Meantime the social order was acquiring the first forms of caste. The priests and the fighting men, the people who settled on the lands for pasture and tillage, and the tribes of aborigines whom they dispossessed and subdued, formed the basis of divisions which were gradually multiplied with extraordinary complexity. A religious authority was found for the whole system in the teachings of the Veda, and to contest its claims was to defy the power which slowly spread with subtle hold through the whole peninsula. By its side arose the doctrine of the Deed (_karma_, p. 217), which explained the varied conditions of human life by the principle that {61} "a man is born into the world that he has made." The lot of each individual had a moral meaning: it was the result of previous conduct, good or ill. This is the conception embodied in the word "transmigration." It pictures man as involved in a continuous series of births and deaths, and religion and philosophy undertook in their several ways to secure him a favourable destiny hereafter, or by various means of divine grace, or strenuous self-discipline, or pious contemplation, to extricate him altogether from the weary round of ignorance and pain. Out of these elements, a crude and ever-varying animism at the bottom, a highly refined metaphysical pantheism at the top, figures of incarnation and deliverance, the cultus of the dead, caste, and transmigration, the complex strands of modern Hinduism have been woven. Many have been the growths upon the way. The early Buddhist texts, representing the society of the "Middle Country," show already in the fifth century B.C. a surprising activity of speculation, busily engaged in questioning every received doctrine of religion and morals. Some forms held their ground for a few centuries and then disappeared. One religious community of that date alone survives, viz. the Jains, who still number about a million and a third. Buddhism, after sending out its missionaries into Ceylon in the south and China in the north, was driven from its ancient seats, and {62} only some 300,000 hold its creed in India itself. In Burma, however, it numbers between ten and eleven million lay adherents, and in the adjacent kingdom of Siam it has 13,000 temples, and more than 93,000 mendicants have taken its vows.