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RELIGION
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Secular Brahmanism recommended the daily practice of salutation to six quarters by a good householder at dawn after bath. The practice was thus linked up with a symbolical scheme of the duties and obligations of a householder which the Buddha tried to render significant by an orientation from his own point of view. But the total result was nothing but the prominence of the ideal which was implied in the Brahmanical scheme.
The early Jain and Buddhist texts also present a vivid and fairly detailed picture of the life of the tāpasas or ancient order of hermits. Acoording to the Brahmanical scheme, the hermits represented the Vānaprastha (Vanapattha) stage. of life. Their retirement from the world is known in Pali as isipabbajjā. The persons who adopted this mode of religious life were mostly Brahmins and Khattiyas; a few of them were gahapatis. Only in a solitary instance a mātanga 2 or 'candāla figures as a notable personality among them. The tradition is conspicuous by the absence of the Suddas. The hermits on their retirement from the world selected a beautiful spot in a woodland or a sequestered valley having a river, or a stream, or a natural lake, near by, and built a hermitage which was no better than a leaf-hut or bamboo
1 Digha, in, p. 180f., Sungalovāda Sutta. 2 Mātanga Jātaka, Jataka No. 407.
