But the heresies, nevertheless, do not represent the priestly caste, so much as the caste most apt to rival and to disregard the claim of the Brahman, viz., the warrior-caste.  They were supported by kings, who gladly stood against priests.  To a great extent both Jainism and Buddhism owed their success (amid other rival heresies with no less claim to good protestantism) to the politics of the day.  The kings of the East were impatient of the Western church; they were pleased to throw it over.  The leaders in the ‘reformation’ were the younger sons of noble blood.  The church received many of these younger sons as priests.  Both Buddha and Mah[=a]v[=i]ra were, in fact, revolting adherents of the Brahmanic faith, but they were princes and had royalty to back them.

Nor in the Brahmanhood of Benares was Brahmanhood at its strongest.  The seat of the Vedic cult lay to the westward, where it arose, in the ‘holy land,’ which received the Vedic Aryans after they had crossed out of the Punj[=a]b.  With the eastward course of conquest the character of the people and the very orthodoxy of the priests were relaxed.  The country that gave rise to the first heresies was one not consecrated to the ancient rites.  Very slowly had these rites marched thither, and they were, so to speak, far from their religious base of supplies.  The West was more conservative than the East.  It was the home of the rites it favored.  The East was but a foster-father.  New tribes, new land, new growth, socially and intellectually,—­all these contributed in the new seat of Brahmanhood to weaken the hold of the priests upon their speculative and now recalcitrant laity.  So before Buddha there were heretics and even Buddhas, for the title was Buddha’s only by adoption.  But of most of these earlier sects one knows little.  Three or four names of reformers have been handed down; half a dozen opponents or rivals of Buddha existed and vied with him.  Most important of these, both on account of his probable priority and because of the lasting character of his school, was the founder or reformer of Jainism, Mah[=a]v[=i]ra Jn[=a]triputra,[4] who with his eleven chief disciples may be regarded as the first open seceders from Brahmanism, unless one assign the same date to the revolt of Buddha.  The two schisms have so much in common, especially in outward features, that for long it was thought that Jainism was a sub-sect of Buddhism.  In their legends, in the localities in which they flourished, and in many minutiae of observances they are alike.  Nevertheless, their differences are as great as the resemblance between them, and what Jainism at first appeared to have got of Buddhism seems now to be rather the common loan made by each sect from Brahmanism.  It is safest, perhaps, to rest in the assurance that the two heresies were contemporaries of the sixth century B.C, and leave unanswered the question which Master preceded the other, though we incline to the opinion that the founder of Jainism, be he Mah[=a]v[=i]ra or his own reputed master, P[=a]rcvan[=a]tha, had founded his sect before Gautama became Buddha.  But there is one good reason for treating of Jainism before Buddhism,[5] and that is, that the former represents a theological mean between Brahmanism and Buddhism.