Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s2: II. Theory
Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s2
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II. Theory
c6.s2.2
Ancient Indian Education is also to be understood as being ultimately the outcome of the Indian theory of knowledge and a part of the corresponding scheme of life and values. That scheme takes full account of the fact that Life includes Death and the two form the whole truth. This gives a particular angle of vision, a sense of perspective and proportion in which the material and the moral, the physical and spiritual, the perishable and permanent interests and values of life are clearly defined and strictly differentiated.
c6.s2.3
Of all the peoples of the world the Hindu is the most impressed and affected by the fact of death as the central fact of life. He cannot get away from the fact that while Man proposes, God disposes. Therefore, he feels he cannot take life seriously, and scheme for it, without a knowledge of the whole scheme of creation. He takes the biological vital process in the context of the total life-situation, comprising the inner self into the depths of which he can descend by means of contemplation (*svarūpānubhūti*), the ideal self that he can discover through intellection (*manana*), and the social self into the laws of which tradition initiates him. Thus he devotes himself to a study of the fundamental truths of life and does not care for half-truths and intermediate truths. His one aim in life is to solve the problem of death by achieving a knowledge of the whole truth of which Life and Death are parts and phases. He perceives that it is the individual that dies, and not the whole or the Absolute. Thus the Individual must merge himself in the Universal to escape from the sense of change, decay, and dissolution. The Absolute is not subject to change. Individuation is Death, a lapse from the Absolute. Individuation results from the pursuit of objective knowledge, and this has to be stopped. Thus the aim of Education is *Chitta-vritti-nirodha*, the inhibition of those activities of the mind by which it gets connected with the world of matter or objects.
c6.s2.4
Hindu Thought takes up the position that the individual as conceived in the context of social life, and the laws of the State, is essentially a psychological and biological fact. But the individual, in order that his ultimate datum of personality may be understood, must be viewed from other perspectives, those of his elemental nature, his potentiality for growth and transformation, his self-sufficiency, his capacity for effecting harmony between conflicting trends of impulses. Such a view of the self will necessarily take it out of its usual habitat. It means that the normal functions in terms of which the biological self ties itself to its material home must be checked so as to lay bare the core and kernel of one's being, the true self, the naked personality, stripped of the envelope with which it is shrouded by the accretions of passing impulses and emotions. When the personality is thus denuded of its material and social trappings, five planes of vital and psychic tendencies reveal themselves. These are called, in the writings of the Hindu thinkers, the five *Koshas* (sheaths). Normal worldly life sets up barriers between them so that they manifest themselves one at a time. The purpose of Hindu Culture seems to be (1) to disclose the personality as a continuum, rather than as a stratified structure, and (2) thus to make the human self the meeting point of Heaven and Earth. As the Upanishadic text says: "He drew out the lustre of the heavenly fire and filled the earth" (Agnerjyotirnichāyya pṛithivyā adhyābharat). Thus the inhibitions that daily life necessitates, the processes of 'rationalization', symbolization, dramatization, and other kinds of distortions, must be righted in the course of spiritual culture.
c6.s2.5
The individual's supreme duty is thus to achieve his expansion into the Absolute, his self-fulfilment, for he is a potential God, a spark of the Divine.
c6.s2.6
Education must aid in this self-fulfilment, and not in the acquisition of mere objective knowledge. It is more concerned with the subject than the object, the inner than the outer world. But there is a method in this madness. The theory is that it is hopeless to get at the knowledge of the whole in and through its parts, through the individual objects making up the universe. The right way is directly to seek the source of all life and knowledge, and not to acquire knowledge piecemeal by the study of objects. The pursuit of objective knowledge is thus not the chief concern of this Education. When the mind is withdrawn from the world of matter, and does not indulge in individuation, Omniscience, the Knowledge of the Whole, dawns on it. Individuation shuts out omniscience. Individuation is concretion of the Mind. The Mind takes the form of the object in knowing it. It limits itself to the object, like the water rained down from the clouds limiting itself in a tank. Thus Individuation is Bondage. It limits vision, knowledge, omniscience. Perception of Life in the perspective of the whole is Mukti, Emancipation. The individual must achieve his emancipation, his escape from bondage, *saṁsāra*, the ills which flesh is heir to, from disease, decline, death, desire, and its satisfaction, recurring in a vicious circle of birth and death, to use the Buddha’s words.
c6.s2.7
In its indifference to objective knowledge, the system assumes that the Universe is not limited to what is revealed by the mere bodily senses which man shares with the lower animals; that man’s faculties of perception are not necessarily limited to the five senses; and that mental life is not entirely bound up with or completely dependent upon what is called the cerebral mechanism or the brain. It is, therefore, considered as the main business of Education to open up other avenues of knowledge than the mere brain or the outer physical senses. It seeks to educate the mind itself as the creative principle in man, the creative principle of his culture and civilization. The Mind is its supreme concern and objective, the chief subject of its treatment. It seeks to train the Mind as the medium and instrument of knowledge, transform the entire psychic organism, overhaul the mental apparatus itself, rather than to fill the mind with a store of learned lumber, objective knowledge. It addresses itself more to the principle of knowing, the roots from which knowledge springs and grows, than to the objective content of knowledge. The chase counts more than the game.
c6.s2.8
Its method, therefore, is the method of *Yoga*, the science of sciences and the art of arts in the Hindu system, the science and art of the reconstruction of self by discipline and meditation. *Yoga* is defined as *Chitta-Vritti-Nirodha*. It is to stop the functioning of Mind as the avenue or vehicle of objective knowledge, the inhibition of individuation. The theory is that the Mind, seeking external knowledge, contacts, and is contaminated and transformed by Matter, and communicates this contamination to the Soul, Self, or Purusha, who thus enters into bondage. The question is, How to break this bondage and escape from the clutches of Matter. By simply cutting off the inflow of Matter upon Mind, checking the materialization of the Mind and Soul, for the Soul, too, in Milton's words of insight, "embodies and imbrutes." Thus Education is a process of control of Mind, to drive it down to its deeper layers, its subterranean depths, not ruffled by the ripples of the surface, the infinite distractions of the material world by which the Mind wears itself out in fatigue. When the Mind is thus led to rest in itself, and fall back upon its innate strength and resources, and does not lose itself in the pursuit of the knowledge of individual objects, there dawns and bursts forth on the Mind the totality of knowledge, Omni-science, as already stated.
c6.s2.9
Bergson also has stressed this point and insists on the withdrawal of the Mind from the world of Matter which "imposes upon it its spatial forms, and thus arrests the natural creativity, inwardness, and suppleness of conscious life". For, as he says, "Consciousness, in shaping itself into Intelligence, that is to say, in concentrating itself on Matter, seems to externalize itself" It is only when the Self "brackets" itself out from the realm of things that the psychic processes regain their normal ways. Such withdrawal, says Bergson, permits the fusion of the varied functions of life and mind into a unitary and concrete process—the Intuition. He further points out that "the individual's consciousness, delving downwards, reveals to him, the deeper he goes, his original personality, to which he may cling as something solid, as means of escape from a life of impulse, caprice, and regret. In our innermost selves, we may discover an equilibrium more desirable than the one on the surface. Certain aquatic plants, as they rise to the surface, are ceaselessly jostled by the current; their leaves, meeting above the water, interlace, thus imparting to them stability above. But still more stable are the roots which, firmly planted in the earth, support them from below" [*Morality and Religion*, p. 6]. The Upanishads also have a similar conception in which the Universe is likened to a peepul tree rooted in the universal consciousness (*ūrddhamūlam*), spreading its branches and leaves as the life and the phenomenal world (*guṇa-pravṛiddhā vishaya-pravālāḥ* . . . Karmānubandhīni manushya-loke).
Linked texts (1)
- Upaniṣad — Sanskrit