Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c22.41

c22.41

**Common Regulations binding on all Groups in a Vihāra.** We shall now proceed to consider the general rules and regulations governing the common life of a monastery to which all members were subject irrespective of their status and standing. These were naturally determined by the ends of monastic life and discipline, those supreme ends for which all other ends of life were sacrificed as being unworthy, for which the enjoyments and obligations of worldly life were renounced by persons associating themselves in a common struggle. All that was even remotely likely to affect the whole-hearted pursuit of those ends was to be rigorously and ruthlessly abjured. The gulf between the ascetic life and the worldly life was always to be kept sufficiently wide so as not to be crossed. It is, however, to be recalled that the Buddhist Order of ascetics was only one among others flourishing in its times. These Orders all agree as to the ends and the general character of the-means, the ascetic practices to be pursued towards the ends, but they must naturally differ as to the exact forms and details of those practices. Buddhist asceticism developed its own system of rules and regulations according to its particular view and definition of the ascetic life. It followed the Middle Path, avoiding the one extreme of self-indulgence and the other of self-mortification. Taking the evil of the world and life to be *dukkha*, pain or sorrow, in the ultimate analysis, Buddhism could not approve of any positive and artificial additions to the sum of life’s sufferings by the infliction of pain or disease on one’s own self or on others. The Buddhist canonical classification of mankind divided it into (1) self-tormentors or self-burners (*attantapo*), i.e. those who practise penance or *tapas*, (2) tormentors of others, such as butchers, fowlers, hunters, fishermen, thieves, executioners, gaolers, and all perpetrators of cruelties, (3) tormentors of both self and others, such as “the great functionaries who, when holding sacrificial ceremonies, perform rites involving some personal discomfort, and also have herds of animals slaughtered and keep their slaves in fear of punishment”, and (4) tormentors neither of self nor of others, such as those who have left the home and the world for the life of recluse, renouncing the cares and connections that torment the world, owning no property in animals or human beings and are thus filled with charity and compassion for all living beings and hence “become cool” (*sītabhūta*) and not in a state of burning [*Majjhima*, i, 341, 411; ii, 159; *Aṅguttara*, ii, 205; *Puggala*, 55, cited in the article on Buddhist Asceticism of Mrs. Rhys Davids in the *Encycl. of Religion and Ethics*]. The ascetics of Buddhism belonged to the fourth class of humanity. We have already referred to the turning-point in the Buddha’s life when he lost faith in the prevailing systems of uncompromising self-mortification as aid to spirituality which he condemned as a merely “bitter course of painful hardship” and was eager to find out “another path to Enlightenment”.