초록 열기/닫기 버튼
It is indispensable for a student to be instructed by his teacher in order to gain the knowledge of ātman and brahman which will lead him to emancipation. Since the teacher has great authority over the student, it might seem that the student ought to follow the orders and obey the rules only passively, even when he is being taught the upaniṣadic metaphysical and transcendental knowledge. This paper, however, aims to show that the student’s positive attitudes play a vital role in attaining the knowledge from the teacher. These positive attitudes can be analyzed into five categories; the student (a) voluntarily approaches the teacher and asks to teach him, or voluntarily asks the teacher specific questions, (b) shows in various ways his strong desire to learn, (c) asks his own teacher alone about the fuller knowledge, (d) poses high-level questions, and (e) ponders over what he heard from the teacher and again asks him questions. What supports these positive attitudes is ‘the desire to know’(vijijñāsā) of the student, and the positive attitudes can thus be understood as a way of displaying persistently and properly his desire to know. There has been an interpretation that the upaniṣadic teacher-student dialogues are a one-sided conversation, based on that the teacher gives a long lecture and is the agent of transmitting the esoteric knowledge. This paper adds to it a new interpretation that the upaniṣadic teacher-student dialogues are a mutual conversation to some extent, in a way that the student’s attitudes influence his teacher’s decisions whether to teach the student or not and to which degree he should teach him.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
The Upaniṣads, dialogue, student, teacher, positive attitude, questions, the desire to know, education, learning.
