakas (Vinaya, Sutta, Abhidhamma) in Pali. Four Buddhist Councils shaped the tradition; at the Fourth Council under Kanishka the faith split into Hinayana, austere and closer to the original doctrine, and Mahayana, which exalted the Buddha as a saviour and spread along the Silk Road to China, Korea and Japan.
§3Mahavira and the Conquest of Self
Vardhamana Mahavira (c. 540–468 BCE), the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the Jains, was born at Kundagrama near Vaishali and preached for thirty years. Jainism taught the Triratna — right faith, right knowledge and right conduct — and five vows of which the greatest was ahimsa, non-violence, carried with uncompromising rigour: Jains strained their water and swept their path to avoid killing.
At the Pataliputra council and later at Vallabhi the Jain canon (the Agamas) was fixed. After the great schism, the Svetambara ('white-clad') admitted women fully and wore garments, while the Digambara ('sky-clad') held that liberation required absolute renunciation, even of clothes. Jainism never travelled as far as Buddhism, but it profoundly marked Indian ethics, literature, and the merchant communities of the west.
End of Chapter 05 · Volume I