On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c5.78

c5.78

Though a political centre was wanting, frequent statements regarding the instruction of the young Brahmans and nobles show that there was an intellectual centre and that it lay in Takkasilā, the capital of distant Gandhāra. Takkasilā is according to the Jātakas the town, where the youth of the two highest classes received instruction in the three Vedas and the twelve or eighteen branches of learning (*sippa* or *vijjāṭhāna*). This agrees with some statements in other parts of the Canon, where, as in the Vinayapiṭaka, the famous physician Jīvaka Komārabhacca is represented as having studied medicine in Takkasilā. And it is very credible that Gandhāra, the native country of Pāṇini, was a stronghold of Brahminical learning certainly in the fourth and fifth centuries B. C., and perhaps even earlier.