[Advaita-l] Is Ayyappa a Vedic god?

[V Subrahmanian]

There is a lot of literature on 'Caste in Buddhism'; here is one:

http://www.chakranews.com/castes-in-buddhism-is-caste-only-a-hindu-problem-part-4/3094

//Weber while concluding in his long monograph
<http://web.uni-frankfurt.de/irenik/relkultur50.pdf> adds:

“Besides Buddha, the ancient Buddhism of India worshipped the gods,
brahmanas and shramanas. It accepted the caste system and introduced it
even itself. A Buddha could be either a pure kshatriya or a pure brahmana;
however, a person belonging to a mixed or lower caste could never become an
enlightened one, and by no means could a dalit become a Buddha.

The more we study the reality of the ancient Indian Buddhism we see that it
is so extremely related to its contemporary co-religionists and so far from
the thinking, working and feeling of modern Buddhists too. Religious people
who are fighting against one and another today are nevertheless more
related to one another than to their own strange ancestors.//

regards

vs