Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s1.2

c6.s1.2

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)].