32 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
ordained Religious inequality. These are matters which are connected with what are called sacraments and Ashrams.
The Hindus like the Christians believe in sacraments. The only difference is that the Hindus have so many of them that even the Roman Catholic Christians would be surprised at the extravagant number observed by the Hindus. Originally their number was forty and covered the most trivial as well as the most important occasions in a person’s life. First they were reduced to twenty. Later on it was reduced to sixteen [1] and at that figure the sacraments of the Hindus have remained stabilized.
Before I explain how at the core of these rules of sacraments there lies the spirit of inequality the reader must know what the rules are. It is impossible to examine all. It will be enough if 1 deal with a few of them. I will take only three categories of them, those relating with Initiation, Gayatri and Daily Sacrifices.
First as to Initiation. This initiation is effected by the investitute of a person with the sacred thread. The following are the most important rules of Manu regarding the sacrament of investitute.
II. 36. “In the eighth year from the conception of a Brahman, in the eleventh from that of a Kshatriya, and in the twelfth from that of a Vaisya, let the father invest the child with the mark of his class.”
II. 37. “Should a Brahman, or his father for him, be desirous of, his advancement in sacred knowledge; a Kshatriya, of extending his power; or a Vaisya of engaging in mercantile business; the investitute may be made in the fifth, sixth, or eighth years respectively.”
II. 38. “The ceremony of investitute hallowed by the Gayatri must not be delayed, in the case of a priest, beyond the sixteenth year; nor in that of a soldier, beyond the twenty second; nor in that of a merchant, beyond the twenty fourth.”
II. 39. “After that, all youths of these three classes, who have not been invested at the proper time, become vratyas, or outcasts, degraded from the Gayatri, and condemned by the virtuous.”
II. 147. “Let a. man consider that as a mere human birth, which his parents gave him for their mutual gratification, and which he receives after lying in the womb.”
II. 148. “But that birth which his principal acharya, who knows the whole Veda, procures for him by his divine mother the Gayatri, is a true birth; that birth is exempt from age and from death.”
1 The following are the sixteen sacraments:—