Vratyas were persons of various castes, who did not undergo the sixteen ceremonies. Contemptuous treatment of Vrātya is seen in almost every chapter of the text. He forbids intermarriage with Vratyas, speaks of the descendants of Vrātya as Shūdras, forbids sacrificing for Vrātyas, and prescribes the same penance for sexual intercourse with a Vrātya woman as he does for such relation with a Chāndāla woman.
A Vähya was a person excluded by the community. This class probably differed very slightly from Vrātya in the treatment by dharma.
We come at last to the Shūdras. Our writer I think does not regard the Shūdras as ārya. There are many references which hint this idea indirectly, but he has never committed himself in any of the places. He has not contrasted ārya with Shūdra, but has on various occasions contrasted twice-born and Shūdra. But he has indirectly hinted that Shūdra is not ārya by declaring that every ārya must study Vedas (ii, 165). In the whole book there is not a single expression which would indicate that our writer has any conception of what we may call race, and the readers of our text should take every care not to put into the word "ārya" a meaning which modern philology has attached to the English word "Aryan." Had the Chinese only respected Brāhmanas our writer would have been perfectly willing to call them Kshatriyas and therefore āryas. People who may have been born in an Aryan family or tribe,
contempt (e. g., viii, 66; x, 32; xi, 81; xii, 70). Dasyus are contrasted with āryas in the Vedas, and our writer, who was a Vedic scholar, would probably have regarded his book as incomplete unless he made use of such a term.
