Are there any scriptural references that people’s caste is determined by their qualities?

Answer Podcast

So is there any scriptural reference that a person who is low born is also considered to be a high born or considered to be qualified like a high born based on their qualities? Yes definitely, the Bhagavatam and the Puranas firstly talk about the lower possibility of Brahmabandhu the term itself is there and Brahmabandhus are very clearly differentiated from Brahmanas that they are relatives of Brahmanas, but they are not really Brahmanas themselves so and Brahmabandhus are often put in the same category as the lower Varanas because it’s understood that they don’t have the qualifications so otherwise how would you decide that somebody is a Brahmabandhu? Isn’t it? Because they clearly are born in the Brahmanical family so the category of Brahmabandhu itself points to that downward slide that somebody may be born in the Brahmana family but that person doesn’t have Brahmana qualifications so there is clearly something more than birth implied as a qualification when somebody is called as a Brahmabandhu so that means the birth in the Brahmanical family is acknowledged through the word Bandhu, Brahmabandhu but the lack of Brahmanical qualification is pointed out by putting them in a category different from Brahmanas now as far as from the lower to above there is a Chandogya Upanishad that is the famous example of Gautam Rishi a young man comes to him and tells him that he wants to take education from him so he asks this young boy who are your parents? who is your father? and he says my mother was a maid servant so she has known many men so I don’t know who my father is so when I am hearing this Gautam Rishi says that actually you are because you are truthful and truthfulness is a characteristic of a Brahmana therefore you are a Brahmana I will accept you as my student and he gives him education so that is one example apart from that if we see the Puranas themselves Suta Goswami is the primary narrator of the Puranas and Suta Goswami’s birth is not considered exactly perfect it is a Pratiloma birth where the his father Romaharshini Suta is married to a person who is not a Brahmani I think she is a Kshatrani, Trayani or a Vaishya and so that is not considered to be a really a very proper birth you know a Brahmana’s husband a Brahmana’s father, a Brahmana’s mother they both together give a Brahmana child but in spite of that disqualification Suta Goswami is considered as a authoritative enough to narrate even to great sages like Shaunaka and others especially in the Bhakti tradition if we see it is filled with saints who were from lower lower rungs of society whether it be Haridas Thakur in our tradition or whether it be Tukaram Maharaj himself in Maharashtra was there he was also not from a Brahmanical caste so the Bhakti tradition offers a lot of examples and broadly that means birth was considered a valid criteria as a starting point but there is always a possibility that despite having a proper birth people may not become elevated and that possibility was acknowledged through the having them Brahma Bandhus so whenever there is any system of social organization social classification it is always possible that there can be there will be concentration of power in the hands of some people and that can lead to discrimination and that’s what happened in the case of Vedic culture the Brahmanas did start claiming privileges based on their own high birth and they started denying privileges to the low born simply because of their low birth without considering their qualifications at all then it became discriminatory and we could see from the same Vedic culture which originally had classification by qualification which later on became classification by birth so from that same Vedic system from one high level there was degeneration but from within that same tradition which degenerated there was also another wave that was of regeneration so the regeneration was the Bhakti tradition so where the Bhakti tradition very strongly emphasized that it is one’s devotion to the absolute that matters far more than one’s birth and so there are a few examples in the Vedic literature I gave two examples of Suta Goswami and Gautam Rishi student and then there are many examples of Bhakti saints who are from lower births but they are considered very exalted because of their devotion does that answer your question?