Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c21.2

c21.2

**Buddhism as a phase of Hinduism.** We shall now trace the history and describe the essential features of what may be called Buddhist Education which, rightly regarded, is, however, but a phase of the ancient Hindu or Brahminical system of education as described in the previous chapters. Buddhism itself, especially in its original and ancient form, is, as has been admitted on all hands, rooted deeply in the pre-existing Hindu systems of thought and life. "To my mind," said Max Müller [*Chips from a German Workshop*, i, 434], "having approached Buddhism after a study of the ancient religion of India, the religion of the Veda, Buddhism has always seemed to be, not a new religion, but a natural development of the Indian mind in its various manifestations, religious, philosophical, social, and political." Barth [*The Religions of India*, p. 101] calls Buddhism "a Hindu phenomenon, a natural product, so to speak, of the age and social circle that witnessed its birth", and "when we attempt to reconstruct its primitive doctrine and early history we come upon something so akin to what we meet in the most ancient Upanishads and in the legends of Brahminism that it is not always easy to determine what features belong peculiarly to it". Rhys Davids [*Buddhism*, p. 34] calls Gautama Buddha "the creature of his time", of whose philosophy it must not be supposed that "it was entirely of his own creation". Hopkins goes so far as to assert [*Religions of India*, p. 298] that "the founder of Buddhism did not strike out a new system of morals; he was not a democrat; he did not originate a plot to overthrow the Brahmanic priesthood; he did not invent the order of monks".