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• Taking into consideration the facts about the place and the time, you should make continuous
and deliberate efforts to enhance your knowledge and excellence of instruments.
• Do not give medicine to the patients if you are sure that their disease is certainly incurable, also
to those who are about to die or to women if their relatives are not present. Do not accept any
fees from ladies without the permission of their husbands or relatives.
• When you enter a patient’s room, focus all your attention on the patient, his/her expression,
movements, and medicines, and not on anything else. You must treat all information about the
patient and his/her family as strictly confidential.
• If there is a danger of the patient or his/her relatives receiving a shock, you should not divulge
about the impending death of the patient, even if you are aware of it. Do not boast of your
knowledge even though you are knowledgeable.
An excerpt from what may be described as a graduation address to Graduates in Taittiriya Upanishad
(11thAnuvak; 1-4) is paraphrased here (Swami Sharvananda,1921):

• Speak the truth. Carry out your duty ethically. Do not neglect your daily studies.
• Do not swerve from the truth. Do not swerve from duty.
• Reckon your mother as a veritable god. Reckon your father as a veritable god.
• Reckon your teacher as a veritable god. Reckon your guest as a veritable god.
• Do not neglect what is useful. Do not miss opportunities to achieve prosperity.

• Do not neglect the daily duties of teaching and learning.
• Emulate only good deeds of ours, not others. Follow only good characters of ours, not others.
• Whatever is to be given as a donation, should be given gracefully, with joy, with modesty, with
fear and with kindness.
• Thus, conduct yourself. This is the commandment. This is the teaching. This should be observed
and verily this should be observed.

These graduation addresses reflect many core values, and with some modifications, are valid even in
modern times. Apart from basic guidelines about ethical and professional behaviour, they emphasize
the effort that needs to be made for continuous engagement in teaching and learning and also for the
enhancement of knowledge. How the efforts were made to inculcate these core values in the ancient
Indian education systems is available in documents about them (Altekar, op. cit.).

Mentoring in Recent Times

After an insight to mentoring in ancient India, it is useful for us to have a glimpse at mentoring in
more recent times, especially over the last two centuries.

Several books, review articles and research papers are available on the subject of mentoring in
the last two centuries (see Additional Readings). Here we can view the topic through examples,
experiences, and thoughts on mentoring of many eminent personalities during the 20th and 21st
centuries.

Thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore

The great Indian poet, philosopher, and artist, Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laureate in literature,
stressed that the best education can only be imparted by the teacher. Rabindranath Tagore thought

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