Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c32.s1.24

c32.s1.24

**Free Education.** Out of the income of these estates the University provided for all its alumni free of cost their four requisites of clothes, food, bedding, and medicine. The number of the alumni in Hiuen Tsang's time "always" reached the figure of 10,000, counting "the priests belonging to the convent or strangers residing therein" (*Life*, ib.). The standard of living seems to have varied with the standing of the monks. Hiuen Tsang during his residence at Nālandā received each day 120 Jambiras (a fruit), twenty areca nuts, twenty nutmegs, an ounce of camphor, and a peck of the finest variety of rice called Mahāśāli rice which grew only in Magadha and nowhere else and was offered only to the king or to religious persons of great distinction It was "as large as the black bean", and, "when cooked, was aromatic and shining, like no other rice at all". Besides the supply of these provisions, "every month he was presented with three measures of oil, and, daily, a supply of butter and other things according to his need" (ib., p. 109). In I-tsing's time, the number of students supported at the monastery exceeded 3,000 (p. 65).