Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c16.3

c16.3

It is, however, to be noted that these do not represent the very first fruits of Indian philosophical speculation which had been in progress from time immemorial. This is seen in the large stock of ideas and technical terms upon which, as the common inheritance from a bygone age, the different Schools of Philosophy have freely drawn in constructing their own systems. The philosophical Sūtras systematize and codify the speculation which is exhibited in an exuberant growth in the *Brāhmaṇas* and older Upanishads, while that growth itself has sprung out of germs contained in a still earlier literature. Indian Philosophy has had, indeed, a very old and continuous history. The early streaks, the dawn of philosophy, are to be discovered in the Vedic Mantras, while the Upanishads show the meridian. The Upanishads contain many technical terms like Brahman, Ātman, Dharma, Vrata, Yoga, Mīmāṁsā, and the like, which point to the activity of speculation in the previous ages, a vast accumulation of religious and philosophical thought upon which they are able to draw. The Upanishads themselves picture the stirring intellectual activity of which they are the products, an activity which, as we have already seen, passed from the solitary hermitages in forests of isolated Brāhmaṇa ascetics to the busy haunts of men the courts of kings, where it became almost a national concern, a fairly popular pursuit, and not the monopoly of a special caste. The Upanishads indeed, as Max Müller remarked, represent India as a nation of philosophers with innumerable centres of intellectual activity scattered throughout the country, so that we find men of practically all castes and classes—men and women, Brāhmaṇas, Kshatriyas, and even Śūdras—sharing in that activity, as is seen, for instance, in the anecdotes already related of Satyakāma Jābāla of unknown parentage and of Raikva called a Śūdra, both of whom made their mark in philosophical studies. But the starting-point of all this activity is to be found in the Rigveda itself where we already see speculation earnest on solving the riddle of creation by grasping the Unity behind its diversity. A sense of diversity in the world of appearances expresses itself in the creation of a richly varied Vedic pantheon, of gods like Agni, Indra, Varuṇa, and Vāyu, but behind this variety is the underlying conception of the One "extending as a god to the gods from afar and embracing this universe" [*Ṛv.*, ii, 24, 11], who is called in His different aspects as Hiraṇyagarbha, Prajāpati, Viśvakarmā [viii, 89, 3], Bṛihaspati, or Brahmaṇaspati, the god of all gods, culminating in Brahman and Ātman. Lastly, it may be noted that this nascent philosophic thought handed down by oral tradition or embodied in what Max Müller has well called Mnemonic literature produced an extraordinary volume and variety of opinions long before the rise of the philosophical Sūtras or systems. Some evidence of this luxuriant growth of speculation is furnished by one of the Suttas or Sermons supposed to have been preached by the Buddha himself, viz. the *Brahma-jāla-sutta* (literally, the net of Brahma in which all philosophical theories are caught up like fishes in a net). In that work, the Buddha mentions as many as sixty-two different schools of philosophy prevailing in the country even in that early age, together with many subdivisions of such schools which he criticizes and condemns in his pursuit of Truth.