Shramana

The movement

The word derives from a root meaning to exert or to strive, and denotes one who labours ascetically. Shramanas were homeless wanderers who had left household life, subsisted on alms, practised austerities and meditation, and taught doctrines of their own devising.

The Pali canon and Jain texts describe a crowded field: teachers with followings, debating in the assembly halls and groves of the Gangetic cities, arguing over the soul, causation, the efficacy of action and what if anything survives death. The Buddha and Mahavira were two among many.

What united them

Shramana doctrines varied enormously — determinist, materialist, sceptical, ascetic — and their teachers attacked one another as vigorously as they attacked the brahmins. What they held in common was negative: rejection of the Vedas as revelation, rejection of sacrifice as efficacious, rejection of brahmin birth as conferring religious authority, and rejection of the household life as the setting for the highest goal.

Most also worked with some version of rebirth and of action determining future states, though they disagreed sharply about how, and the Ajivikas and materialists rejected moral causation altogether.

Context

The movement appears in the Gangetic plain in the middle of the first millennium BCE, in a period of urban growth, expanding trade, coinage and the consolidation of large kingdoms. The connection between these developments and the emergence of renouncer religion has been argued in various ways — new wealth supporting non-productive religious specialists, new social mobility loosening inherited status, or the anonymity of cities enabling departure from clan obligation.

Johannes Bronkhorst has argued that the region east of the Vedic heartland, which he calls Greater Magadha, had its own religious culture in which these ideas were native rather than reactions to Vedic religion — a position that reverses the usual account of the shramanas as dissenters from brahmanism.

Outcome

Two shramana traditions survived: Buddhism, which spread across Asia before contracting in India, and Jainism, which remained. The Ajivikas persisted for many centuries and died out. The materialists left no institution. The rest are known only as names in the polemics of their rivals.