Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c9.16

c9.16

and political necessity. It was also a literary necessity. It was necessary to preserve the sacred text from the changes to which it was liable in the process of its oral transmission from teacher to pupil and from generation to generation. It was liable to be corrupted, modified, and modernized in the course of such transmission. It had to confront the compelling consequences of a natural linguistic evolution which would make the retention of its pristine purity and original, archaic form more and more difficult, unless it was fixed and standardized. The time soon arrived, as pointed out by Wilson [*Ṛv. Saṁhitā*, I, xix], "when the antiquity of the hymns, the obscurity of their style, the peculiarities of their language, and the number to which they had multiplied, with the corresponding difficulties of recollecting and teaching them, brought home the supreme necessity of rescuing the dispersed and obsolete Sūktas or Vedic verses from the risk of oblivion and moulding them into some consistent and permanent shape."