In the classical Vedic pattern, a gurukula was not a purpose built school but the guru's own household, into which a boy moved after his upanayana, the sacred thread initiation that marked the formal start of Vedic study, to live as a resident member of the family rather than as a visiting pupil. The grihya sutras, domestic ritual manuals that survive from the late Vedic period, describe the brahmacharin, the student, performing everyday chores for the household, gathering firewood, tending the sacred fire, begging alms on the teacher's behalf, alongside memorizing and reciting Vedic texts under close daily correction.
No fee was charged for instruction, since teaching the Veda was understood as a duty rather than a transaction, but a student was expected to offer a guru dakshina, a gift determined by the teacher, at the completion of study, and the well known story of a student asked for an impossibly costly dakshina illustrates how seriously that closing obligation could be taken. Instruction relied entirely on oral transmission, drilled through recitation techniques designed to preserve the Veda's exact sound with almost no error across many centuries of purely spoken transmission, before any of it was reliably fixed in writing.