The Buddha lived about 500 years before the Christian era in the West, and about 500 years after the last waves of fair-complexioned clans, calling themselves aryans, had pushed into northern India and overran the dark-complexioned Dravidian inhabitants.

The India of the Buddha’s day had four major racial¹ identities – brahman (for hereditary priests), kshatriya (for hereditary warriors and rulers), vaisya (for hereditary farmers and merchants) and sudra (for hereditary servants-slaves). Their definition was in some sense more rigid than modern definitions of race, since the kind of work one did for a living was solely determined by one’s racial ancestry.

The Buddha was attributed the racial identity of a kshatriya (warrior and ruler), but chose to adopt the religious lifestyle which was the hereditary role of brahmans.

In the town of Savatthi, a group of brahmans hear that the Buddha teaches that the four racial groups are equally pure.

From among themselves they choose a sixteen-year-old prodigy by the name of Assalayana to refute the Buddha. The views that the brahmans hope to convince the Buddha of, are:
that brahmans are the superior racial group;
that brahmans are white, while all the other racial groups are black;
that brahmans alone are pure;
that brahmans alone are the true descendants of God.

The last is addressed first by the Buddha in a very literal way: he asks, How can this be true when it is an observable fact that brahmans are born from women in the same natural manner as members of other racial groups? Assalayana admits this, but maintains his position nonetheless.

The Buddha then points out the relative nature of Indian social structure: other cultures have different social hierarchies. Assalayana grants this, but still maintains his position.

The Buddha then successively gets Assalayana to agree that all four racial groups are subject to the same moral laws, that all four racial groups are capable of the civilized behaviors of tolerance and personal hygiene, and that natural laws are indifferent to any human racial distinctions. But at each of these, Assalayana is unmoved.

Finally the Buddha gets Assalayana to admit that brahman identity applies to individuals who are mixed with other racial groups. With this, Assalayana ceases to defend his position.

The Buddha then gets Assalayana to see that while among animals there is a significant distinction between species, among humans distinctions are only superficial. The example from the animal kingdom that the Buddha uses is that of a horse and donkey producing a mule.

With brahman identity no longer defensible upon a racial basis, the Buddha gets Assalayana to fall back on asserting that education is the criterion of a true brahman. Yet this would have still left the brahmans pre-eminent since they were the most educated.

So the Buddha gets Assalayana to assert that it is really virtue (a thing which cannot be monopolized as education can be) that is the true criterion of a brahman. This point was made before, but it did not faze Assalayana, whose arguments remained the same. The difference in this last instance was that since he could not defend the definition of a brahman as one with pure ancestral lineage, his arguments now applied to a universal or mixed-race context.

This last assertion is of course the Buddha’s own, and is what the brahmans had sent Assalayana to refute.

Assalayana becomes despondent and the Buddha recounts the following story.

In time past, a group of brahman seers had held the same views. A well-known seer by the name of Black Devala heard of this and decided to confront the brahmans. He approaches where they live and shouts for them. They find this behavior very rude and attempt to cast an evil spell on him. But the more they try, the fairer Devala’s appearance becomes! At this they lose faith in their religious training. Devala approaches, sympathizes with them, and introduces himself. The brahmans welcome him.

Devala gets the brahmans to admit that since they cannot be certain that their forebears went only with brahmans – for as far back as the seven generations required for brahman identity – then they really cannot be sure what their true racial identity is.

Tradition has it that Devala was in fact the Buddha in a ‘previous’ life.

This episode is significant in that it shows clearly the racial character of ancient Indian society. It was this character that the Buddha’s philosophy or dharma (Pali dhamma)³ addressed. Buddhism began as a language of race, but a language with which race was rejected in no uncertain terms.

The problem the Buddha faced

The brahmans, who considered themselves the superior racial group, imposed the doctrine of atman (Pali atta, “identity”). This was ancient India’s equivalent to the modern notion of race, the belief that ancestral lineage (the atman in the ancient case, biological traits in the modern) innately determined cultural differences. The atman confined each racial group to a very specific socio-economic niche. Only the brahmans’ atman could be identified with the universe (Brahman). This universal identity was discouraged in the non-brahman aryans, and denied outright in the non-aryans.

The fact that race is an identity which extends across generations was expressed as rebirth (Pali jati “birth”). It was quite logical for the Buddha to say (as we do today, and in opposition to the brahmans) that the atman (race) did not exist, yet acknowledge the tremendous motivation it was for many. While the word jati usually referred to a single episode of rebirth, samsara (Pali sangsara “running around”) referred to the entire line or cycle of births which an individual was heir (and potential ancestor) to.

The atman and rebirth went hand in hand with a consuming interest in genealogy. A very critical aspect of ancient Indian society, genealogy provided the means by which one was determined worthy of the most prestigious status, brahman identity, to wit seven generations of unbroken brahman ancestry. The Buddha himself had a clear understanding of his own mixed ancestry -- he acknowledged ancestors from all racial groups -- and advocated that his followers become aware of theirs. In the language of ancient India, this was “knowing one’s former births.”

From childhood the Buddha had felt constrained by racial motivation. Though born to the life of a warrior, he was instinctively drawn to the brahmacariya or ‘holy’ life of a brahman. This conflict was duhkha (Pali dukkha, “dis-ease”). The Buddha saw the entire life that unfolded within rebirth, not only (as the literal meaning of duhkha implies), lacking in ease, lacking a certain naturalness, but as profoundly constrained.

The Buddha’s solution

To overcome this duhkha or constraint, the Buddha set himself the task of rooting out racial motivation (rebirth) in himself. He realized that the biggest obstacle in his way was not anyone’s opposition, but rather his own desire to perpetuate rebirth. This desire was trishna (Pali tanha, “thirst”). It was necessarily all embracing, covering sexual lust, acquisition and destruction. All of the Buddha’s moral struggle was aimed at eliminating this desire.

But the Buddha did not stop there. He rejected the naive belief in permanence on which the notion of atman depended. Both the atman and race deny impermanence by insisting that mental and physical phenomena persist across generations in an individually defining way. Hence the embracing of impermanence was an effective practice which the Buddha used to eradicate racial identity in himself. Impermanence applied to the (five) aggregates (Sanskrit skandha, Pali khandha) -- bodily form, feelings, perception, consciousness, and volitions. To the Buddha, everything that comprised these mental and physical phenomena, and everything they composed, shared the same defining property of impermanence.

The Buddha rejected the brahmans’ claim to a universal identity. Though he himself had sought the life (and asserted the identity) of a brahman, he realized that the brahmans were more constrained by racial motivation (rebirth) than any other racial group. Their atman never reached “union with Brahman (the universe)” as they claimed. It was because they and so many others were constructing their identities out of a variety of body types and cultural forms (the five aggregates), that the Buddha responded with the doctrine of anatman (Pali anatta, “non-identity”). To the brahmans’ culture of identity, the Buddha responded with a culture of non-identity wherein the entire universe was void of any identity or any basis for an identity.

The Buddha would see his liberation from duhkha as ultimate, equal to all previous liberations, and beyond which no future liberation could go. This was nirvana (Pali nibbana, “extinction”). Nirvana was defined as an objective reality. It was unborn because it lacked the racial motivation of rebirth. It lacked the desire--sexual, acquisitive and destructive--which propelled rebirth. And it lacked identity (atman).

To conform with nirvana, the Buddha redefined himself as an arhant (Pali arahant, “worthy”). This was the most distinguished of the aryans (Pali ariya, “noble”), a word which the fair-complexioned tribes as a whole had used to distinguish themselves from the Dravidian natives, and which the Buddha and his followers would use to refer to themselves. Aryan was not as exclusive an identity as brahman, for it applied to some of those whom the brahmans referred to as black (kshatriya like the Buddha, and possibly vaisya), but who were simply mixed race. No matter their hereditary identities--whether warrior-ruler, farmer-merchant, or servant-slave--the arhants and aryans believed they were worthy of respect even from brahmans. But to show respect to those whom the society attributed inferior racial identities, especially in regard to wisdom--the hereditary province of the brahmans--was something of a stretch, especially for brahmans. But it showed the audacity of the early buddhists. The aryans were not even supposed to hold lengthy conversations with anyone who was in a physical position above them.

Many will object to equating the venerable philosophy of buddhism with the profane language of race. Yet the Buddha did no less than denigrate the sacred atman of brahmanism. And Mahayana buddhism profaned nirvana – the cherished prize of early buddhism – by equating it with its antithesis – samsara. Clearly the dynamic of buddhism is not the attainment, but the rejection, of transcendence.

¹ Racial distinctions are as slim as those between ethnicities--as between the “black” and “white” races of America where a genetically white individual can be defined as racially black--but much more appropriate to designate the rigid distinctions that existed between the social groups of ancient India. In general, congenial relations will define genetic and cultural differences as ethnic, while animosity will define them as racial. This is so whether between Han Chinese and Tibetan, between Anglo-Saxon and Celt, or between Russian Slav and Russian Caucasian.

² This section is a paraphrasing of the Assalayana Sutta, a part of the Majjhima Nikaya collection of the Buddhist canon. A verbatim translation of most of the Assalayana Sutta can be found at The Buddha and the Texts of the Pali Canon: Learning and Good Conduct Count More than Birth. A complete version can be found in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya, Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, 1995.

³ Sanskrit and its close relative Pali were the original languages in which buddhist scripture was preserved. Their different forms of words (in that order) are given so the interested reader could compare the definitions given here with those found in other sources.

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