Ancient Indian Education: An Inquiry into its Origin, Development, and Ideals c4.130.3

c4.130.3

Bhandarkar is also quoted with regard to the wonderful arrangements which the Brāhmans devised for the accurate preservation of the sacred text. These were far more complicated than anything the Massoretes ever dreamed of. In the *saṃhitā* arrangement the words were in their natural order and joined together according to the Sanskrit rules of sandhi. In the *pada* arrangement the words were separate, that is, not united by *sandhi*, and the compounds also dissolved. In the *krama* arrangement the words were in the following order: 1, 2; 2, 3; 3, 4; 4, 5, etc., with *sandhi* between them. In the *jaṭā* arrangement the order was 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2; 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3; 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, etc. In the *ghana*, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3; 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, etc. This was, no doubt, a later development, but it must have greatly added to the burden upon the pupil's power of memorizing, which even before was almost too heavy to be borne, and we must wonder however pupils could have been willing to submit to the monotonous task of learning by rote such an enormous mass of material. It certainly seems as though the powers of memorizing gained by this laborious process have been inherited by later generations, for it is no uncommon thing for a boy in India, even at the present day, to commit on his own initiative a whole text-book to memory, a task which most English boys would find unbearable.