Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c12.s6.50

c12.s6.50

**Knowledge insured against risks.** Secondly, the system contributed to the preservation and propagation of its literature in a most remarkable and unique manner. Nowadays human knowledge is stored up for the most part in books stocked in libraries, and is thus made liable to all those risks to which all material things are liable. History records many an instance of political vandalism which has deliberately destroyed valuable libraries under a spirit of bigoted animosity against the knowledge they stored up and preserved. Many a library, if not a victim to human malice, has succumbed to nature’s destructive agencies or physical accidents such as earthquake, deluge, or fire. Recently, the destruction of Louvain has beaten the record of the horrors of war and barbarism. But the knowledge and culture of ancient India were not left from the very outset to the tender mercies of these risky and precarious, faithless and unreliable agencies. The human mind—and no perishable material storehouse—was the repository of our ancient, accumulated wisdom. And, if the individual dies, the nation lives. Thus Indian culture has been immortally preserved through an unbroken succession of teachers. Every literary man of ancient India was himself a living library, so to speak. Thus the storage and preservation of the learning of the country were effected by means of what were practically immaterial and immortal agencies. It would appear as if the Vedas which, according to orthodox traditional opinion, are not perishable books but eternal verities have also evolved their appropriate methods of transmission from age to age. There were no centralized libraries wherein was accumulated the wisdom of the ages, so that to strike at them would mean striking at the sources of knowledge. There was the widest possible diffusion of learning through the millions of the “living libraries” and domestic schools of ancient India that helped to insure her culture against the risks alike from Nature and Man—from the destructive effects of physical accidents and political revolutions. And the result of this remarkable system is, as has been well pointed out by Max Müller, that at the present moment if all the MSS. of the Vedas were lost we should still be able to recover the whole of them from the memory of the Śrotriyas of India; and that, further, “if writing had never been invented, if printing had never been invented, if India had never been occupied by England, young Brahmins in their hundreds and thousands would probably have been engaged just the same in learning and saying by heart the simple prayers first uttered on the Sarasvatī and the other rivers of the Panjab by Vasishṭha, Viśvāmitra, Śyāvāśva, and others.”