The other four were in many respects what we should call fatalists and materialists[232], or in the language of their time Akriya-vadins, denying, that is, free will, responsibility and the merit or demerit of good or bad actions.  They nevertheless believed in metempsychosis and practised asceticism.  Apparently they held that beings are born again and again according to a natural law, but not according to their deeds:  and that though asceticism cannot accelerate the soul’s journey, yet at a certain stage it is a fore-ordained and indispensable preliminary to emancipation.  The doctrines attributed to all four are crude and startling.  Perhaps they are exaggerated by the Buddhist narrator, but they also reflect the irreverent exuberance of young thought.  Purana Kassapa denies that there is any merit in virtue or harm in murder.  Another ascetic called Ajita of the garment of hair teaches that nothing exists but the four elements, and that “fools and wise alike are annihilated on the dissolution of the body and after death they are not.”  Then why, one asks, was he an ascetic?  Similarly Pakudha Kaccayana states that “when a sharp sword cleaves a head in twain” the soul and pain play a part similar to that played by the component elements of the sword and head.  The most important of these teachers was Makkhali Gosala.  His doctrine comprises a denial of causation and free will and an assertion that fools and wise alike will make an end of pain after wandering through eighty-four hundred thousand births.  The followers of this teacher were called AjIvikas:  they were a distinct body in the time of Asoka, and the name[233] occurs as late as the thirteenth century in South Indian inscriptions.  Several accounts[234] of the founder are extant, but all were compiled by bitter opponents, for he was hated by Jains and Buddhists alike.  His doctrine was closely allied to Jainism, especially the Digambara sect, but was probably more extravagant and anti-social.  He appears to have objected to confraternities[235], to have enjoined a solitary life, absolute nudity and extreme forms of self-mortification, such as eating filth.  The Jains accused his followers of immorality and perhaps they were ancient prototypes of the lower class of religious mendicants who have brought discredit on Hinduism.

3

None of the phases of religious life described above can be called popular.  The religion of the Brahmans was the thought and science of a class.  The various un-Brahmanic confraternities usually required their members to be wandering ascetics.  They had little to say to village householders who must have constituted the great majority of the population.  Also there are signs that priests and nobles, however much they quarrelled, combined to keep the lower castes in subjection[236].  Yet we can hardly doubt that then as now all classes were profoundly religious, and that just as to-day village deities unknown to the Vedas, or even to the Puranas, receive the worship of millions, so then there were gods and rites that did not lack popular attention though unnoticed in the scriptures of Brahmans and Buddhists.