§ 192. Family Education demands unconditional obedience towards parents
and towards all who stand in an analogous position. Caste Education
demands unconditional obedience to the duties of the caste. The family
punishes by whipping; the caste, by excommunication, by loss of honor.
The opposition to nature appears in both systems in the form of a rigid
ceremonial, distinguishing between the differences arising from nature.
The family as well as the caste has within it a manifold fountain of
activity, but it has also just as manifold a limitation of the
individual. Spirit is forced, therefore, to turn against nature in
general. It must become indifferent to the family. But it must also
oppose history, and the fixed distinctions of division of labor as
necessitated by nature. It must become indifferent to work and the
pleasure derived from it. That it may not be conditioned either by
nature or by history, it denies both, and makes its action to consist in
producing an abstinence from all activity.
§ 193. Such an indifference towards nature and history produces the
education which we have called monkish. Those who support this sect care
for food, clothing, and shelter, and for these material contributions,
as the laity, receive in return from those who live this contemplative
life the spiritual contribution of confidence in the blessings which
wait upon ascetic contemplation. The family institution as well as the
institution of human labor is subordinated to abstract isolation, in
which the individual lives only for the purification of his soul. All
things are justified by this end. Castes are found no more; only those
are bound to the observance of a special ceremonial who as nuns or monks
subject themselves to the unconditional obedience to the rules of the
cloister, these rules solemnly enjoining on the negative side celibacy
and cessation from business, and on the positive side prayer and
perfection.
[Sidenote: _Buddhistic Education--System of Active Education._]
§ 194. In the school of the Chinese Tao-tse, and in the command to the
Brahmin after he has established a family to become a recluse, we find
the transition as it actually exists to the Buddhistic Quietism which
has covered the rocky heights of Thibet with countless cloisters, and
reared the people who are dependent upon it into a childlike amiability,
into a contented repose. Art and Science have here no value in
themselves, and are regarded only as ministering to religion. To be able
to read in order to mutter over the prayers is desirable. With the
premeditated effort in the state of a monk to reduce self to nothing as
the highest good, the system of passive education attains its highest
point. But the spirit cannot content itself in this abstract and dreamy
absence of all action, though it demands a high stage of culture, and it
has recourse therefore to action, partly on the positive side to conquer
nature, partly to double its own existence in making history. Inspired
with affirmative courage, it descends triumphantly from the mountain
heights, and fears secularization no more.