become teachers and caretakers of traditional knowledge, like the Confucian
ju, although much less political. According to the ideal, the student goes to
live at the house of his teacher, acting as his servant (alternatively a student
can be taught by his own father). Learning consists in memorizing and reciting
a text; allegedly it takes 12 years to learn one Veda, although this can hardly
be accurate, given that students were now learning three or four Vedas, plus
a good deal of other knowledge such as grammar, etymology, numbers, astron-
omy, portents, demonology, and so on (e.g., Chandogya Upanishad 7.1.2). The
Brahmans are now not so much performing religious rituals as engaging in a
lengthy scholastic routine.
It is apparent that the educational business is booming. There is also a good
deal of questioning traditional teaching methods and contents. The Upanishads
take for granted that students attend various schools and learn many religious
and non-religious specialties. Some stories tells of students who learn from
cattle, or from gods who appear to them; the idiom expresses the fact that
students are producing ideas from their own inspiration. Such individualists
would likely include the ascetic sages depicted in the Buddhist and Jaina texts,
a rival type of intellectual who makes a point of his independence from
traditional teaching and its methods. These sages known as shramanas, make
a sharp break with the economic and social base of the Brahmans, who are
now wealthy householders and landowners; the dissidents are alms men, holy
beggars who have given up householding to become lifelong ascetic recluses.
Nevertheless, one gets a sense that the shramanas too are competing for student
followers. The common greeting among wanderers was to ask one another
about their teacher and doctrine; the lives of the Buddha and Mahavira describe
conversions of followers from one teacher to another.
There is an upsurge now of cultural production and dissemination. In part
this comes from the breakdown of the Vedic cults and the spread of education
to a much wider group than the priests. It is also during this period (by the
500s b.c.e.; Thapar, 1966: 63) that writing appears. It does not have a very
direct effect on the educational world, since most of what we see is oral
recitation and debate. The use of writing most likely began with record keeping
in the expanding governments of the time, and with merchant accounts; the
religious intellectuals were the most conservative, centered as they were on the
ritualized transmission of their knowledge. This is a pattern we find elsewhere,
such as in the exclusively oral traditions of the Celtic Druid priests long after
writing was available in the secular world. The availability of an alternative
form of knowledge outside of priestly circles, however, must have contributed
to the delegitimation of Brahmanical claims for cultural dominance.
The Upanishads contain many stories of students whose teachers do not
know the new doctrines, of old-style priests who are embarrassed by ceremo-
196 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths