Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s1.6

c6.s1.6

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'."