Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c21.5

c21.5

**Buddhist Scheme of Life as influenced by Brahmanical.** We are not, however, concerned with the doctrines of Buddhism, the answer that Buddhism has sought to give to the question which all other schools of Indian thought try to answer in their own several ways, the question, How is release to be achieved from the endless course of births and rebirths to which life is liable? We are concerned rather with those external practices of Buddhism by means of which it developed its social and educational organization for the advancement and diffusion of its particular truths, the ideals of thought and life for which it stood. Philosophy or Religion, especially in India, has been always lived, and not merely contemplated, and so it has always developed its outer side in strict accordance with the inner. The two developments must always run parallel to each other in vital harmony. Thus it is that as in the old Brahminical speculations we see the sources of the dogmatics of Buddhism, so in the Brahminical scheme and ordering of life or social organization was largely laid the foundation of the Buddhist Community and Church. Far from discarding and denouncing the Brahmanic ideal of life, "Buddhism achieved, in one sense, the full realization of this Brahmanic ideal" [Max Müller, ib., i, 438]. "Buddhist society, as we know it from the sacred writings of the Buddhists, is far more the fulfilment than the denial of the ancient schemes and dreams of the Brahmanic lawgivers" [ib., p. 437].