THE MONKHOOD--II
'The restrained in hand, restrained in foot, restrained in speech,
of the greatest self-control. He whose delight is inward, who is
tranquil and happy when alone--him they call
"mendicant."'--_Acceptance into the Monkhood._
Besides being the ideal of the Buddhists, the monk is more: he is the
schoolmaster of all the boys. It must be remembered that this is a thing
aside from his monkhood. A monk need not necessarily teach; the aim and
object of the monkhood is, as I have written in the last chapter, purity
and abstraction from the world. If the monk acts as schoolmaster, that
is a thing apart. And yet all monasteries are schools. The word in
Burmese is the same; they are identified in popular speech and in
popular opinion. All the monasteries are full of scholars, all the monks
teach. I suppose much the same reasons have had influence here as in
other nations; the desire of the parents that their children should
learn religion in their childhood, the fact that the wisest and most
honoured men entered the monkhood, the leisure of the monks giving them
opportunity for such occupation.
Every man all through Burma has gone to a monastery school as a lad, has
lived there with the monks, has learnt from them the elements of
education and a knowledge of his faith. It is an exception to find a
Burman who cannot read and write. Sometimes from lack of practice the
art is lost in later manhood, but it has always been acquired. The
education is not very deep--reading Burmese and writing; simple, very
simple, arithmetic; a knowledge of the days and months, and a little
geography, perhaps, and history--that is all that is secular. But of
their religion they learn a great deal. They have to get by heart great
portions of the sacred books, stories and teachings, and they have to
learn many precepts. They have to recite them, too, as those who have
lived much near monasteries know. Several times a day, at about nine
o'clock at night, and again before dawn, you will hear the lads intoning
clearly and loudly some of the sacred teachings. I have been awakened
many a time in the early morning, before the dawn, before even the
promise of the dawn in the eastern sky, by the children's voices
intoning. And I have put aside my curtain and looked out from my
rest-house and seen them in the dim starlight kneeling before the
pagoda, the tomb of the great teacher, saying his laws. The light comes
rapidly in this country: the sky reddens, the stars die quickly
overhead, the first long beams of sunrise are trembling on the dewy
bamboo feathers ere they have finished. It is one of the most beautiful
sights imaginable to see monks and children kneeling on the bare ground,
singing while the dawn comes.
The education in their religion is very good, very thorough, not only in
precept, but in practice; for in the monastery you must live a holy
life, as the monks live, even if you are but a schoolboy.
But the secular education is limited. It is up to the standard of
education amongst the people at large, but that is saying little. Beyond
reading and writing and arithmetic it generally does not go. I have seen
the little boys do arithmetic. They were adding sums, and they began,
not as we would, on the right, but on the left. They added, say, the
hundreds first; then they wrote on the slate the number of hundreds, and
added up the tens. If it happened that the tens mounted up so as to add
one or more to the hundreds, a grimy little finger would wipe out the
hundreds already written and write in the correct numbers. It follows
that if the units on being added up came to over ten, the tens must be
corrected with the grimy little finger, first put in the mouth. Perhaps
both tens and hundreds had to be written again. It will be seen that
when you come to thousands and tens of thousands, a good deal of wiping
out and re-writing may be required. A Burman is very bad at arithmetic;
a villager will often write 133 as 100,303; he would almost as soon
write 43 as 34; both figures are in each number, you see.
I never met a Burman who had any idea of cubic measurement, though land
measurement they pick up very quickly.
I have said that the education in the monasteries is up to the average
education of the people. That is so. Whether when civilization
progresses and more education is required the monasteries will be able
to provide it is another thing.
The education given now is mostly a means to an end: to learning the
precepts of religion. Whether the monks will provide an education beyond
such a want, I doubt. A monk is by his vows, by the whole tenour of his
life, apart from the world; too keen a search after knowledge, any kind
of secular knowledge, would be a return to the things of this life,
would, perhaps, re-kindle in him the desires that the whole meaning of
his life is to annihilate. 'And after thou hast run over all things,
what will it profit thee if thou hast neglected thyself?'
Besides, no knowledge, except mere theoretical knowledge, can be
acquired without going about in the world. You cannot cut yourself off
from the world and get knowledge of it. Yet the monk is apart from the
world. It is true that Buddhism has no antagonism to science--nay, has
every sympathy with, every attraction to, science. Buddhism will never
try and block the progress of the truth, of light, secular or
religious; but whether the monks will find it within their vows to
provide that science, only time can prove. However it may be, it will
not make any difference to the estimation in which the monks are held.
They are not honoured for their wisdom--they often have but little; nor
for their learning--they often have none at all; nor for their
industry--they are never industrious; but because they are men trying to
live--nay, succeeding in living--a life void of sin. Up till now the
education given by the monks has met the wants of the people; in future
it will do so less and less. But a community that has lived through
twenty-four centuries of change, and is now of the strength and vitality
that the Buddhist monkhood is, can have nothing to fear from any such
change. Schoolmasters, except religious and elementary, they may cease
to be, perhaps; the pattern and ensample of purity and righteousness
they will always remain.