Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c31.37

c31.37

**Successful Monasteries and their best products.** As regards their successes, the monasteries produced some of the highest types of intellect and character. One of their principal aims was to produce successful preachers and dialecticians. Such persons were needed for the purposes of a proselytizing religion which had, moreover, to maintain its position against the numerous sects that were ready to challenge its supremacy in India in those days. Accordingly, the highest honour in the Buddhist world of scholarship was accorded to those who would "oppose the heretics as they would drive beasts (deer) in the middle of the plain and explain away disputations as boiling water melts frost" (p. 181). The successful disputants "become famous throughout Jambudvīpa (India) and receive respect above gods and men". Men of such international reputation are, of course, rare, "only one or two appearing in every generation." I-tsing mentions some of them belonging to the different periods of Buddhist history. "Such were Nāgārjuna, Deva, Aśvaghosha, of an early age; Vasubandhu, Asaṅga, Saṁghabhadra, Bhāvaviveka, in the Middle Ages; and Jina, Dharmapāla, Dharmakīrti, Śīlabhadra, Siṁhachandra, Sthiramati, Guṇamati, Prajñāgupta, Guṇaprabha, Jinaprabha of late years" (ib.). To these names he elsewhere (p. 183) adds those of Kāśyapa-mātaṅga and Dharmaraksha (who were the first Indian Buddhists in China, which they visited in A.D. 67); of Paramārtha (who came to China in A.D. 548 and translated thirty-one works), whose fame "reached even to the Southern Ocean (i.e. Nanking)"; of Kumārajīva (who came to China about A.D. 401 and translated fifty Sanskrit books into Chinese), who "supplied a virtuous pattern to the foreign land".