Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s2.3

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.