Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c16.5

c16.5

**Systems of Philosophy as Systems of Discipline and Education.** These systems of philosophy insist on their own ideas and systems of discipline by which the pupil has to acquire and fulfil those qualifications and conditions that are required of him by way of *adhikāra* or eligibility for his chosen philosophical studies. This course of arduous preparatory discipline is dictated by the typical Hindu point of view which treats philosophy not as a mere subject of study through books but as something to be lived, like religion, as truth to be realized. It was studied as a means for the attainment of the highest truth or *mukti*, emancipation which one is to attain by stages of experience, each representing a specific degree of conquest achieved over the body and the material world. A system of philosophy is a system of Release. Thus philosophical study is bound up with a system of discipline.