What was the caste system in India, and how did it affect daily life in the civilization?

Answer 1

The caste system in India divides the people of India into four groups of people. The highest being the Brahmans and the lowest being the undesirables. It still effects the daily life of India as the rich people are all apart of the higher caste system, while the undesirables are the poor people who live in the slums. They have no hope of getting out of this caste because, Hinduism teaches reincarnation which really simply is what goes around comes around - in this life or the next, so if you were born into a low caste system, it has something to do with the fact that in your previous life you were not a very good person. This also gives the people from the higher caste system a good reason to ignore and not take care of the poor in their societies, because they see poverty as some sort of justice for mistakes made in past lives. A good example of the caste system being played out was with the tsunamis that hit India on Boxing Day 2004, all of the foreign aid actually never went into the pockets who needed it most (the poor who lost not only all their posessions, but to repairing the mansions of the Rich that were damaged

Answer 2

Today the caste system has not restricted itself to India itself. What was once a societal structuring based on the works (manual or intellectual) that one did, today this caste system has spread all over the world and can be identified under other banners up-class & commoners in Europe, as a phenomenon called Apartheid in Africa and superior & inferior colleagues in the Americas. For an example, all we have to do is look around to see how one human puts down the other by one-upping the other on different factors. This in real sense is the caste System.

Answer 3

Brahmanism, the predominant religion in India during the Buddha's time, divided all humans into four castes (attu vanna), priests, warriors, traders and labourers. Social contact between each caste was minimal and the lower one's position in the system the less opportunities, the less freedom and the less rights one had. Outside the caste system were the outcasts (sudra) people considered so impure that they hardly counted as humans. The caste system was later absorbed into Hinduism, given religious sanction and legitimacy and has continued to function right up till the present.

Despite this, various forms of the caste system are practised in several Buddhist countries, mainly in Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Japan where butchers, leather and metal workers and janitors are sometimes regarded as being impure. However, the system in these countries has never been either as severe or as rigid as the Hindu system and fortunately it is now beginning to fade away.