Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s1: I. Background
Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s1
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I. Background
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A singular feature of ancient Indian or Hindu Civilization is that it has been moulded and shaped in the course of its history more by religious than by political, or economic, influences. Religion, as the ancient Hindus understood it, practically dominated every sphere of their national life. The fundamental principles of social, political, and economic life were welded into a comprehensive theory which is called Religion in Hindu thought. Practical attitudes thus followed theoretic orientations. The total configuration of ideals, practices, and conduct is called Dharma (Religion, Virtue, or Duty) in this ancient tradition. Thus it is Religion that gave its laws to the social life and organization of the ancient Hindus, and regulated even their economic activities and pursuits. In politics, its influence has been no less profound and pervasive, though not so apparent, and explains much of the political history of the ancient Hindus. From the very start, they came, under the influence of their religious ideas, to conceive of their country as less a geographical and material than a cultural or a spiritual possession, and to identify, broadly speaking, the country with their culture. The Country was their Culture and the Culture their Country, the true Country of the Spirit, the ‘invisible church of culture’ not confined within physical bounds. India thus was the first country to rise to the conception of an extra-territorial nationality and naturally became the happy home of different races, each with its own ethno-psychic endowment, and each carrying its particular racial traditions and institutions. The political and social reality for Hindus is not geographical, nor ethnic, but a culture-pattern. Country and patriotism expand, as ideals and ways of life receive acquiescence. Thus, from the very dawn of its history has this Country of the Spirit ever expanded in extending circles, Brahmarshideśa, Brahmāvarta, Āryāvarta, Bhāratavarsha, or Jambudvīpa, and even a Greater India beyond its geographical boundaries. In different ages of its history has it thus had different territorial embodiments, but never any territorial limits. This domination of politics by religion is also responsible for the initial and fundamental difficulty of its history. The problem of India has been the problem of the world, so to speak, the finding of a workable compromise between different nationalities and social systems, and is, therefore, yet to be solved. But the lines on which it may be solved are perhaps more clearly indicated in Hindu than in any other polity. In political organization, India has believed more in group-life which has received full scope throughout. It has had a most exuberant and luxuriant growth on the Indian soil, illustrating in the manifold forms of its organization all the vital and natural modes and forms of human association. India, indeed, thus offers the best study in group-types, and in group-organization in which is now being increasingly found in the West "the best solution of popular government". [See Miss Follet's *The New State : Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government* (Longmans, London)].
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The revolt against modern democracies is not mere party politics or expediency but Nature's own revenge against the violation of her laws by Man in his political arrangements. The Group has not been given its proper place in the organization of individuals into the State. The democracy of to-day stresses alternately the Group and the Individual. Hindu Thought effects a happy compromise by placing the worth of the real Personality above all things. The concept of Personality is the point of meeting of the social group and the biological individual. Emphasis on the personality-values then brings within the purview of politics biological facts, social traditions, and the pattern of inner culture. The Indian Polity, recognizing the claims of the Group as the necessary and inevitable intermediary formation between the individuals and the sovereign central authority of the State, points to that principle of comprehension by which a true, stable, and living League of Nations can be organized and the state of war between them abolished. Thus has India sought to spiritualize her politics by taking stand upon its broader and truer foundations.
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Similarly, in the sphere of economic life and interests, the free choice of occupations, or the movement of labour, horizontal or vertical, was subordinated to the choice of the ideals and ends of life. Castes determined Crafts or vice versa. Some occupations were approved for certain castes and condemned for others. Thus economic life was controlled by religion as man’s supreme interest and concern, and was not left to be moulded freely by the operation of natural laws. For religion or *Dharma* reflects the wider outlook of the group and its material needs.
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The entire ancient Indian social organization, too, was planned on the principle that it should, in all its classes, ranks, and grades, offer the best scope for the development of the individual as its centre and chief concern, though it is possible to argue that the means adopted have not always shown themselves to be as sound as the ends. In a word, the entire Hindu view of life is characterized by its instinctive ‘choice of realities’ of a particular order, the ideal and the spiritual as distinguished from the physical and temporal. Indeed, contrary to the generally accepted view, the Hindu thinkers are always anxious to translate nebulous ideals into determinate concepts, vague social attitudes into specific rules of conduct, and to envisage the group-life not as an indefinite æsthetic or romantic reality but as a system of laws. In the same way, the process of adjustment to the group-life is not left to chance, to the raw impulses of the individual, or to the changing patterns of *mores* and fashions. The ideals of the group, its scheme of values, and the realities that the group-tradition conceives as supreme, must be clearly reflected in the mind of the individual. The end can only be achieved through a course of training that reshapes the psychic and bodily life of man.
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Nowhere is this distinctive tendency of Hindu thought more manifest than in the sphere of learning and education. Learning in India through the ages had been prized and pursued not for its own sake, if we may so put it, but for the sake, and as a part, of religion. It was sought as the means of salvation or self-realization, as the means to the highest end of life, viz. *Mukti* or Emancipation. The result is that it is Religion that creates Literature in India and wields it as an instrument for its own purposes, a vehicle of its expression. It fixes its very body and form and determines the course of its evolution. As Macdonell puts it [*Sanskrit Literature*, p. 39], since the birth of the oldest Vedic poetry, we find Indian Literature, for a period of more than a thousand years, bearing “an exclusively religious stamp; even those latest productions of the Vedic age which cannot be called directly religious are yet meant to further religious ends. This is, indeed, implied by the term *Vedic*, for *Veda*, primarily signifying *Knowledge* (from root *Vid*, to know), designates 'sacred lore' as a branch of literature. Besides this general sense, the word has also the restricted meaning of 'sacred book'."