Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c12.s6.43

c12.s6.43

**Cultivation of Memory.** Thus this view of the subject-matter of learning necessarily moulded the methods and system under which it was to be imparted. Hence we find that the preliminary stage of learning was the learning by heart the sacred texts through indefinite repetition and rehearsal by both the teacher and the taught. This means that the cultivation of memory was accorded a most important place in the ancient system of education. The powers of verbal memory were accordingly developed to a degree almost incredible in modern times. As Max Müller well puts it: "We can form no opinion of the power of memory in a state of society so different from ours as the Indian Parishads are from our universities. Feats of memory, such as we hear of now and then, show that our notions of the limits of that faculty are quite arbitrary. Our own memory has been systematically undermined for many generations. To speak of nothing else, one sheet of *The Times* newspaper every morning is quite sufficient to distract and unsettle the healthiest memory." As Max Müller has further stated in some of his writings, this dependence on verbal memory for the transmission of sacred literature has continued to this day in a sense. "Even at the present day when MSS. are neither scarce nor expensive, the young Brahmins who learn the songs of the Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, and the Sūtras, invariably learn them from oral tradition and know them by heart. They spend year after year under the guidance of their teacher, learning a little, day after day, repeating what they have learnt as part of their daily devotion until at last they have mastered their subject and are able to become teachers in turn." Max Müller himself arranged to collect various readings for his edition of the Rigveda not from MSS. but from the oral tradition of Vaidik Śrotriyas who are fittingly described by the Indian scholar, Mr. Shankar Pandurang, who was entrusted with the work, in the following passage: "*I am collecting a few of our walking Rigveda MSS., taking your text as basis.*" We may also have in this connection some idea of the quantity of literary burden and matter carried in the small heads of these young learners. The Rigveda alone, as we have already stated, consists of 1,017 (1,028) poems, 10,580 verses and about 153,826 words. But besides the Rigveda, the Sūtra works mention a number of other subjects to be learnt by the student. An Indian scholar informed Max Müller that even so late as the early 'seventies, the Vedic curriculum comprised the following: (1) The *Saṁhitā* or *hymns*; (2) The *Brāhmaṇa*; (3) The *Āraṇyaka*; (4) The *Gṛihya Sūtras*; (5–10) The six *Vedāṅgas*.