Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c25.33

c25.33

**Features of difference between Buddhist and Brahmanical Education.** We have now considered the chief features of the Buddhist Saṁgha regarded as an educational organization and shall now comment upon those which distinguish it from the Brahmanical system of educational organization. We have already remarked that the Brahmanical system was predominantly what may be called the domestic system of education under which the individual teacher's home was the school of the young admitted to it as pupils. The influence of the home was installed as an indispensable educational factor, though it was the home not of the natural but the spiritual parents of the pupil. Under the Buddhist system the home was superseded by the monastery. In fact Buddhist education begins with the destruction of domestic ties as the starting-point. The necessity of a domestic environment under the Brahmanical scheme did not thus favour the expansion of the small school under an individual teacher into a larger educational federation controlled by a collective body of teachers, as was the characteristic of the Buddhist system. The Brahmanical ideal did not permit the ‘home industry’ to be supplanted by the ‘factory’, so to speak. Smaller and larger organizations have their characteristic merits and defects in industry as well as in education. It has been well said that it was his Society rather than his Doctrine, his Saṁgha rather than his Dhamma, which, while it helped in the spread of the Buddha’s religion, also helped in its decline in India. We have already seen that while private property was abolished within the Buddhist brotherhood, the brotherhood itself came to possess vast properties and became rich enough to support larger numbers of monks. Then the brotherhood was very liberal as regards admissions to it. As observed by Rhys Davids [*Buddhism*, p. 153], “when successive kings and chiefs were allowed to endow the Society, not indeed with gold or silver, but with the necessaries’ of the monkish life (including lands and houses), it gradually ceased in great measure to be the school of virtue and the most favourable sphere of intellectual progress, and became thronged with the worthless and the idle.” The Order was an admirable solution of the problem of poverty, as Max Müller has forcibly pointed out [*Chips from a German Workshop*, vol. i, p. 442], but did not solve very well the problems for which it was brought into being. Even at the time of the very rise of the Order, we have seen how one rule after another was laid down to guard it against unworthy applicants. The Vinaya texts amply indicate how the level of physical life in the monasteries was higher than the level of average life outside them. There was no struggle for existence within the Order. The Buddhist brother lived on the charity of his brotherhood, while the brotherhood lived on the charity of the laity or the Upāsakas who supported the brotherhood as a religious duty. The Buddha himself, when once complimented for his ascetic life and love of solitude, did not accept the compliment by frankly acknowledging: “While some of my disciples affect ascetic practices, I some days eat more, or wear robes made for laymen, or accept invitations to dine, or dwell indoors, or among my fellows”