Education as Assimilation of Ideas

His Holiness Swamy Ranganathananda
Former President, Ramakrishna Math and Mission, Calcutta

This is the blessing that the upanishads hold for us, They will help us to continually build up our moral and spiritual assets and through them, even our material assets. They will enrich man’s inner life by helping him to build the structure of his higher personality above his given personality. The latter is the indisciplined ego which is always of a grasping nature, which desires to exploit others for its own benefit, and which is the perpetual focus of tension and sorrow. This little ego must be transcended, making for the manifestation of the true self. Sri Ramakrishna refers as the pakka, ripe ego. The kachha ego must be made to give place to the pakka ego. It is such an education that fits man for a truly civilised, truly cultured existence.

Our society must bend its energies to get an education for itself. Man in the Indian context needs to be inspired by the vedantic vision of human excellence and the vedantic will to realize that excellence in character and conduct and as taught by the ‘Gita’. The study of the ‘Gita’, will be a fascinating experience after the study of the Upanishads. It is the essence of all upanishads, of all the vedas, “samastavedartha sarasangrabhutam” as Sankaracharya tells us. It is one thing to have philosophy even to read it, and master it and quite a different thing to live it and express it in forms of life, conduct, and behaviour. Whatever may be said of other philosophies, vedanta shines best not in study and discussion but in life application. It is so because in the words of Sankaracharya (Brahma-sutra commentary) anubhava avasantvat-‘it finds its consummation in experience’. As Sri Ramakrishna used to put it “some have heard of milk, some have seen it, some have touched it, and some have drunk it, and assimilated it. Among these, the last alone have been benefited by the milk, for they alone are nourished and strengthened by it”. Such is Vedanta, its ideas have the power to nourish and strengthen man, but only when taken in and assimilated. They are not meant for mere study or argument, mental orientation, or intellectual exercise.

This capacity for assimilation of ideas comes to man from self-discipline alone. ‘Tapasa brahma vijinasasva.’ Seek to know Brahman through tapas, self-discipline, says the Taittiriya Upanishad. Where there is lack of this self-discipline there will also be lack of this capacity to understand, appreciate and assimilate high ethical and spiritual ideas. Our nation today needs to generate within itself this capacity to assimilate lofty values and ideas. We have the historically developed capacity to grasp and keep ideas. We have developed a love for ideas and tremendous memory to keep them in our minds. But for lack of will and the humanistic urge they have remained in our heads static and sterile, they have failed to percolate into the heart, and the nervous system, into the bones and muscles, to find expression in lived experience. That is different type of experience to be able to taste the fruit of the vedantic character-clear vision, broad sympathies, and intense practicality. Where there is only memory and no assimilation man becomes merely storehouse of ideas, and a storehouse is just a storehouse and nothing more. Swami Vivekananda taught us long long ago to aim in our education at the assimilation of ideas and not be content to be their store house. He says ‘Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, udigested all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character forming assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and make them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library. ‘Yatha kharascandana - bharavahi bharasysventtana to condanasya’ - The ass carrying its load of sandalwood knows only the weight and not the value of the sandalwood. If education is identical with information, the encyclopaedias are the Rishis.

To carry ideas in the head and not to know their value is to be an ass carrying sandalwood, says swami Vivekananda quoting the famous poet Bhartrhari. As the English saying goes, the spoon does not know the taste of the soup. Our education today, I am afraid, has such a tendency. A student or a citizen in our country feels the weight of knowledge in his head but knows very little of its value. He has studied history but his behaviour does not express its values or its lessons. History has told him that for want of national unity, for want of broad ideas, in the absence of social justice this country lost its freedom again and again. It has suffered humiliations and oppressions from many foreign invasions for a thousand years. Having studied all this, he believes in public and private, in ways calculated to jeopardize the freedom and national unity. He did not extract from his study an emotional identification with the good and ill fortune of his people so as to make his life, conduct and character, a guarantee of his nation’s unity, strength and progress.