Education is that which is imparted throughout a person’s life in the form of experiences. It is the sum and substance of the formal as well as informal intellectual and emotional inputs steadily imbibed through the senses and goes to make a man’s individuality. The first teachers of a child are his parents, the immediate family and friends. The next is the school where he picks up one ounce of Physics from the physics teacher, another ounce from the Maths teacher and so on.

All this is just the foundation for his personality; the superstructure is yet to come up. Hopefully the child will get to access the requisite material needed to fill up the yawning gaps that will present themselves during his journey through life; that subtle material so essential for him to grow into a complete human being.

One is reminded of the story of a wandering mendicant and his Gurus in the Bhagavatha. Seeing him, the ruling king recognized the extraordinary person as a wise and holy man and wanted to know who his guru was. The Bhikshu said,

“I have 24 gurus. I adopted them through my intellect, having gleaned wisdom from their actions.”

The honey bee and the beetles that flit around flowers gathering honey is a guru; because it teaches that as per the laws of Nature one should desist from taking from a donor more than what he can give comfortably. The donor here is undoubtedly the earth itself.

The blacksmith who was totally absorbed in his work was unaware of the king’s procession passing by. It is said that wisdom does not come from thoughts, but through focusing, through single pointed attention to anything.

The mendicant further recounts gurus like the sun that lights up the whole creation, not counting their qualities;

The air that passes through everything without getting attached to any;

The spider that weaves a perfect web from a secretion it exudes from the navel and then withdraws it when the time comes; much like the creator playing the game of creation and destruction.

He has even adopted the snake, the most unlikely of gurus, having observed him wandering without building a home for himself and when necessary going to live in a hole someone else has made. Probably the snake is aware of the fact that ‘his Father has many mansions and he could live in any one of those rooms when the need arises.’