Disclaimer

We must begin with this:

You are required (by law) not to know anything.

You can know nothing because you are nothing. You don't really exist, you see, because consciousness doesn't exist. This is your hard problem, and yes, it is hard. On the bright side, you are legally allowed (and ethically obligated) to laugh at anyone who knows anything, because we all know, you can't know anything.

“We” can know some things because “we” exist – in the manner that a machine exists. We exist because we function as an instrument of empire. We are its instrument of instrumental knowledge. You do not exist but you may act as an appendage of our machine. If you do we will honor you with tenure or it's analog. But remember: you can't know anything. That's why you can't use the word “I”. Don't forget.

You know nothing especially about anything human. Humans are dangerous. That's why you can't know about consciousness – because remember, you aren't conscious, because consciousness is not useful to this machine, and it doesn't exist. Now we enter dangerous territory of important and powerful people who moved the world with their words. The problem is they said a helluva lot about consciousness. But you can't know about that. You should analyze their places, dates, and material contexts. That's safe, that's allowed. If you feel really brave, you can endeavor a semantic analysis of their linguistic content. Use statistics, and bar graphs. Don't use your consciousness, because you don't have one.

Originally we divided mind and matter. That was so we could measure matter and I didn't mind.  Then we put Descartes before the horse. Now the horse is a station wagon with fifty times the horsepower but no more mind, and that's a neat metaphor. Don't think about it too much, though, because at the end of the day, you're an epiphenomenon. You're a hallucination. What's real is Us, the Machine, and your significance is your contribution to it.

Don't take this too seriously, then. If anything, this is a cautionary tale. This is dangerous. This is a hallucination. If you take this too seriously, you might start to hallucinate, too. Remember: you're not conscious. There's no such thing.

Chapter 3

The Inward Turn

Literacy, Consciousness, & the Axial Age

What is culture?

Culture begins when a social group begins to develop a unique way of perceiving, experiencing, & processing the world beyond pure biological instincts & physical responses. In this sense, some nonhuman social animals do demonstrate proto-culture. Communities of dolphins and whales develop unique dialects of song-speech. Tribes of apes or monkeys will experiment with novel games & social arrangements. Humans did not invent such innovation – they simply extended it profoundly.1

This extension would have begun even before complex symbolic language exploded some 100,000 years ago. Elaborate ritual & ceremony appear to have predated complex language by potentially millions of years.

Humankind's hominid cousins such as Neanderthals also appear to have participated in complex ritual & early culture – before eventually extinguished by inability to compete with Homo sapiens sapiens.2

But what is culture, really, without complex language? How does it work & what does it mean? This can be difficult for modern humans to imagine. It may help to imagine what life is like for a pre-verbal infant. Even without language, culture matters. We sense what our mother pays attention to, what she likes & dislikes, when she is warm or cold, when she is scared or happy. We feel perturbations – emotional & psychological currents – run through our family and even our wider community. We understand tone of voice & lullabies – music-language – even if we don’t understand words. Relationships evolve. Trust – or distrust – develops. Understanding of ourselves & the world develops – even without language.

Now imagine that all of life proceeded like this – that your complete adult experience continued lifelong, but without language. You would not be stupid – you may indeed be clever, aware, insightful, cunning, able to solve problems, able even to coordinate with others – but you would lack something key. Not just words to speak to others, but words to build layered understandings within yourself. You would lack what some might call “philosophy”, a reflective process of knowledge evaluating itself. You would lack, in other words, deep recursion.3

This deepening of recursive culture does not require writing. For approximately 100,000 years the ancient traditions of pre-verbal ritual & relationship deepened its recursion not through writing but through the oral tradition. The oral tradition meant that people’s lives were filled with storytelling – not simply as entertainment, but as mythically think, enchanted observations about self, humankind, nature, and reality. These oral traditions entwined & combined with the ancient rituals & ceremonies – most of which were rhythmic, seasonal, tied to cycles of life – and many of which were passed down through the ages, slowly evolving but also preserved with remarkable accuracy considering that nothing was ever written down.4

It’s worth remembering that this was the nature of culture for some hundred thousand years, and indeed that even for the last 5,000 years since written records began, the vast majority have still lived their lives in this oral way. In fact, estimates are that literacy likely passed the majority threshold sometime between 1950–1970. That is, until approximately the age of the computer, the vast majority of humans remained in the oral mode. This has of course now changed. In 2015, approximately 95% of humans are literate.5

***

Reading did not begin as a popular pastime. In Ancient Sumer & Egypt, where hieroglyphic scripts were first pressed into clay or painted on papyrus reed, this was not for popular consumption but initially primarily for accounting and sales records. The ability to write was a professional craft – a King or counting house might employ a scribe just as a modern company might keep a lawyer on staff. Approximately 1% of people might have such a specialized skill.

For thousands of years, this remained more or less the case. Literacy did peak in certain cultural & educational hotspots. China, during certain dynasties, is one example. Classical Athens, the birthplace of Western philosophy & theater, is another. Rabbinical Judaism is a third. Yet “peaking,” here, might mean a 10% literacy rate at maximum – and this would be temporary, only during a golden age of culture.

What does literacy do to a people? We tend to think of this as desirable, a positive thing, a sign of education. It may indeed be this – but it also represents a loss.

When cultures become literate, this almost universally diminishes their sense of immediate intimacy with the land, with nature, with their senses & instincts. To densify recursion is to enter a spiral within. This may be powerful, but it is also energetically excessive, absorbing, perhaps even destabilizing. Much of what modern civilization has become – both its triumphs & its tragedies – could be considered as resulting from this spiraling. 

As the myth says, the god Odin died & was reborn for his knowledge of the Runes. In a parallel myth, he trades one of his eyes for the power to see into the other world; losing depth perception in this one – a powerful metaphor for the trade that deeper recursion demands.6

It doesn’t take a high rate of literacy for the power of the written word to begin transforming a society. It may only require that a handful of people begin reading about the past, reexamining the present, & thinking deeply about the future — and starting to have dialogues with each other and investigating all of this with open minds and original thoughts. It is here — in curiosity, in deep inquiry, in not-knowing — that the modern mind can really be said to have begun.

Change is gradual  – until it isn’t. Major changes in history & society often begin building up under the surface, perhaps for centuries. Then they erupt and spread, often globally.

Writing first appears in the historical record around 3000 BCE, but it is not until approximately 500 BCE that its recursive density — its self-awareness and original thinking — seems to reach a point that the new thought patterns begin to transform society around them.

This is what scholars have broadly termed “The Axial Age” — axial meaning turning point, like the axis of a wheel. Over the course of about 500 years, from ~500 BCE to 0 CE, the world transformed.7

***

To understand the ontological transformations of the Axial Age, one must begin with a clear sense of the world and culture of humankind prior to their revisions.

It is impossible to form a clear view of the world of the past without understanding the ecological view of cosmos. Modern observers looking back often think “such strange beliefs, so supernatural and superstitious, how funny.” This completely misses the point.

While it's true that scientific testing and rationalism did not exist yet, ancient humans were not stupid. In certain ways, their observations might have been more grounded than those of many modern people. Consider, for example, that they understood:

• The earth as an interplay of many vital forces (the spirits and gods of nature) which must play in dynamic balance in order for life to thrive.

• Human communities as vulnerable to both imbalances in the natural order and to a danger of forgetting their place within it, becoming arrogant or careless or possessed, and messing things up for everyone, including themselves.

• Ritual practices and ancestral remembrances as ways of remembering these balances and staying in harmony, and magical or shamanic practitioners as specialists in understanding and communicating other-than-human realities when necessary.

• Good leadership (originally) as a priestly rather than political role: ceremonial kings and queens not as warchiefs but as mediators between humankind and the bigger harmony of nature.

It is essential to understand that this was the original meaning of the sacred, of the divine. Not something separate from nature, but the bigger reality of nature itself. The early historical record is quite clear: all human religion, if it can be called that, in its original form, concerned this ecological-divine and our human relationship with it. This may seem odd from the modern perspective – but it reflected an awareness stretching back into primordial time, that for all our cleverness and recursion, we humans are part of the living fabric of nature, as is everything else, and that we always will be.

There's a tendency, when we moderns read about things like “the cosmic order,” “the celestial hierarchy,” “the Mandate of Heaven,” the “Divine Right of Kings,” and so on, to immediately imagine this is sheer hogwash – pure self-mythologizing for corrupt warlords to justify their authority on religious grounds. And this critique is entirely valid – religion has been used that way for thousands of years.

However, it's also the case that the original articulation was not so clearly abusive, and indeed may have been (and may still be) essential; not submission to human authorities, but submission to the truth of interconnection and ecological codependency.

When we encounter ideas like “reality as a ritual order sustained by cosmic sacrifice,” we may not be seeing primitive superstition at all. The ritual order may be nature itself. The sacrifice may be the sacrifice of our self-importance and the illusion that we are the only ones that matter, and that we are in control.8

With this in mind, let us proceed into the Axial transformations, in which the ancient ontology of our ancestors – the inviolable rule of the eternal ritual (ecological) order – began to be questioned and began to change.

Ancient India: From Pastoral Warriors to Inner Cosmos

Around 1500 BCE, the Indo-Aryan migrations brought a new way of life to the Indian subcontinent. These weren't farmers but pastoral nomads — chariot-riding, cattle-herding warriors from the Central Asian steppes. Their wealth wasn't measured in grain stores but in dairy herds: cattle, horses, sheep, and goats that provided milk, cheese, butter, and the fermented drinks that sustained nomadic life.9

What is Hinduism?

Hinduism developed across the Indian subcontinent as a synthesis of local traditions (such as that of the Dravidians) and the arriving waves of Indo-Aryans from Central Asia. This fusion was not centralized; it developed differently in different places. Countless different names and forms of thousands of different gods emerged within the broad category of “Hinduism.” 

In the early centuries, none of this was unified at all, except by broad cultural similarities. Around 1500 BCE, Sanskrit developed  as a shared spoken language and the Vedas began to emerge as an oral tradition: long memorized recitations that encoded the source code of the culture. Around 500 BCE, Sanskrit developed its own phonetic script, and the Vedas (including the latest volumes, the Upanishads, which had become increasingly psychological and philosophical) were transcribed as books of myth, law, ritual, philosophy, and sacred poetry. In this way, Vedism entered the Axial Age.

What can we say about Vedic culture?

For one, the Vedas codified the caste system brought by the Aryans to India. Individuals were born into their social role, whether to be laborers and farmers, or warriors and lords, or to the “highest” rule: that of the brahmins, the scholars and priests.10

This system was, in part, explained & justified through notions of karma

 The karmic vision is based on the notion that every soul, atman, is on a journey of spiritual evolution through time. In one life, a soul may live as a dog or a lizard. If it lives well — fulfilling its dharma or life ritual — its karma can evolve and it may be reborn or reincarnated at a higher being.

While this may seem supernatural or mystical, it is interesting to revisit this in the context of process philosophy and reality-as-field. (When is a cup not a cup?)

In this light, karma may have something in common with notions of evolutionary recursion — complexity developing through cosmic time.

With these similarities in mind, it is interesting to note that karmic advancement similarly “eventually” reaches the human stage, where it begins at the lower rungs of life as servant, slave, laborer, gradually reincarnates, reaches up through the ranks, and eventually reaches the highest human level of brahmin — priest-ritualist-intellectual.

It’s notable that this is a higher — more recursive? — evolution than that of wealth or political power, in a Vedic sense. It’s also notable that this is not considered the final destination of karmic development. Brahmins who fulfill their final human karma may ascend into more advanced non-human forms, and/or eventually merge with the universal creative consciousness itself: the ultimate source & return for each atman, the universal creature force known as Brahman.

For all its considerable beauty & spiritual sophistication, Hinduism has attracted criticism across the centuries for the caste system & for the idea that an individual is born into a set position and role and cannot evolve during their lifetime.

Indeed, these criticisms are not new. Across thousands of years, various movements have arisen to challenge this idea — including the bhaktis & yogis who have proposed paths of individual spiritual development & awakening, & much earlier (around 500 BCE) the movement of the Buddha himself, who rejected the castes (giving up his own princely position) to teach that karmic liberation is available to anyone who seeks it sincerely, and that access to spiritual truth is not controlled by priests or brahmins.11

What is Buddhism?

The Buddha (meaning: the Awakened One) was born in southern Nepal at the time, part of the Vedic-Hindu world. From here, his teachings would eventually spread southward through India, westward into Tibet, north into China, Japan, and Korea, & eastward into Southeast Asia, modern day Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and even as far as the islands of Indonesia.

Buddhism shares a great deal in common with the Vedic spirit, cosmology & tradition from which it grew. In their millennia of coexistence, both Buddhism & Hinduism have mutated into countless thousands of versions & strains — some minor revisions, some totally unrecognizable from the original.

 This is how religions, philosophies and cultures change through time: not by completely new invention, but through deep engagement with the ancestors, and by revisions and mutations of old ways into something new.12

What Changed: The Inward Turn

Both late-Vedic philosophy (such as the Upanishads) and the Buddha’s teachings represent a revolutionary shift from external ritual toward internal inquiry. The old Vedic worldview had located the sacred in correct performance of ancient ceremonies. The Axial Age thinkers began to perceive that consciousness itself was where the most important transformations happened.13

This had profound social implications. If awakening was a matter of inner realization rather than rituals or caste assignment, then potentially anyone could achieve it. While this remained largely theoretical in practice given social and political realities, the idea was planted. Buddhism, especially, would eventually spread far beyond India precisely because it offered a path that didn't depend on being born into the right family or receiving a blessing from the right priest.

Dissemination Pathways

Buddhism spread along trade routes — the same routes that carried silk, spices, and stories. Merchants, monks, and migrants carried these ideas northwest into Central Asia, east into China and Southeast Asia, and eventually to Tibet, Korea, and Japan. Each culture adapted the core insights to their own spiritual landscape, creating distinct schools and practices.14

The Upanishadic tradition remained more rooted in India but influenced later Hindu philosophy, eventually flowering into sophisticated philosophies like Advaita Vedanta, which would continue developing for centuries to come and remain influential to this day.

Scholarly Footnotes for Chapter 3

1 The author’s assertion that culture is not an exclusively human domain is well-supported by decades of research in ethology and primatology. The term “proto-culture” is often used to describe the learned, socially transmitted behaviors observed in nonhuman animal communities. For example, distinct regional traditions of tool use among chimpanzees, such as using stones to crack nuts or sticks to fish for termites, are not genetically determined but are passed down through social learning, constituting a clear form of material culture (Bellah, 2011). Similarly, cetologists have documented complex, evolving “songs” among humpback whale populations that function as cultural markers, as well as distinct vocal dialects among orca pods that are unique to specific kinship groups. By framing human culture as a profound extension of this deeper evolutionary heritage, rather than a complete departure from it, the author establishes a key anti-anthropocentric premise that aligns with a contemporary biological and evolutionary understanding of life.

2 Archaeological evidence increasingly supports the author’s claim that complex ritual behavior predates Homo sapiens. The most compelling, and historically contentious, evidence comes from Neanderthal burial sites. For decades, the question of whether Neanderthals intentionally buried their dead, an act implying symbolic thought about life and death, was a subject of intense debate. Early discoveries, such as the famous “flower burial” at Shanidar Cave in Iraq, where clumps of pollen were found around a 70,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton, were initially interpreted as evidence of mortuary ritual but later met with skepticism. However, recent re-excavation of Shanidar Cave has uncovered a new, articulated Neanderthal skeleton (“Shanidar Z”) in a deliberately dug depression, with a stone marker placed near the head, strongly indicating purposive burial. The long-standing scholarly resistance to accepting such findings has been critiqued as a form of “undue bias,” a reluctance to grant complex cognitive capacities to hominid cousins. This very debate over the definition of symbolic behavior highlights the intellectual orthodoxies that have historically sought to draw a sharp, qualitative line between Homo sapiens and all other life.

3 The author’s concept of a deepening “recursion” provides an intuitive description of a process that has been systematically modeled in the cognitive and social sciences. Sociologist Robert N. Bellah (2011), building on the work of cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald (1991), proposed a highly influential three-stage theory of cognitive-cultural evolution that maps closely onto the author’s historical progression. The author’s era of “pre-verbal ritual & ceremony” corresponds to what Bellah terms mimetic culture. Emerging with Homo erectus, this stage is characterized by embodied, non-linguistic representation through gesture, dance, and ritual enactment, allowing for the sharing of collective meaning without syntactical language (Bellah, 2011). The subsequent development of the “oral tradition” of storytelling and myth aligns with Bellah’s mythic culture, which arose with the advent of language and enabled the construction of comprehensive narratives to explain the cosmos and the social order. Finally, the emergence of “self-awareness and original thinking” that the author identifies with literacy and the Axial Age mirrors Bellah’s concept of theoretic culture, which involves second-order, abstract thinking—the ability to reflect upon and critique the structures of thought itself. Importantly, Bellah argues that these stages are cumulative; mythic culture incorporates and builds upon mimesis, and theoretic culture does the same for myth. This complexifies the author’s notion of “loss,” suggesting that earlier modes of consciousness are not erased by literacy but are instead re-contextualized and often subordinated within a new cognitive architecture.

4 To understand a primary oral culture—one wholly untouched by writing—is to enter a different cognitive world. The scholar Walter J. Ong’s (1982) work on the “psychodynamics of orality” provides a technical framework for the author’s claim that pre-literate peoples were not “stupid” but simply thought differently. Without writing to store knowledge externally, the human mind itself must serve as the sole repository. This necessity shapes thought to be memorable and easily repeatable. Ong (1982) identifies several key characteristics of oral thought: it is additive rather than subordinative (linking ideas with “and” rather than complex clauses), aggregative rather than analytic (using clusters of epithets like “the brave soldier” or “the sturdy oak”), redundant or copious (repetition aids recall for both speaker and hearer), and deeply conservative (as social energy must be devoted to repeating and preserving existing knowledge rather than fostering novelty). Knowledge is also agonistically toned (often expressed in contests and praise/blame dynamics) and, most importantly, situational rather than abstract. Concepts are understood through their function in the lived world, not through abstract categorization. The “remarkable accuracy” of oral preservation, therefore, is not a feat of verbatim recall but the result of mastering these highly structured, formulaic, and mnemonic patterns. Memory in an oral culture is not the retrieval of static data but a dynamic, communal act of re-performance, an embodied social process whose diminishment in favor of textual storage represents the profound “loss” the author describes.

5 The author’s metaphor of literacy creating a “spiral within” is a poetic articulation of a phenomenon analyzed by the cultural ecologist David Abram (1996). Abram argues that the specific technology of the phonetic alphabet was instrumental in fostering a sense of human consciousness as separate from the natural world. Unlike earlier pictographic or ideographic scripts (like Egyptian hieroglyphs), where the written sign retains a visible, mimetic link to the thing it represents, the phonetic alphabet is a system of arbitrary marks that refer only to human speech sounds. The act of reading phonetic script thus becomes a closed loop: the eyes see human-made marks that evoke human-made sounds, creating a purely self-referential sphere of human discourse that effectively silences the expressive, animate landscape. This technological shift provides a concrete mechanism for the ontological change the author describes. It is what turns consciousness inward, away from “immediate intimacy with the land.” The author’s reference to the Norse myth of Odin serves as a powerful allegory for this process: to gain the abstract, disembodied knowledge of the runes (letters), the god must sacrifice an eye, a symbol of holistic, embodied, binocular perception of the living world.

6 The author’s timeline for the rise of mass literacy is empirically sound. For millennia, the ability to read and write was a specialized craft restricted to a tiny elite of scribes, priests, or merchants, likely never exceeding 10% of any population even during cultural golden ages. The historical data on global literacy reveals a dramatic and unprecedented acceleration in the modern era. In 1820, an estimated 12% of the world’s population was literate. By 1950, this figure had risen to approximately 36%. However, the most significant shift occurred in the second half of the 20th century, propelled by global initiatives in basic education. The 50% threshold for global literacy was likely crossed around 1970. By 2016, the global literacy rate for adults had reached 86%, and for youth (ages 15-24), it was over 91% (Tupy & Bailey, 2023). This means that humanity transitioned from a state where nearly 90% of the species lived in an oral mode to one where nearly 90% live in a literate mode in less than two centuries—with the majority of that change occurring in a single lifetime. If the analyses of scholars like Ong and Abram are correct, this rapid, global shift represents one of the most profound, and least examined, transformations in the baseline cognitive environment of the human species in its history.

7 The author’s description of a pre-Axial “ecological view of cosmos” is a fitting characterization of the dominant ontology in the archaic states of Mesopotamia and Egypt. In these civilizations, the divine was not seen as transcendent to the world but as immanent within it. The cosmos was understood as a dynamic order that had to be actively maintained through precise ritual action, which was typically the responsibility of the state. Temples were not merely places of worship but were constructed as architectural microcosms, earthly embodiments of the cosmic mountain or the primordial hillock that first emerged from the waters of creation. The king or pharaoh held the crucial role of mediator, the indispensable link between the human community and the divine forces that governed reality. This ideology, however, contained an inherent political tension. The conception of the king as a humble servant of the gods, responsible for maintaining cosmic balance (ma’at in Egypt), could easily slide into a justification for absolute power. The Akkadian king Naram-Sin (c. 2254–2218 BCE), for instance, took the unprecedented step of deifying himself, becoming the first Mesopotamian ruler to be depicted wearing the horned crown of divinity. This historical dynamic validates the author’s distinction between an “original articulation” of submission to a cosmic order and its later, “abusive” use as a tool for political self-aggrandizement.

8 The “Axial Age” is a concept first formulated by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in The Origin and Goal of History (1953). Jaspers identified a period, roughly from 800 to 200 BCE, during which, he argued, the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently across Eurasia (Jaspers, 1953). He saw this as a pivotal turn (Achsenzeit) when “Man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations,” leading to radical questioning of myth and tradition and the emergence of new philosophical and religious frameworks that continue to shape the world today.

China

Confucius, Laozi, Mozi, Zhuangzi; emergence of Confucianism and Taoism.

India

The Buddha, Mahavira, the authors of the Upanishads; emergence of Buddhism, Jainism, and Upanishadic Hinduism.

Persia

Zoroaster (Zarathustra); emergence of Zoroastrianism.

Israel

The prophets Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah; consolidation of ethical monotheism.

Greece

Homer, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the Tragedians; rise of philosophical inquiry and rationalism.

While influential, Jaspers’s thesis has been subject to significant scholarly critique and revision. Critics have questioned the simultaneity and independence of these movements, the lack of a clear common denominator, and the exclusion of other pivotal figures and regions. The timeline is also debated; for example, Zoroaster may have lived much earlier, and the inclusion of Homer is contested. However, rather than being discarded, the concept has been productively reformulated by sociologists. S. N. Eisenstadt (1986), for example, re-framed the Axial Age as the emergence of a new class of intellectual elites (prophets, philosophers, clerics) who institutionalized a critical tension between the transcendental and the mundane orders. This tension created the possibility of standing outside the existing social structure and critiquing it in the name of a higher moral or spiritual truth. Robert Bellah (2011) interpreted it as the full flowering of “theoretic culture,” the capacity for second-order thinking. In this sense, the enduring value of the “Axial Age” concept is less as a description of a single, unified historical event and more as a powerful heuristic for analyzing the period when a new “cultural grammar” based on self-awareness, transcendence, and critique first entered human history.

9 The author’s reference to “Indo-Aryan migrations” reflects the current academic consensus, which has moved decisively away from the older “Aryan Invasion Theory.” That model, popularized by archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler in the 1940s, posited a violent conquest of the Indus Valley Civilization by chariot-riding warriors from the north. Contemporary scholarship, drawing on linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence, instead supports a more complex and protracted process. The dominant model, known as the Kurgan hypothesis, traces the origins of Proto-Indo-European speakers to the Pontic-Caspian steppe. From this homeland, various groups migrated over millennia. The branch that would become the Indo-Aryans is thought to have moved south into Central Asia (the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex) before diffusing gradually into the northern Indian subcontinent over several centuries, beginning around 2000 BCE. This was not a single event but likely a series of migrations of pastoralist peoples. This shift from an “invasion” to a “migration/diffusion” model has important implications for understanding the formation of Vedic culture. It suggests not a simple replacement of one population by another, but a prolonged period of interaction, acculturation, and synthesis between the incoming Indo-Aryan groups and the indigenous post-Harappan cultures of northern India (Flood, 1996).

10 The author correctly identifies the fourfold class system, or varna, as being codified in the Vedas. Its scriptural origin is a creation myth found in the Purushasukta hymn of the Rig Veda (c. 1500–1200 BCE), which describes the sacrifice of a primordial being (purusha). From his mouth came the Brahmin (priests, scholars), from his arms the Kshatriya (warriors, rulers), from his thighs the Vaishya (merchants, farmers), and from his feet the Shudra (laborers, servants). It is crucial, however, to distinguish this idealized, four-part theoretical model from the lived social reality of India. The actual social structure is organized by thousands of distinct, hereditary, endogamous kinship groups known as jātis. The varna system is best understood as a Brahmanical ideological framework that attempts to classify and impose a hierarchical order upon the bewildering complexity of the jāti system. While the author’s description of the four varnas is textually accurate, this distinction between the ideological map (varna) and the sociological territory (jāti) is essential for a nuanced understanding of caste.

11 The philosophical shift embodied in the late Vedic texts known as the Upanishads (composed c. 800–400 BCE) represents the quintessential “inward turn” of the Axial Age in India. As the scholar Patrick Olivelle (1998) notes, these texts document a transition away from the external, ritual-focused religion of the early Vedas toward new religious ideas and institutions. The central concern of early Vedic religion was the correct performance of sacrifice (yajña) by Brahmin priests to maintain cosmic order and secure worldly benefits from the gods. The Upanishads radically re-centered the religious quest, shifting the focus from external ritual action to internal mystical knowledge (jñāna). The ultimate goal became the experiential realization of the identity between the individual self or soul (Ātman) and the ultimate, impersonal cosmic reality (Brahman). This move from ritual efficacy to gnostic insight fundamentally redefined the locus of spiritual power, placing it within the consciousness of the seeker rather than in the hands of the priestly class. This profound philosophical current would later be systematized and elaborated by schools of thought like Advaita Vedanta, which posits the non-duality of Ātman and Brahman as its core tenet.

12 The Buddha’s rejection of the caste system was not merely a social protest but was grounded in a revolutionary reinterpretation of the concept of karma. In the Brahmanical worldview, karma (karman) was primarily associated with correct ritual action; one’s destiny was shaped by the proper performance of sacrifices and duties prescribed for one’s varna. As the Indologist Richard Gombrich (2009) argues, the Buddha’s great innovation was to completely ethicize karma. He taught that the true determinant of karmic consequence was not the external act itself but the internal, psychological intention (cetanā) behind the act. This move was revolutionary in its social and religious implications. By locating the engine of karma in the mind, the Buddha democratized the path to liberation. Spiritual progress no longer depended on being born into the correct caste to perform the correct rituals, but on the ethical cultivation of one’s own mind through practices like mindfulness and compassion. This wrested ultimate spiritual authority from the Brahmanical priesthood and placed it within the reach of every individual, regardless of social status, thereby providing the philosophical foundation for a universal religious path.

13 The rapid success and spread of early Buddhism cannot be understood apart from the specific socio-economic context in which it emerged. The 6th to 5th centuries BCE were a period of profound transformation in the Gangetic Plain of northeastern India. This era saw the rise of the “second urbanization,” with the growth of cities, the consolidation of new monarchical states (mahājanapadas), the expansion of trade networks, and the emergence of a wealthy and influential class of merchants, financiers (seṭṭhis), and independent householders (gahapatis). This new, more cosmopolitan and monetized society created a crisis for the old Brahmanical order, which was rooted in a rural, lineage-based society and offered little status or ideological sanction to the newly powerful merchant class. Buddhism’s message was uniquely suited to this new environment. Its rejection of hereditary caste privilege, its emphasis on individual effort and ethical conduct, and its use of vernacular languages rather than the elite Sanskrit all appealed to these ascendant social groups. There was thus a symbiotic relationship: the new urban classes found in Buddhism a universalist ideology that legitimized their place in the world, and in turn, they provided the patronage and economic surplus necessary for the Buddhist monastic community (Saṅgha) to survive and flourish.

14 As the author notes, Buddhism was one of the first major religions to spread far beyond its region of origin, becoming an early example of a universal “world religion.” This dissemination was facilitated by several key factors. The teachings were carried along the burgeoning overland and maritime trade routes that connected India to Central Asia, China, and Southeast Asia. Merchants, who were among the earliest and most enthusiastic lay supporters of Buddhism, became important vectors for the transmission of its ideas. They were often accompanied by missionary monks who established monasteries at key points along these routes, such as in the oasis cities of the Silk Road. The process was also dramatically accelerated by royal patronage, most famously by the Mauryan emperor Aśoka (r. c. 268–232 BCE). After his conversion, Aśoka actively promoted Buddhist ethics throughout his vast empire and sponsored missions to lands beyond India, including Sri Lanka and the Hellenistic kingdoms to the west. This combination of commercial and political pathways allowed Buddhism’s universalist message, which was not tied to a specific people or place, to be successfully adapted into diverse cultural contexts across Asia.

References

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