Education in Ancient India c7.s3.23

c7.s3.23

a thousand could explain, as we have seen already, twenty collections of Sūtras. This means that there were about a thousand competent teachers to look after the education of about 4,000, but in no case, more than 9,000 monk students. On the average therefore each teacher was in charge of about not more than nine students. Personal attention was thus possible to each student and the teaching therefore must have been very efficient. The college had eight big halls and 300 smaller apartments and every day the authorities used to arrange for about a hundred lectures. Learned monk teachers were held in high veneration and were provided with sedan chairs. They were experts in the art of teaching and expounding; I-tsing gratefully observes, ‘I have been very glad that I have had an opportunity of aquiring knowledge personally from them, which I should otherwise have never possessed.’