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CHAPTER X
EDUCATION, LITERATURE AND SCIENCES
The period of Lord Mahāvīra can justly be regarded as the most creative epoch in the spheres of education, literature and the sciences. Education acquired greater complexity and exactitude, and produced specialists in the form of privato teachers in different branches of learning. Another development was the art of writing, which proved to be instrumental in the advancement of learning and the diffusion of knowledge. Prakrits (Vernaculars) grew as literary languages. Different religious teachers contributed to the growth and development of literature of their respective sects. As a result, there was a prolific output of religious literature in which instruction was imparted through oral methods. The Satra (a short rule) style was devised to memorise this type of literature, and it became a special feature of the age. This literature survived for considerable time in the form of oral traditions, and was codified in local dialects with habitual interpolations.
EDUCATION
When there was neither any printing press nor an casy means of communication from one place to another, the religious teachers, who wandered from place to place propagating their doctrines, proved to be potential media of mass education. True education was not understood as comprising merely of reading books, but as self-culture and self-development. It was regarded as a process of illumination which brought about harmonious development of physical, intellectual and spirilual faculties of man. Education was understood as the acquisition of knowledge by which a person achieves an understanding of words and their meaning and thus finds his way in the forest of the fourfold Samsāra; like a needlc with its thread, the scul possessing sacred knowledge will not be lost in the Sarasüra. If one performs all prescribed actions relating to knowiedge,
