By W. T. HARRIS.

We often hear in our time the fear expressed that there is a danger in too much education, and especially in a too great extension of free education at the expense of tax-payers. “Where shall society obtain its hewers of wood and its drawers of water?” is asked in an anxious tone. “Education renders people unwilling to earn their living by hand labor alone, and they resort to crime rather than work at an honest trade.” Investigation, however, does not confirm these fears. We find, upon studying social science, that those states of the world that enforce universal education are by far the greatest wealth producers and accumulators of wealth.

The statistics of the seventeen states in our nation (the seventeen that kept statistics of illiteracy in jails and prisons in 1870), show that out of a total of 110,538 prisoners, 27,581, or 25 per cent. could not write, while only 3½ per cent. of the adults of those seventeen states were illiterate—that 3½ per cent. of the population, if illiterate, furnish as many criminals as 32 per cent. of the people, if able to read and write—or that the one who can not read and write is nine times as liable to get to prison as the one who can read and write. Of course we must remember that the education of the school is powerfully reinforced by the education of the family, the community, the State, and the Church, and that the school is not the only educational influence, nor the most potent one. We must not place a too high estimate on the phase of civilization that merely keeps men out of prison. Chinese education does that, although it does not produce scientific thinkers, a literature of freedom, or a people that worship the true God, or any god that allows man to participate in his being.

We shall learn this lesson again in studying the caste education of India. The duties of each person to members of his own caste and then to the members of the other castes form the chief staple of Hindoo education. There the hewers of wood and the drawers of water are effectually provided for, first by birth and then by education.

If we desire to behold the effects of caste-education made supreme over all others, we must look carefully into East Indian life, and interpret it by its laws, religion, and philosophy. The division of labor is necessary in order that men may gain the requisite skill to conquer nature. Food, clothing, and shelter are rendered necessary by nature—that is to say, by our bodies—and can be supplied only by nature—the mineral, vegetable, and animal realms. Besides food, clothing, and shelter, there is the fourth want, that of culture or spiritual direction, and the fifth want, or that of protection,—the realm of religious and scientific education, and the realm of the political government.

In India one caste is devoted to spiritual direction—the Brahmin, which reads and interprets the Vedas and gives counsel to the rulers of the state. Next is the Kshatrya, or warrior caste, that manage the secular or political government, with the counsel and advice of the Brahmins. Then the food, clothing, and shelter providers, who devote themselves to agriculture and the arts and trades of commerce, form a third caste, the Vaisyas; and lastly is the Sudra caste, which consists of day-laborers, or servants. The caste is determined by birth, not by the free choice of the individual, but by an accident of nature. For the East Indian the division of labor is the great divine fact of life. Brahma, the highest god, created the caste of Brahmins from his head, the warriors from his arms, the trades peoples from his loins, and the servants from his feet. Manu says that the first part of the name of a Brahmin ought to express sanctity; of a warrior power; of a merchant wealth; of a laborer contempt. The second part of the Brahmin’s name should express blessing; of a warrior protection; of a merchant means of subsistence; of a Sudra menial servitude.

Caste being of divine origin and imposed upon man, how shall it be preserved and transmitted? The answer is a perpetual education in the duties of one’s caste and in the abnegation of all that looks toward the recognition of identity of human nature and the equality of all in the substance of manhood. The greatest possible care is taken not to educate children beyond the position into which they are born and which has been occupied by their ancestors (if they belong to one of the regular castes). By marriage other castes are produced. The Hindoo must have for his first wife one of his own caste, and then he may take one more from each caste below him. Thus the Brahmin may have four wives, three being from the lower castes; the warrior may have three wives and the merchant two, while the Sudra can have only one. The children of the wives from the lower castes are classified according to a scheme invented by one of the kings, and there are more than thirty castes in all. The chandalas have for their vocation the removal of corpses, the execution of criminals, and such impure offices. General duties, common to all castes, are very few.

What is a virtue in one caste may be a sin in another. The duties are prescribed with such minuteness that a very complex system arises for each person, which must be obeyed in its smallest particular, under penalty of excommunication from one’s caste. The observances and formalities are more numerous with the higher castes. Hence even for the Brahmin, who is as a god to the other castes there is such a weight of formalities and observances that life is not worth living for him. He must perform tedious ceremonies of purification to remove the effect of the most casual accidents. Should he walk abroad and meet one of a lower caste, he must turn back and purify himself. If he should step over a rope to which a calf is tied, he must purify himself. If he should happen to look up and see the sun when setting, or at any time see it reflected in the water, he must purify himself. If he should chance to go out and get caught in a shower, he must purify himself; and so, too, if he happens to step on the wrong foot when he rises from bed. He must not look at his wife when she sneezes or gapes or eats. He must not step on a cotton seed, on a piece of broken crockery, or on ashes. When out in the sun he must look northward; when under the stars, southward; only when under a tree or a roof he may look in any direction. If he should fail to purify himself he will be excommunicated from his caste, and can be restored only by a painful ceremony.

The first, second, and third castes are of the twice-born, and they may hear the Vedas, but the Sudras must not read, nor hear read, those holy books. Burning hot oil poured into his ears was the penalty for breaking this law. If the Sudra were to speak evil of a Brahmin or warrior or merchant, the code of Manu decrees that a red-hot iron bar shall be thrust into his mouth.

There is more respect shown toward cows than toward the lowest caste of human beings. In fact, the Hindoo will not tread upon ants nor kill brute animals, but founds hospitals for sick or aged cows and monkeys, while he is entirely indifferent to the sufferings of a man from a lower caste.

The women, even of the highest caste, are treated like lower castes in spiritual things,—no woman is allowed to read the Vedas or to become learned. The children of whatever caste, too, may be sacrificed to the deities by their parents. A mother may throw her child, especially if it be a girl, into the Ganges, or any sacred river. The women are excluded from education, and are given in marriage in their seventh or eighth year. A woman who is discovered to possess a knowledge of reading and writing draws down upon her head the most severe condemnation. There is one exception to this in the dancing girls, and the bayaderes, who are purchased from poor parents for service at the temples. These are taught by the priests reading and writing, music, dancing, and singing, as well as the female arts of coquetry. They are dedicated to the gods, and do not learn housework.

Although the warrior caste and merchant caste may read the Vedas, they must do it under the supervision of the Brahmins.

Elementary instruction to the regenerated, or twice born, includes reading, writing, and arithmetic. The children learn to form letters on the sand first, and afterward on palm leaves with an iron pencil; at last with ink on plantain leaves. The monitorial system is practiced—one child hearing the other recite his lesson and assisting him to learn it. The Brahmin’s children are in all cases treated with partiality.

The chief branch of study in school is, of course, the Vedas, or holy books. This exercise must be approached with due ceremony—of girding with bands, purification, consecrated fires, and solemn ceremonies performed morning, noon, and night. The pupil must seize his teacher’s feet before he begins, and then read with clasped hands, and at the close of his reading again seize his master’s feet. This ceremony of greeting his teacher he performs by crossing his hands and taking his master’s right foot in his right hand and the left foot in his left hand.

Pupils generally reside with their teachers—in a sort of boarding-school—each teacher having the care of ten or twelve pupils. A very strict surveillance is kept up.

“Without his teacher the pupil must not enter a house nor look to the right or left, but bend his look to the ground as he follows behind his teacher.” “When reading the holy scriptures one must not cough nor take any food or drink. In blowing the nose one must not make too much noise—nor spit in a clean place—nor offer tea with his hand—he must hold his arm-sleeve before his mouth when he gapes—he must not smack his lips when he eats nor scratch his head.” Such directions are found in the educational code. We often find sublime moral duties intermingled with trivial details of ceremonial. If the pupil does not say “Om” on beginning and ending his reading of the Vedas, the exercise will do him no good.

The moral maxims are taught in the form of fables. The book used is what we know as the Fables of Bidpai (“Friend of Science”) from an Indian work, which was rewritten as the Hitopadesa (“Friendly Advice”) some centuries ago. It contains profound ethical wisdom, mixed with some things whimsical and absurd. Proverbs are quoted at every turn, being strung on the thread of the fable, like glittering stones on a necklace.

The instruction of the Brahmin’s son extended to the philosophic doctrines of Hindoo pantheism. To understand the nature of this pantheism is most important. There is Brahm—above all the individual gods. Brahm expresses pure abstraction from all distinctions—merely to think it is to become unconscious of all things. Brahma is the personification of that substance (Brahm) as the creator, Vishnu as the preserver, and Siva as the destroyer. Below these high gods there are terrestrial ones presided over by Indra, the Hindoo Jupiter, ruler of the sky. Creation is not an act of the will of deity, but a sort of emanation “like the growth of plants from seed or the hair from the head.” The world proceeds from nothingness, growing out of Brahma, and returns into nothingness—it is all an illusion, a sort of dream, which the Hindoo calls “Maya.” Brahm is the substance of all the gods, and of the beings of the world, and hence all their differences vanish to the Brahmin, who meditates long enough to reach the idea of Brahm. Hence the highest aim of education is to reach this annihilation of all distinction—passing beyond all the gods, even to Brahm.

The Sankhya philosophy expresses this doctrine of annihilation of all particular things and beings through reflection: “So through the study of principles the conclusive, incontrovertible, one only knowledge, is attained, that neither I am nor is aught mine, nor do I exist.”

One must not suppose that the Hindoo education is so complete that the lower castes remain without aspiration. They learn by degrees in what rests the power of the Brahmin to ascend above the gods by the exercise of meditation and abstraction. This is taught in the Bhagavad Gita—even a Sudra can by meditation come to Brahm.[H] The lower castes may become partakers of the divine life through regeneration—“immense self-denial, torture and penance” are requisite. They become “yogis,” and undertake some painful exercise, such as standing for twelve years without once lying down, then clasping the hands over the head for another twelve years; then a third grade by standing between four fires and the tropical sun, afterward swinging backward and forward over a fire for nearly four hours; lastly, if life is not extinct, being buried alive for the same length of time. If he lives still, the devotee has now become a Brahmin.

From the bondage of caste there is therefore one possible escape—through self-torture and penance,—but the remedy is as bad as the disease. It was Buddha who taught a doctrine that furnished a real relief from all this in the utter abolition of the caste system. Driven out of India, this doctrine spread throughout Ceylon, Farther India, China, Thibet, and among the Tartars of Siberia, and to this day numbers more human beings in its faith than any other form of religion. It gives all families a chance to ascend to the highest state of religious culture.

Buddhistic emancipation is from the rigid bonds of family as well as from caste. Any family having four sons must devote one to a monastic life. This demands the renunciation of all personal wishes and longings—all desires, all pride, and anger, and stubbornness; then the devotee reaches Nirvana and all will and consciousness have sunk into the rest and quiet of non-existence, and are purified of all finitude and special existence. In Nirvana ceases all change—no more beginning and ending—no more birth and death—perfect rest.

In the catechism of Chinese Buddhism there are ten duties prescribed: (1) Slay no living being; (2) steal not; (3) be chaste; (4) speak nothing wrong; (5) drink nothing intoxicating—these are also found in primitive Buddhism—another five duties are added relating to external rules of the order: (6) Do not perfume the hair on the top of the head, nor paint the body; (7) do not listen to songs nor attend the theater; (8) do not sit or lie on a large cushion or pillow; (9) do not eat except at meal-time; (10) do not own gold or silver, or anything of value as private property. The ideal is that of mendicancy—pious beggary.

Its ideal of the divine is no higher than that of India. God is conceived, not as a personal being having consciousness and will and love (our Christian conception), but rather as a being above personality and consciousness (the Hindoo conception). Hence the Buddhist still strives for the annihilation or extinction of his conscious individuality, just as the Indian devotee, but without those frightful penances, and without cruel laws of caste.

We can not commend the views of those who find in Buddhism, as portrayed in the “Light of Asia,” a doctrine almost or quite equal to Christianity. To us it seems to be infinitely below Christianity. Its conception of God and of God’s creation is just the opposite of the Christian conception, for in Christianity we believe God to be a personal being, who reveals himself in nature and man, and even becomes human in his Son, and dies on a cross out of love for the human race. Man can grow forever into the image of God, realizing that image in his will, his love, his intellect, because God is all there in an infinite degree, while to the Buddhist God is none of these but a being who is the negative of nature and of man too. Hence the education of Brahminism and Buddhism is based on an idea radically opposed to our own.