Do you still feel the need to know someone’s caste? That urge itself is the problem. Caste exists neither in the body nor in consciousness; it is a construct of the mind. Society keeps it alive because the ego thrives on division. Until you see a person simply as a person, caste will persist. The real solution lies in understanding and dropping inner ignorance.
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Questioner: Good evening, sir. I am Krishna, and I'm a student of town planning, and I would like to ask about casteism. So, there's an age-old debate about castes in India, where some people say that it is an embodiment of systematic exploitation, while others say it is just a division of labor that got corrupted with time. So, you have spoken previously about the true meaning of caste based upon the Upanishads. What are your views right now about the Indian caste system?
Acharya Prashant: It does not depend on what criteria you use to divide man from man, it is bogus, full stop. Even if you need to have division of labor, why does that have to be from birth? How is birth a criterion to decide who will pursue what kind of vocation? How is it guaranteed that someone born to an ironsmith would be great with metals, or that someone born to a family of priests would indeed be a wise person? So, all that is quite bogus.
It doesn't matter how you want to interpret it or justify it, just leave it to history and museums now. It's outlived its utility, if ever there was any. I really don't think there ever was any utility. It's just an expression, the caste system is just an expression of the tendency of the ego to divide, because the ego is a limited thing, and all limits mean boundaries. The ego, therefore, cannot live without boundaries. It needs to find some way, one way after the other, to divide one person from the other.
