Indian Buddhist Attitudes toward Outcastes: Rhetoric around caṇḍālas

Silk, J.A.

doi:doi:10.1163/15728536-06302003

Silk, J.A. (2020)

Indian Buddhist Attitudes toward Outcastes: Rhetoric around caṇḍālas

Indian Buddhist literary sources contain both systematic and casual rejections of, broadly speaking, the caste system and caste discrimination. However, they also provide ample evidence for, possibly subconscious, discriminatory attitudes toward outcastes, prototypically caṇḍālas. The rhetoric found in Indian Buddhist literature regarding caṇḍālas is examined in this paper.