Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c30.10

c30.10

**Ascendancy of Brahmanism and Sanskrit : Its many Sects.** The ascendancy of Brahmanism in his time is demonstrated by the fact that the general name for India was "Country of the Brahmans". Says the traveller: "Among the various castes and clans of the country, the Brahmins were purest and in most esteem. So from their excellent reputation the name ‘Brāhmaṇa-country’ had come to be a popular one for India” (p. 140). The predominance of Brahmanism is further evident from the fact that Sanskrit became at that time the language of the cultured classes in which even wrote all the most famous Buddhist teachers. Hiuen Tsang regards the spoken and written language of “Mid-India” as at once the parent and the standard of all the dialects of “North India”: “The people of mid-India are pre-eminently explicit and correct in speech, their expressions being harmonious and elegant, like those of the Devas, and their intonation clear and distinct, serving as rule and pattern for others. The people of neighbouring territories and foreign countries repeating errors until these became the norm, and emulous for vulgarities, have lost the pure style” (p. 153). The vitality of Brahmanism was further manifested in the growth of numerous ascetic orders or sects, each distinguished by its own special garb: “Some wear peacocks’ tails; some adorn themselves with a necklace of skulls; some are quite naked; some cover the body with grass or boards; some pull out their hair and clip their moustaches; some mat their side-hair and make a top-knot coil. Their clothing is not fixed and the colour varies” (p. 148). Elsewhere Hiuen Tsang describes some of them as “professed Sectarians, Digambaras, and Pāṁśupatas, and those who wear wreaths of skulls as head ornaments” (p. 123). In another place (vol. ii, p. 47) he records: “Some of these cut off their hair, others made it into a top-knot; some went about naked and some smeared themselves with ashes.”