ahmanic 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