Ancient Indian Education: An Inquiry into its Origin, Development, and Ideals c6.69

c6.69

This valuable picture of Buddhist learning and education in the monasteries at the time of I-Tsing’s visit shows a great amount of intellectual activity going on. The main course seems to have been founded on an elaborate study of Sanskrit grammar which led on to logic and finally to metaphysics and philosophy. It is closely connected with Brāhmanic education in that the first six out of the nine works which he mentions as being studied were those also used in the Brāhman schools. The last three, however, were composed, I-Tsing tells us, by Bhartṛihari,¹ who was a member of the Buddhist order. The method seems to have been chiefly oral, and he frequently insists that these various treatises must be learned by heart. I-Tsing has a passage in which he says,² ‘There are two traditional ways in India of attaining to intellectual power: (1) Committing to memory; (2) the alphabet fixes one’s ideas. By this way, after a practice of ten days or a month, a student feels his thought rise like a fountain, and can commit to memory whatever he has once heard. This is far from being a myth, for I myself have met such men.’ The meaning of this passage is by no means clear, but it certainly brings out the prevalent practice of learning everything by heart and shows what facility students seem to have gained in doing this. A great place was also given to discussion and debate, at least in the higher part of the course, and a man’s ability seems to have been very largely judged by his power to vanquish opponents in discussion. It was such men apparently who got royal appointments and whose names were, ‘as a reward, written in white on their lofty gates.’