Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c11.s4.11

c11.s4.11

**Śākhās and Charaṇas.** The term *Śākhā* was originally applied to the three original Saṁhitās of the *Ṛik*, *Sāma*, and *Yajus* regarded as the three branches or stems of the Veda-tree¹ having the same root, revelation (*Śruti*), and bearing the same fruit, the sacrifice (*karman*) [Kumārila and Āpastamba quoted by Max Müller, *Sans. Lit.*, p. 124]. More frequently, however, the term was used with reference to the different traditionary texts of each of the four Vedas. As Madhusūdana Sarasvatī puts it [ib. 122], "for each Veda there are several Śākhās, and their differences arise from various readings." The growth of a variety of readings in even the sacred texts of the Vedas is of course to be traced to the methods of teaching in vogue in those ancient times. Literary works did not then exist in writing and were devoid of any tangible, external form. The Vedic hymns had no outward existence except through those who heard and remembered them. Thus a book then existed merely as a body of thought handed down in schools or in families. A man who had mastered a book was himself the book. A work once composed might either wither for want of an audience, or grow, like a tree, of which every new listener who would learn it by heart would become a new branch (literally, *śākhā*). But we should not fail to distinguish between the branch, as the book, and the branch, as the reader; that is to say, between the trust and the trustee. The former is to be designated *Śākhā* and the latter as the reader of a *Śākhā*, while we should also note in this connection that the term *Charaṇa* is to be applied to those ideal successions or fellowships to which all those belonged who read the same *Śākhā*. Thus the analogy of a branch of a tree was employed to convey what we in modern times understand by an edition, say, of a hundred copies. Literary works were handed down by oral tradition in different communities which thus represented, so to say, different works, or even different recensions of one and the same work, like so many MSS. in later times.