Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c32.s1.47.2

c32.s1.47.2

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.