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[ Education of prince Mahavira
specialists are surprised to see it. And what is it all due to ? It is due to his learning in the past lives. It is the sweet fruit of his continuous hard labour for mental culture underrtaken in innumerable previous births. There is another boy in the same class or in the same family, who is so dullheaded that he cannot learn a thing even when it is taught to him a hundred times. Here, we are constrained to suppose that he is poor in his possession of knowledge that he might have attained in his previous lives. He is, therefore, helpless. Keeping this in our mind, we now turn to the main topic.
Prince Mahavira was now seven years old. In the beginning of the eighth year his parents thought of sending him to school. He was placed under the tutelage of an able teacher. The teacher first wrote the alphabets on the blackboard and pronounced the letters one by one before the prince. He then asked the prince to learn them by heart. Mahavira wrote out all the letters, learnt them, and pronounced them correctly before the teacher. The teacher thought that there was no wonder if the boy learnt the alphabets so soon, for he belonged to a high family; and his parents who were highly learned, might have taught him so much at home. For the second time, the teacher wrote some figures of notation on the board, and the prince again learnt them very soon. He wrote out all the figures with the table of multiplication and showed them to his teacher. The teacher again ascribed the same cause to his cleverness, and did not wonder. For the third time, he gave some questions of addition and subtraction which prince Mahavira solved immediately. For the fourth time, the teacher gave him questions of higher classes, but the prince solved them all
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