Birth does not decide worth — and the tradition has argued about that for three thousand years.
The Gita says the four varnas were made by quality and action; the dharmashastras say they are made by birth, and set the penalties accordingly. Every reformer from the Buddha to Basava to Ambedkar has hit this seam, and the ones who stayed inside argued from the tradition's own scriptures.
This is the live argument, and it is not a modern import. The Gita 4.13 verse is quoted by everyone: reformers stop at guna-karma-vibhagashah, made by the distribution of quality and action, and read varna as a description of temperament; traditionalists point out that the same text elsewhere treats varna as inherited and prescribes duties accordingly. The dharmashastras are unambiguous and ugly on the point. Against them stands an equally old counter-tradition inside Hinduism: the Chandogya's Satyakama, admitted to study when he honestly reports that his mother does not know who his father was; sixty-three Tamil Shaiva saints including an untouchable poet; Basava's twelfth-century Lingayat community, which abolished caste and arranged an intercaste marriage and was destroyed for it; Kabir, Ravidas, Narayana Guru, Gandhi, and Ambedkar, who concluded the thing could not be reformed from inside and left with half a million people in 1956. Today the argument runs through temple entry, priesthood, reservations in education and employment, and caste discrimination cases in Silicon Valley. Anyone who tells you Hinduism has a single position on caste is selling something.
The four orders were created by me, by the distribution of quality and action.
Bhagavad Gita 4.13 (rendered)Both sides of the caste argument quote this verse and stop reading at different points in it.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.