Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c28.20

c28.20

**Householders as Students.** The admission of day scholars as students implied that of householders or married students. We read of "a country Brahman" who, finishing his studies in the three Vedas and the eighteen Sciences under a famous teacher in Benares, stopped on there to look after his estate, married, and became a regular householder. And yet he was allowed to continue his studies as an external student. He could, however, come but "two or three times every day to listen to his master's teachings" owing to the obstruction of his mischievous wife who always feigned sickness whenever he wanted to get away to the school [i, 463]. A similar case is that of "a young Brahman from a foreign land" who, while studying as one of 500 pupils of a famous teacher at Benares, "fell in love with a woman and made her his wife. Though he continued to live on in Benares, he failed two or three times in his attendance on the master." Sometimes he was so worried and harassed by his unmanageable wife that he absented himself altogether from waiting on the master. "Some seven or eight days later he renewed his attendances" [i, 300], when his master gave him necessary instructions after which he "paid no heed to his wife's caprices", while his wife also "ceased from that time forward from her naughtiness". There is another instance of a student being handicapped in his studies by the wicked ways of his wife [ib., 301–2]. Lastly, we may also refer to the instance of a teacher of 500 students at Benares who selects by a special test one of them for the hand of his grown-up daughter [iii, 18