Ancient Indian Education: An Inquiry into its Origin, Development, and Ideals c4.28

c4.28

The different kinds of priestly schools had now become well developed, and were learned associations with a growing reputation, and a priest was proud of the school in which he had received his training, and he could not perform his duties as priest without having passed through one of these schools. The first duty of the student was to learn by heart the particular Veda of his school. This he did by repeating it after his teacher until perfect accuracy was secured. The method was entirely oral, and it was not till much later times that writing was introduced. He would also receive a great deal of instruction on his duties as a priest of the particular school in which he was studying, and also explanations of the meaning of the hymns and ritual acts. The instruction was called *vidhi*, the explanation *arthavāda*. For a long time these lectures were given by the teacher as he willed in his own language, but in each school this didactic material tended to become more and more in accordance with precedent, and finally became stereotyped in the *Brāhmaṇas*.¹ These works are in prose, and were composed somewhere between 800 and 500 B.C. The *Brāhmaṇas* are connected with the different Vedic schools, and contain such material as the students of each Veda required, but their general characteristics are the same. Besides instruction and explanation relating to the sacrificial ritual, they contain mythological stories and legends, speculation, and argument, and we can find in them the first beginnings of grammar, astronomy, etymology, philosophy, and law. Their intellectual activity was centred, however, on the sacrifice, and much of the matter contained in them seems meaningless and puerile to the modern mind. They exhibit an arrogant sacerdotalism, but at the same time signs of considerable intellectual vigour. The language of the old hymns had now become archaic, and unintelligible to the multitude. This is referred to in the *Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa*,² and was no doubt one of the reasons why the power of the priesthood increased.