Chapter 32: Cross-Pollination: Sanatan Dharma, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism in Dialogue

The Udasi order, discussed in the previous chapter, is only the most institutionally concrete example of a much broader pattern: the four great religious traditions native to the Indian subcontinent — Sanatan Dharma, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism — have never developed in true isolation from one another, but through centuries of shared vocabulary, shared sacred geography, mutual borrowing, and mutual critique.

1. Buddhism and Jainism as internal critics and eventual reabsorption

Buddhism and Jainism both emerged, in roughly the 6th to 5th century BCE, as movements led by figures (the Buddha, and the Jain tirthankara Mahavira) working within, yet sharply critical of, the broader Vedic-Brahmanical religious world already described in earlier chapters, above all rejecting Vedic animal sacrifice, the authority of the Vedas themselves as an infallible revealed scripture, and, in Buddhism’s case, the very existence of a permanent Self (Atman) that Upanishadic thought had placed at the center of ultimate reality — a direct philosophical challenge to the teaching examined in Chapters 7 through 9 (Gombrich, 2006, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 2nd ed., Routledge, remains a standard academic treatment of Buddhism’s early relationship to its surrounding Brahmanical religious environment). Jainism, for its part, developed one of the most rigorously and consistently applied doctrines of ahimsa (non-violence) of any Indian tradition, a doctrine that, as discussed in Chapter 17, exerted substantial pressure on Brahmanical Sanatan Dharma practice’s own gradual turn away from animal sacrifice and toward vegetarian ideals (Jha, 2001, discusses this Jain and Buddhist influence on Brahmanical dietary reform directly; Cort, 2001, Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India, Oxford University Press, is a standard modern academic study of Jain social and religious identity, including its long historical coexistence, intermarriage patterns, and shared temple and pilgrimage geography with the surrounding Sanatan Dharma population, particularly in Gujarat and Rajasthan).

Over subsequent centuries, the relationship between these traditions and the wider Brahmanical mainstream shifted repeatedly. Later Sanatan Dharma Puranic theology, rather than treating the Buddha purely as a rival, in several Vaishnava Puranas incorporated the Buddha himself as the ninth avatara of Vishnu — a striking and much-discussed act of theological absorption that different traditional and modern interpreters read variously as an attempt to draw Buddhist devotees back within a Vaishnava framework, as an acknowledgment of the Buddha’s genuine spiritual stature even by his tradition’s critics, or, in a more skeptical historical reading offered by some modern scholars, as a strategy for explaining Buddhism’s decline in India by recasting the Buddha’s teaching as a deliberately delusive divine test rather than treating it as a legitimate rival revelation in its own right. Buddhism itself, meanwhile, declined sharply within India over the first and early second millennium CE, for reasons scholars continue to debate — including the loss of royal patronage, internal doctrinal fragmentation, the Brahminical intellectual resurgence associated with Shankara and others (Chapter 18), and the disruption of major North Indian Buddhist monastic universities during the Turkic and early Delhi Sultanate military campaigns of the 12th and 13th centuries CE — even as it flourished and continues to flourish well beyond India’s borders, across Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and East Asia. Jainism, by contrast, never spread as widely beyond the subcontinent but has maintained an unbroken, continuous presence within India itself down to the present day, remaining, as noted in Chapter 17’s discussion of the Pew Research Center’s 2021 dietary survey, the most consistently vegetarian religious community in India, at 97 percent.

2. Sikhism: born from, and distinct from, the Bhakti-Sufi milieu

Sikhism, founded by Guru Nanak (1469–1539) in Punjab and developed across the ten Sikh Gurus through the early 18th century, emerged directly out of the broader devotional (Bhakti) and Sufi Islamic mystical milieu already discussed in Chapter 20, sharing with contemporaries such as Kabir a commitment to formless, image-free devotion to a single divine reality (accessible to Sikhism as Ik Onkar), a rejection of caste hierarchy in religious practice, and a marked preference for vernacular devotional composition over Sanskrit or Persian elite scholarly languages — indeed, several of Kabir’s own compositions were later included directly within the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, alongside works by Sanatan Dharma Bhakti saints and Muslim Sufi poets, making the Sikh scripture itself a genuinely interfaith devotional anthology rather than a text drawing on a single tradition’s poetic corpus alone. At the same time, Sikhism developed a distinct and self-consciously separate religious identity, formalized decisively by the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, with the establishment of the Khalsa order in 1699, giving Sikhs a distinct visible identity, code of conduct, and institutional structure clearly differentiated from the surrounding Sanatan Dharma religious world even as it continued to share substantial devotional, ethical, and even family and social ties with it — ties reflected concretely in the long historical role of the Udasi order discussed in the previous chapter, and in the still-common historical pattern, particularly in undivided Punjab before 1947, of individual Punjabi families raising some sons within Sikh religious practice and others within Sanatan Dharma practice, treating the two as closely related rather than as sharply opposed communal categories.

3. Shared sacred geography and continuing exchange

Beyond formal doctrine, all four traditions have long shared, and continue to share, specific sacred sites, festivals, and cultural practices across the subcontinent: Jain and Sanatan Dharma temples frequently stand within the same temple complexes or pilgrimage towns, particularly across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Karnataka; Buddhist sites such as Bodh Gaya remain active pilgrimage destinations for Sanatan Dharma as well as Buddhist visitors, and are administered, not without periodic controversy over management rights, by boards including both Sanatan Dharma and Buddhist representation; and Sikh gurdwaras and Sanatan Dharma temples in many parts of India, and across the global Indian diaspora, continue to see mixed attendance and shared festival observance, particularly among Punjabi Sanatan Dharma communities, reflecting the genuinely blended religious history this chapter has traced rather than a set of hermetically sealed, mutually exclusive religious identities.

4. Historical context, evidence, and interpretation

The subject of Cross-Pollination: Sanatan Dharma, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism in Dialogue needs to be approached at more than one level. A religious tradition is not only a collection of doctrines; it is also a record of texts, institutions, practices, places, memories, and changing interpretations. The same word may carry different meanings in different centuries, and the same institution may change while retaining its name. For that reason, the discussion in this chapter distinguishes, wherever the evidence permits, between what a primary source says, what a later community remembers, and what historians infer from comparing independent evidence. This distinction is especially important when a tradition describes its own origins in sacred or idealized language.

Chronology is another safeguard. Dates in South Asian religious history are often approximate because manuscripts are later than the compositions they preserve, oral traditions can predate their surviving written forms, and legendary biographies may combine historical memory with theological purpose. A date attached to a text should therefore not automatically be treated as the date when every idea in that text first existed. Conversely, uncertainty about an exact date does not make a source useless. Linguistic change, intertextual references, material culture, inscriptions, manuscript relationships, and the geographical distribution of traditions can all help establish relative sequence. The result is a history that sometimes has to use ranges and probabilities rather than false precision.

Regional diversity is equally significant. Sanatan Dharma traditions developed across languages and political regions, and religious vocabulary moved between Sanskrit, Prakrits, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and many other languages. A practice described in a Sanskrit normative text may not have been followed in the same form by every community. Conversely, a practice absent from a particular Sanskrit text may be important in a local tradition. Historians therefore compare textual sources with inscriptions, temple records, poetry, ritual manuals, oral histories, archaeology, and ethnography when those sources are available. This approach avoids treating elite textual traditions as a complete record of ordinary religious life.

The chapter's topic also demonstrates why the categories used in modern scholarship should be handled carefully. Terms such as “Sanatan Dharma,” “sect,” “orthodox,” “reform,” “tradition,” “modern,” and “folk” are analytical tools, not neutral labels that existed in exactly their present meanings throughout history. A community may understand itself through lineage, deity, village, language, caste, monastic order, philosophical school, or several of these at once. Modern institutions can preserve older practices while introducing new organizational forms, technologies, educational programs, or global networks. Describing such developments as either pure continuity or complete rupture usually misses the more interesting historical process of selective adaptation.

Primary sources deserve particular attention because they constrain what can responsibly be said. Where the chapter discusses a scripture, the strongest evidence is the text itself in a reliable critical or scholarly translation. Where it discusses an institution, inscriptions, legal records, institutional constitutions, archival documents, court records, or contemporary statements can be more probative than later summaries. Secondary scholarship remains indispensable for chronology, context, translation, and historiographical disagreement, but it should be possible for a reader to trace important claims back toward the underlying evidence. Where evidence is disputed, the text should identify the disagreement rather than manufacture certainty.

Finally, interpretation should remain proportionate to evidence. Similar symbols do not necessarily prove direct historical borrowing; theological similarity does not by itself establish institutional descent; and a later community's claim about antiquity is evidence for that community's self-understanding, not automatically proof of the claimed chronology. These cautions do not diminish the significance of religious traditions. They make the history stronger by allowing sacred claims, scholarly hypotheses, archaeological evidence, and modern institutional narratives to be distinguished rather than conflated. The aim of this chapter, as with the book as a whole, is therefore not to settle every contested question but to give readers enough evidence and context to understand why the questions remain meaningful.

Pluralism without collapsing distinct traditions

Religious interaction in South Asia should not be confused with the absence of religious boundaries. Sanatan Dharma, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist communities shared geographical spaces, languages, pilgrimage routes, artistic conventions, philosophical vocabulary, and sometimes social institutions, while simultaneously maintaining distinctive doctrines and forms of authority. Recent scholarship therefore increasingly studies interaction rather than treating each tradition as a sealed historical block. Oxford’s work on religious interactions in modern India explicitly challenges monolithic treatment of “Sanatan Dharma,” “Muslim,” “Buddhist,” “Sikh,” “Jain,” and “Christian” traditions by examining relationships within and between them, including both cooperation and antagonism. The same methodological caution applies to earlier periods. Similar practices may emerge from shared regional conditions rather than direct borrowing; conversely, genuine borrowing can occur without eliminating the identity of either community. Sikh history provides a particularly clear example: Guru Nanak lived within a religious environment shaped by multiple traditions, and the Sikh canon incorporated compositions associated with figures from different backgrounds. Yet Sikh institutions, scripture, and successive Gurus also developed a distinctive communal trajectory. Jain and Buddhist traditions likewise interacted with Brahmanical traditions through debate, patronage, artistic exchange, shared pilgrimage landscapes, and competition for institutional resources. Such interactions are better described as processes of encounter, adaptation, critique, and selective appropriation than as evidence that all Indic traditions were historically one undifferentiated religion. This distinction is central to a reliable account of Sanatan Dharma because “unity” can be historically meaningful without requiring sameness. The evidence supports extensive interaction; it does not justify erasing doctrinal and institutional differences.

Shared intellectual environments without collapsing differences

Sanatan Dharma, Buddhism and Jainism developed in sustained interaction across the Indian subcontinent. They shared languages, concepts, monastic and lay institutions, pilgrimage networks and philosophical problems, while also disagreeing about fundamental issues such as the self, karma, liberation, ritual authority and the status of the Vedas. Buddhism and Jainism emerged in environments deeply engaged with Vedic ritual culture, but neither can be understood simply as a branch of Vedic religion.

Philosophical debate was particularly important. Buddhist thinkers challenged substantialist accounts of the self; Jain philosophers developed distinctive accounts of substance, karma and multiple-sidedness; Brahmanical schools developed increasingly sophisticated arguments in response. The resulting intellectual history is not a sequence in which one tradition simply replaced another. Texts often preserve explicit debate with rival schools, and concepts were refined partly because competing traditions demanded stronger arguments.

Sikh traditions emerged much later in a different historical environment, but they too participated in a North Indian world shaped by devotional poetry, Islamic intellectual contexts and older Indic ascetic and philosophical traditions. Shared vocabulary does not prove shared theology. The proper historical question is how concepts, practices and institutions moved across communities while each tradition maintained its own claims. This approach allows genuine cross-pollination to be studied without erasing difference.