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None of the phases of religious life described above can be called popular. The religion of the Brahmans was the thought and science of a class. The various un-Brahmanic confraternities usually required their members to be wandering ascetics. They had little to say to village householders who must have constituted the great majority of the population.
The names of Vâsudeva and Sankarshaṇa occur in old inscriptions and the Greek Heliodoros calls himself a Bhâgavata on the column found at Besnagar and supposed to date from the first part of the second century B.C. The Pâncarâtra was not Brahmanic in origin and the form of the Sânkhya philosophy from which it borrowed was also un-Brahmanic.
It therefore seems probable, though not proven, that the origin of these ideas is to be sought not in the early Brahmanic schools but in the intellectual atmosphere non-theistic, non-sacerdotal, but audaciously speculative which prevailed in the central and eastern part of northern India in the sixth century B.C. The Sâṅkhya recognizes no merit in sacrifices or indeed in good works of any kind, even as a preliminary discipline, and in many details is un-Brahmanic.
Perhaps the fables and parables which form the basis of the fourth book of the Sâṅkhya Sûtras point to some more popular form of instruction similar to the discourses of the Buddha. We may suppose that this ancient un-Brahmanic school took shape in several sects, especially Jainism and Buddhism, and used the Yoga discipline.
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