could begin teaching their sons early on. It was the Brahmans too who knew how to perform the elaborate sacrificial rites by means of which the whole world was kept in existence.110 The kings and nobles funded the sacrifices and the landowners bred the cattle that were killed. Thus three of the four classes had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. This is the traditional picture. By the time of Gautama, however, there was widespread change in India, both social and spiritual. Towns and cities were on the increase and the power partnership of king and temple was breaking down as merchants and a market economy undermined the status quo. A new urban class was emerging which was ambitious for itself and impatient with the old ways. The new Iron Age technology played a role here, too, in helping farmers clear the dense forests.111 This opened up more and more land to cultivation and changed the economy from stockbreeding to agricultural crops. Though this helped expand population, it also changed attitudes to sacrifice, now seen as more and more out of place. Kapilavatthu, where Gautama lived, typified these changes. In any case shortly before his birth there was a religious rebellion in India. Dissatisfied with the old Vedic faith, the sages of the day began to compose a new series of texts which they passed secretly between themselves. These new texts became known as the Upanishads, which derived from a Sanskrit term, apa-ni-sad , which means 'to sit near', and reflected the unorthodox way that these new, reinterpreted verses, were begun. In a way the Upanishads had parallels with the teaching of the Israeli prophets, in that they made the old Vedas more spiritual and gave them an interiorised aspect.112 By dint of the Upanishad disciplines, a practitioner would find that Brahman was present in the core of his own being. 'Salvation lay not in sacrifice but in the realisation that absolute, eternal reality that is higher even than the gods, was identical to one's own deepest self ( atman ).' In the Upanishads, salvation is not just salvation from sin, but from the human condition itself.113 This really marked the beginning of the religion that we now call Hinduism, and the parallels with the Judaism of the prophets are clear. Just where the idea of reincarnation came from is not so clear. However, in the As'valayana-Grkyasutra , one of the Vedas, there is an idea that 'The eye must enter the sun, the soul the wind; go into the heaven and go into the earth according to destiny; or go into the water, if that be assigned to thee, or dwell with thy limbs in the plants.'114 Though primitive, this passage in many ways heralds the idea, in the Upanishads, that, after cremation, the dead, according to their life on earth, would go 'the way of God' ( devayana ), which led to Brahman, or to 'the way of the fathers' ( pitrayana ) which went via darkness and gloom to the abode of the ancestors and then back to earth for a new cycle.115 It was in the Upanishads that the twin doctrines of samsara and karma appear. Samsara is rebirth, karma is the life force but its character determines the form of someone's next incarnation. The subject of the twin processes was the atman , the soul, a word derived from an , to breathe, meaning that for Hindus too the soul was equivalent to the animating principle.116 In order to be at one with Brahman and achieve moksa , and to succeed to the 'way of the gods', salvation, the atman had to overcome avidya , a profound ignorance, of which the most important aspect was maya , taking the phenomenal world for reality and regarding the self as a separate entity. The overlap here between Hinduism on the one hand, and Plato on the other, is apparent and will become more so. This then was the background out of which Siddhartha Gautama-the Buddha-appeared. His life is nowhere near as well documented as the Israelite prophets, say, or that of Jesus. Narrative biographies have been written, but the earliest dates from the third century AD, and though they were based on an earlier account, written down around a hundred years after his death in 483 BC, that text has been lost, and we can have little idea of the accuracy of the extant biographies. But it would appear that Gautama was about twenty-nine when, c . 538 BC, he suddenly left his wife, child and very well-to-do family and embarked on his search for enlightenment. It is said that he sneaked upstairs for one last look at his sleeping wife and son, but then left without saying goodbye. Part of him at least was not sorry to go: he had nicknamed the little boy Rahula, which means 'fetter', and the baby certainly symbolised the fact that Gautama felt shackled to a way of life he found abhorrent. He had a yearning for what he saw as a cleaner, more spiritual life, and so he did what many holy men did in India at the time: he turned his back on his family and possessions, put on the yellow robe of an itinerant, and lived by begging, which was an accepted form of life in India at the time.