Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/425

 Reviews. 405

KGtadanta Sutta, which is really a humorous skit on the formalism of the Brahmanical ritual. Next comes the Mahali Sutta, in which the ability of the initiate to see heavenly sights and hear heavenly sounds is investigated, and the true conception of the possibility of the attainment of Arahatship along the Eight-fold Path is con- sidered. In the eighth, or Kassapa-Sihanada Sutta, the general question of asceticism is dealt with, and in the ninth, or Pottha- pada, the Teacher passes on to a discussion of the Buddhistic theory of the soul. The remaining Suttas are less definite in aim, but the whole collection, as will appear from this brief sum- mary, supplies us with a corpus of early theological and psycho- logical beliefs of which it would be difficult to overrate the importance.

But beside the philosophical interest of this collection, it con- tains many interesting facts connected with the social organisation and popular beliefs of ancient India. Thus, we have (p. 8) a curious reference to what were possibly old exogamous dancing assemblages; to Bina and Diga marriage, in the former the bridegroom being brought to the house of the bride, in the latter the bride being sent to live with the bridegroom (p. 23) ; to sister marriage, adopted by some tribes on the Himalaya " through fear of injuring the purity of their line" (p. 115); to mother-kinship as characteristic of the Kshatriya caste (p. 120). To the ethno- logist one of the most interesting dialogues will be perhaps the Ambattha Sutta, in the excellent and suggestive introduction to which Professor Rhys Davids discusses the Buddhistic conception of caste. He shows that the idea of caste organisation was neither purely Aryan nor Indian. It corresponded on the one hand with the social structure of the Indo-European races about the seventh century B.C., and was also common to the indigenous or Dravi- dian peoples, whose influence on the Aryan poHty is only now beginning to be recognised. We have, on the one hand, the division into the four varnas or colours, among whom the rules of exogamy and endogamy were only now in a faint way beginning to be re- cognised; and, on the other, the occupational form of caste which, originating among the inferior artizan tribes, gradually extended to those of a higher grade. This process, it may be added, was facilitated by the early adoption by the Brahman Levites of the guild system. But these Buddhist records are particularly in- teresting because we find here caste as it were in the making, and