4. Effects on Education.—It is easy to predict what education would become under the weight of these double chains, social and religious. While the ideal in our modern societies is more and more to enfranchise the individual, and to create for him personal freedom and self-consciousness, the effort of the Hindoo Brahmins consisted above all in crushing out all spontaneity, in abolishing individual predilections, by preaching the doctrine of absolute self-renunciation, of voluntary abasement, and of contempt for life. Man was thus born doubly a slave,—by his social condition, which predestinated him to the routine apprenticeship of his ancestral caste, and by his mysterious dependence on the divine being who absorbed in himself all real activity, and left to human beings only the deceptive and frail appearance of it.
5. Buddhist Reform.—The Buddhist reform, which so profoundly affected Brahmanism at about the sixth century B.C., did not sensibly modify, from the educational point of view, the ideas of the Hindoos. Buddha also taught that the cause of evil resides in the passions of men, and that in order to attain moral peace, there is no other means to be employed than that of self-abnegation and of the renouncement of everything selfish and personal.
6. Conversation of Buddha and Purna.—One of the traditions which permit us the better to appreciate the original character, at once affecting and ingenuous, of Indian thought, is the conversation of Buddha with his disciple Purna about a journey the latter was going to undertake to the barbarians for the purpose of teaching them the new religion:—
“They are men,” said Buddha, “who are fiery in temper, passionate, cruel, furious, insolent. If they openly address you in words which are malicious and coarse, and become angry with you, what will you think?”
“If they address me to my face in coarse and insolent terms, this is what I shall think: they are certainly good men who openly address me in malicious terms, but they will neither strike me with their hands nor stone me.”
“But should they strike you with their hands and stone you, what will you think?”
“I shall think that they are good men, gentle men, who strike me with their hands and stone me, but do not beat me with a club nor with a sword.”
“But if they beat you with a club and with a sword?”
“They are good men, gentle men, who beat me with a club and with a sword, but they do not completely kill me.”
“But if they were really to kill you?”