Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c32.s1.47

Language: English

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**Harmony of Life in the midst of utmost diversity of Studies and Beliefs.** That harmony will be regarded as a still more surprising achievement when it is considered how it was established in the midst of wide and acute differences among the monks in their opinions and beliefs. The monks at Nālandā were not a homogeneous community They were drawn from the different denominations of the Buddhist Church and carried into the University all the strife and discord of its different sects and schisms. But what still further added to the heterogeneous composition of the University was its admission of students of even non-Buddhistic systems of learning and courses of study. Indeed, Nālandā flung its gates wide open to all systems and schools of thought and belief in the country and became the arena where they might fight out their supremacy in debates and discussions. As we have already seen, Nālandā was known both in India and abroad for its "schools of discussion" which foreign students were so anxious to enter, that they might return with the best credentials for their capacity as preachers. It is difficult to say on the basis of our available evidence how far Nālandā offered any regular courses of instruction for beginners. We are told that students there, learning and discussing, found the day too short, while every student was expected to be well up in the mysteries of the Tripiṭaka as the minimum qualification.

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Thus it is that Nālandā had the signal merit of bringing together Schools, whose "tenets would keep them isolated", at an age when "controversy runs high, and heresies on special doctrines lead many ways to the same end", as observed by Hiuen Tsang [Watters, i, 162]. Nālandā became the common meeting-ground, in the India of the times, of the warring sects and creeds, with their "possible and impossible doctrines" [I-tsing, p. 177], and an opinion approved and recognized there would at once obtain a universal currency. The victors in these All-India Tournaments of Debate at Nālandā would be victorious over every opposition. But while its intellectual life was thus a round of animated controversies and acrimonious debates between contradictory and incompatible opinions and beliefs, that did not mar the academic repose and peace of Nālandā as a seat of culture. She faced boldly the intellectual differences of the times, the profound and earnest disagreements in opinions and cherished beliefs, in the very fundamentals of life, and presented a larger ideal which would evolve a common life and concord out of the divisions. That ideal was Freedom, Freedom of Thought, Opinion, and Belief, Toleration that would not constrain conscience, the first principle of a sound and scientific education. A writer in the *Hibbert Journal* [vol. xiii, p. 165] characterizes the Nālandā education as "an experiment in liberty of teaching". That ideal was nothing new to Buddhism.

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It was derived from Brahmanism with its remarkable absence of any official creed and its readiness to accommodate within its pale a wide variety of deities and beliefs. Buddhism thus imbibed "the flexibility which marked the methods of the older faith". The founder of Buddhism was well known for his consideration towards followers of other creeds whom he did not like to convert in haste, while this large and catholic ideal utters itself in no uncertain and feeble tones in some of the edicts of Asoka who stood for "the growth of the essence of the matter in all sects". The ideal of Liberty leads to that of social service. The inspiration of this ideal is responsible for the administration of the University on a democratic basis as far as possible. Under this inspiration the Saṁgha counts more than the individual monks, the whole is always greater than the part. Thus sectarian differences are merged in a common life and service, in the service to a common ideal. Nālandā stood for this larger synthesis to be realized in and through life, in which the theoretical and conventional differences were reconciled.

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But the position is best explained in the eloquent words of the writer in the *Hibbert Journal* above referred to: "The secret of union lies in a common life, a common moral ideal, the conception of the service of man as realized in the person of Gotama, who, in the oft-repeated formula of the early texts, chose the homeless life for the welfare of gods and men, that he might become a Buddha, and lift off from the world the veils of ignorance and sin. That was the secret of the extraordinary missionary enthusiasm which carried the noble and the sage amid incredible hardships all through Middle Asia in the centuries preceding Hiuen Tsang, 'moved by the desire to convert the world'; for as the Chronicler of Ceylon remarks in relating the triumphs of an earlier date, 'when the world's welfare is concerned, who would be slothful or indifferent?' To this principle Buddhism has been always faithful. It has never made theological tests the basis of religious communion. Wide as have been its internal variations, it has always asked the disciple, ‘Have you the right disposition?’ rather than, ‘Have you the true belief?’ Neither among its different Schools, nor towards the rival establishments of Brahmans and Jains, or the philosophical sects that lay outside all three, the Agnostics and Materialists, did it ever raise the cry that the faith was in danger or kindle the fires of persecution.

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Such was Buddhist teaching in India in the seventh century a.d.” The same writer refers to another confirmatory picture in the well-known contemporary record, Bāṇa’s *Harsha-charita*, of similar educational conditions of Liberty and Toleration obtaining at a centre of learning of a different, though common, type. That was the hermitage of a Buddhist recluse in the forest of the Vindhya, Divākaramitra by name, who was a Brahman by birth and education. The reputation of his learning drew to his out-of-the-way and remote retreat crowds of students of all possible Schools of thought and belief: there were Buddhists of different varieties, “perched on pillars, dwelling in bowers of creepers, lying in thickets or in the shadow of branches, or squatting on the roots of trees”; there were Jains in white robes and worshippers of Krishṇa; there were ascetics of various orders, Sāṁkhists, Lokāyatikas, Vedāntins, followers of Nyāya and Vaiśeshika, of the Institutes of Law and of the Purāṇas, adepts in sacrifices and even Grammarians and others beside, “all diligently following their own tenets, pondering, urging objections, raising doubts and resolving them, discussing and explaining moot points of doctrine, in perfect harmony.” The harmony is depicted as extending to the brute creation. True to the promises of the Yoga doctrines, the *Ahiṁsā* of the sage pervades the entire environment.

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We read of lions lying like lambs near the sage’s seat, nay, of tigers turning vegetarians under his Buddhist teaching! “Doubtless this is in large part a satire; but the satire would have been unmeaning, had there been no basis for it in fact. These forest instructions were really many centuries old. Here was a University of another type, more flexible still, because unembarrassed by establishments needing great revenues for maintenance.” “Some day, perhaps,” continues the writer, “the great Universities of the West may deem these voices of the dim and distant past yet worth attention. They are more than mere curiosities of literature. They are the witness of the East to the abiding principle that the first condition of the quest for Truth is Liberty."