Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c13.28

c13.28

But rote-learning was not of course the only method of study. There were indeed various subjects of study in the learning of which memory played a far less important part than understanding. Pāṇini's grammar was itself one of the most conspicuous of such subjects, demanding a most sustained exercise of the reader's reasoning faculty in comprehending the orderly evolution of a perfectly scientific system on the basis of a combined application of approved deductive and inductive methods. Thus the methods of both mechanical and critical study are explicitly referred to by Pāṇini in his Sūtra [iv, 2, 59]—*Tadadhīte tadveda* upon which the gloss of Patañjali is equally explicit. The term *adhīte* in the Sūtra refers to studies which depend upon memory, i.e. texts which have to be learnt by heart, while the other term, *veda*, applies to studies depending upon understanding Patañjali distinguishes a pupil who simply commits to memory texts, without understanding their meaning (*saṃpāṭhaṃ paṭhati*), from one who elects studies that involve the exercise of intelligence. The *Bālamanoramā* (a commentary on Bhattoji-dīkshita's *Siddhāntakaumudī*) defines the technical term *adhyayāna* as used by Pāṇini in the sense of the repetition by the pupil of the syllables in the order in which they issue from the lips of his teacher, while the term *vedanam* is explained as the knowledge of the meaning of the words heard.¹