The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c9.s2: Section 3. Organized Charities and Utilities
The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c9.s2
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Section 3. Organized Charities and Utilities
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As specimens of Hindu energism in group-activity let us begin with organization in social service or welfare work. In Europe the hospital was unknown until Emperor Constantine (306—337) founded it for the first time in the fourth century A. C. But in India the first hospitals both for animals and human beings were founded at least as early as the third century B. C. by Asoka the Great.² And about 400 A. C. among the institutions that drew the notice of Fa Hien,³ the Chinese scholar-saint, at Pâtali-putra, the capital of the Gupta Empire, we are told of the free hospitals "founded by the respectable nobles and landowners of the country". These were resorted to by "the poor of all countries, the destitute, cripples and the diseased", and every kind of requisite help was offered gratuitously.
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² ^2 Rock Edict II.
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³ ^3 Beal's *Travels of Fa Hien and Sung Yung*, p. 107. For the political "immunities" of a village belonging to a hospital in Ceylon *vide* p. 75.
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Similarly Hindu public life can count in its manifold experience the founding and maintenance of *pariṣats* (academies) for the prosecution of research in the arts and sciences, as well as of educational institutions of ambitious scope and encyclopaedic character. It was in the hands of scholars who graduated from such centres of learning that the administration of government was entrusted.⁴ One such institution was the University at Nâlandâ in Eastern India (Bihar), founded by Emperor Narasimha-gupta Bâlâditya (*c.* 469—473). Itsing, the Chinese scholar, was an alumus of this university for ten years (675—685) in the departments of medicine and logic. The number of residents at Nâlandâ exceeded 3000, was between 3500 and 5000, at that time. The lands possessed by the University comprised more than 200 villages, the gifts of kings for several generations.¹ Itsing mentions eight halls and three hundred apartments among the buildings of the institution.²
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⁴ ^4 Takakusu's *Itsing: Record of the Buddhist Religion*, Ch. XXXIV, p. 177.
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¹ *Ibid*, Ch. X, p. 65.
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² *Ibid*, Ch. XXXII, 154.
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The Nâlandâ corporation was a residential-teaching university like the *El Azhar* at Cairo and gave instruction, room, board, and medicine free of any cost whatsoever. Hiuen Thsang was very much impressed by its architectural magnificence. "The richly adorned towers", as we read in his Chinese biography, "and the fairy-like turrets, like pointed hill-tops are congregated together. The observatories seem to be lost in the vapors of the morning and the upper rooms tower above the clouds".³ This was the institution that inspired in subsequent years the monastery-college at Horiyuji near Nara in Japan. And it is on record that the Afghan scholar Vîra-deva was elected Chancellor here in the ninth century then enjoying the patronage of Deva-pâla,⁴ the Bengali *sârvabhauma* of Eastern India. It is obvious that for several centuries after their establishment the Universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford⁵ would certainly have envied the material endowments and international reputation enjoyed by the presidents and faculties of Nâlandâ for about seven hundred years (c 500—1200). The long story of this university bears undoubted testimony to the continuous and cumulative organizing ability of the race in which it flourished.
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³ Beal's *Life of Hiuen Thsiang*, pp. 110—112.
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⁴ *Ind. Ant.*, 1888, pp. 308—309, 311.
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⁵ Leach's *Educational Charters and Documents* (A. C. 598—1909), pp. xxii—xxvii, 276.
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A very interesting *sâhitya pariṣat* (literary academy) of southern India was the *Sangam* of the Tamils⁶ at Madura. Early in the Christian era in this Pandyan city a body of censors formed themselves into an institution to correct the abuses of literature. The third of these *Sangams* was in existence in the second century. Forty nine critics and poets were members of this association, which thus anticipated by about fifteen hundred years the French Academy founded by Richelieu (1637) in its aim at checking the growth of literary weeds. The *Sangam* enjoyed the patronage of the state for several generations. Its influence on the people may be gathered from the fact that the celebrated Tamil classic, the *Kural* of Tiru-valluvar, received the imprimatur of the academy before king Ugra-Peruvalludhi. It is interesting to note that the author himself was not a member of the association. Similarly the two other masterpieces of the Augustan age of Tamil literature, viz., the *Epic of the Anklet* and the *Jewel-Belt*, were submitted to the examination of this body of connoisseurs.
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⁶ Aiyangar's *Anc. Ind.*, pp. 70, 337, 359, 360, 379—382.
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*Pariṣats* or academies, whether stationary or peripatetic, have indeed existed in India since time immemorial. Medicine, grammar, logic, chemistry, mathematics, political science, jurisprudence, almost every branch of learning has grown up in India through the clubbing of intellects. Cooperative researches have been the tradition of intellectual life among Hindus. As a result of these corporate investigations we know today only of "schools" or "systems" of thought, very rarely of the individuals who built them up through the ages. Most of the names in the annals of science and philosophy in India are those of masters or pioneers, and these again, are but pseudonyms associated with the patronymic saints or gods, the Prometheuses and Apollos of Hindu culture.
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It is this collective or *pariṣadic* origin that explains why the treatises on arts and sciences in Sanskrit literature have in general the title of *Saṁhitâ* i. e., compilation. Mostly encyclopædic works, as these are, they bear internal evidence of the collaboration and cumulative experience of many minds.
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Individualistic ideals and ends are as a rule associated with moral, religious, and spiritual affairs in India. Yet even in this field the capacity for cooperation has been equally evident as in other spheres. Every twelve years Hindus have had a Council of Trent, so to speak, since the earliest times. These congresses of spiritual leaders, the *sanyâsins*, monks and hermits, are called *Kumbha-Melâ* after the planetary conjunction (of Kumbha) which recurs periodically. The present-day survivals of these institutions are tremendous vitalizing forces; their delegates number about 75,000, and the audience millions.
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Some of the inscriptions of the ancient Gujaratis throw an interesting sidelight on the Hindu legal sense and institutionalism. India's appreciation of corporate energism will be evident from the measures that General Uṣavadâta adopted to perpetuate the benefits from his charities.¹ This great philanthropist of the Ândhra Deccan had the terms of his endowments registered by the *nigama-sabhâ* (town-corporation) of Govardhana (Nasik). And these were then inscribed on the door of the monastery. Gifts for public purposes used thus to be looked after by public bodies.
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¹ *Early Hist. Dek.*, sec. IV.