Caste

Also published on Twitter

Fine I’ll give my take on the “gatekeeping Vedas” stuff:

• gatekeeping knowledge for generations is bad
• various hereditary occupations gatekept their knowledge to the in-group. Architects, carpenters, ship pilots, various artisan castes etc.
• gatekeeping of the Vedas OTOH was largely theoretical. Vedas were put to writing at some point, and V4s were quite freely admitted to traditional schools.
• Even the theoretical restriction was much more lax than the gatekeeping in other hereditary occupations. V2s and V3s were to learn the Veda after all, even in theory.
• There was gatekeeping on “who could become a priest” … but this was more like a trademark than the use of force. You could always just start your own cult, as long as you did not pretend to be an orthodox Hindu priest. Indeed there were people who fed ascetics of various śramaṇa sects at their sacrifices; of course this was condemned by orthodox V1s but they did not use violence to stop it.
• if “priestly class secretive about their incantations and rituals” happened in Japan instead of India you’d all be creaming your pants