The Vinaya and Sutta portions of the Pāli canon, for example, contain only five references to Brahmins who received land grants from the kings of Kosala and Magadha, and only seven references are made to Brahmanic settlements in the same region.[5] Even a text such as the Ambaṭṭha Sutta, which Bronkhorst argues is late, describes how the Brahmin Ambaṭṭha arrived in Kapilavatthu only to become an object of ridicule to the local Śākyas.[6] This evidence suggests that Brahmins were an oddity in the early Buddhist period, and thus that Vedic culture played little role in the imperial civilization established by the Mauryas.

But this does not mean that Brahmanism was entirely absent from the region of Greater Magadha. The Yājñavalkya-kāṇḍasuggests the existence of a small but influential school within the region of Videha-Kosala, and thus the orb of the Magadhan cultural region, in the late Vedic period. Situated in non-Vedic territory, at a time of great social change, the Brahminic thinkers of this circle would have developed their ideas in isolation from the Vedic mainstream. It is even possible this school also became a haven for ascetic and speculative traditions attested as far back as the late Ṛgveda.[7]

Whatever the case, there is a strong case that the ideas of karma and liberation from rebirth emerged in this unorthodox school, and then eventually triggered the culture of world renunciation, asceticism, and meditation. If so, it would seem that the peculiar religious culture of Greater Magadha was an unintended consequence of the early Videhan kings’ attempt to legitimize their rule through the Vedic tradition. From the Vedic perspective this Sanskritization went wrong, for it resulted not in the establishment of Vedic orthodoxy beyond the āryāvarta, but rather an unorthodox counterculture of renouncers and philosophers.