The Śramaṇa Turn

Lesson 44 left religion institutionalised: endowed, staffed, and useful to rulers. This lesson is about the people for whom that was the problem.

Śramaṇa is glossed first as making effort or exertion, toiling, labouring — and then, as a masculine noun, one who performs acts of mortification or austerity, an ascetic, monk, devotee, religious mendicant, attested from the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa onward. The entry then adds that it is applied to a Buddhist monk, to the Buddha himself, and to a Jain ascetic.

The root sense is labour. Whatever a śramaṇa is, he is not described as someone who has stopped working; he is described as someone who works.