प्राचीन भारत में शिक्षा (डॉ. ए.एस. अल्तेकर - गुरुकुल एवं बौद्ध विहार शिक्षण इतिहास)

256 EDUCATION IN ANCIENT INDIA [Ch. in the West and in the East. In Europe too the Middle Ages were a period of intellectual repression. Jesuitical education also produced not creative or original but receptive and imitative minds. The Renaissance and Reformation movements, however, eventually succeed- ed in establishing an era of intellectual independence and originality in Europe; in India, on the other hand the foreign rule and its natural consequences continued the spirit of the Middle Ages down to the time of the na- tional reawakening towards the end of the 19th century. Intellect ceases to be assimilative :—Owing to its excessive reverence for the past, the Hindu intellect ceased to be assimilative from about 800 A. D. Hindu sculptors assimilated Greek methods and enriched Indian art. Early astronomers like Āryabhaṭa and Varāhamihira were keeping themselves in touch with the activities and achievements of the workers in the same field outside India. Varāhamihira (c. 500 A. D.) pays even a handsome compliment to Greek astronomers and observes “The Greeks are no doubt Mlechhas (impure), but they are well grounded in astronomy and are therefore worshipped and honoured like the Ṛishis.”¹ A remarkable change for the worse took place in the Hindu attitude towards foreign scholarship within a couple of centuries or so after Varāhamihira’s death. Implicit faith in the past and in the correctness of its canonised tradition made the Hindu scholar narrow, bigotted and conceited. Of the Hindu men of letters of the 11th century A. D., Alberuni observes, “They are haughty, foolish, vain, stolid and self-conceited. According to their belief, there is no country on the earth but theirs, no other race of men but theirs, and no created beings beside them that have any knowledge

1. म्लेच्छा हि यवनास्तेषु सम्यक्शास्त्रमिदं स्थितम् । ऋषिवत्तेऽपि पूज्यन्ते······॥ Brihatsamhitā, II 14.