Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c21.15

c21.15

The second feature of this Vedic monasticism seems to have been that these seekers after truth organized themselves as close corporations and treated the knowledge and the doctrines they developed as something fit for the few and the elect, or the specially qualified, and not meant for the masses or to penetrate the national life. "The father might impart the secret to his son, and the teacher to his pupil, but, in the circle of the believers in the Ātman, there was wholly wanting that warm-hearted enthusiasm which holds that it then, and then only, properly enjoys the possession of its own goods, when it has summoned all the world to participate in their possession" [Oldenberg, op. cit., p. 63]. The Upanishads, in the literal sense of the term, signify a body of select and secret doctrines and their esoteric character marks them out sharply from Buddhism. The strongly democratic spirit of the Buddha and his teachings and his overmastering solicitude for the amelioration of the masses receive their culminating expression in the following saying attributed to him: "I shall not enter Nirvāṇa until the life of holiness¹ which I point out has been successful, grown in favour, and entended among all mankind, and is in vogue and thoroughly made known to all men." In the story, this declaration or decision has not been reached by the Buddha without a struggle. For a time he is possessed by the Upanishadic spirit of treating truth he had attained as a select and secret doctrine too high for others and thus to be confined only to himself. The *Mahāvagga* thus recounts the story [i, 5, 2, etc.]: "Into the mind of the Exalted One, while he tarried, retired in solitude, came this thought: 'I have penetrated this deep truth, which is difficult to perceive, and difficult to understand, peace-giving, sublime, which transcends all thought, deeply-significant, which only the wise can grasp. Man moves in an earthly sphere, in an earthly sphere he has his place and finds his enjoyment. For him it will be difficult to grasp this matter, the law of causality, the chain of causes and effects, the extinction of all conformations; the withdrawal from all that is earthly, the extinction of desire, the cessation of longing, the end, the Nirvāṇa. And so—