Veda12- Memorizing through rote learning

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Do you remember how you used to memorize a nursery rhyme in your younger days? If the rhyme is a bit too long, you probably split it into fragments, went back and forth uttering the words in these fragments, probably even repeating some of the words, and so on. You kept repeating this process for a while. That seemed to help you in remembering the rhyme.

 

In this act of going back and forth and repetition of the words, you are actually helping the brain in setting up our motor memories. As I said in the previous episode, it means that you are unknowingly setting up a complex network of neurons with a complex pattern of connectivity. This pattern is needed not only to remember the entire rhyme, but also to know how each word is uttered.

 

The language in which the Vedas were composed, namely the Sanskrit, is a bit more complex than English. The words in that language are not just stand-alone combination of alphabets. A word can get combined with its adjacent word or words, through a well-defined process called Sandhi. In doing that, the word can change its form to some extent.

 

Since the Sandhi rules are well defined, it is often possible to split these combined words back into individual words with meaning. Sanskrit also has a unique feature that word orderings are not very important and the meaning of a sentence can still be inferred, no matter the word order. Well, most of the time!

 

Now let us look at our task of memorizing massive Vedic texts without the aide of any written material. How did the ancient Indians do that?

 

As we discussed in the previous episodes, the Mantras in a Veda are gathered together in what are called Samhita part of the respective Veda. Each Mantra is in the form of a verse, that is composed following some metrical rule. They may have more than one complete sentence each comprising of several words. These words may not be simple standalone words, but could be words that are combined with adjacent words following the Sandhi rules.

 

So, a Mantra is one or more sentences, each with several words that are often combined with adjacent words. This ‘form’ of the Mantra is called the Samhita form – the form as it appears in the original text. The traditionals call this form as Samhita Pata.

 

Let us take one of the well-known Mantras from the Veda, namely the Gayatri mantra. The Samhita Pata of this Mantra is like this

 

tatsavitur varENiyam bhargOdEvasya dhImahi

 

dhiyOyOnah pracOdayaat

 

Now we need to memorize this Mantra. The first step in doing that is to split all compound words into simple words, breaking the original Sandhi. That leaves you with a sentence that is a series of standalone words. This ‘form’ of the Mantra with standalone words is called Pada Pata, where Pada means word. Now the same mantra becomes

 

tat savituh varENiyam bhargah dEvasya dhImahi

 

dhiyah yah nah pracOdayaat

 

Observe that the original Samhita Pata had only 6 words, where as the corresponding Pada Pata has 10 words. Now this form is more amenable to understanding the meaning of the Mantra. Let us get into meaning related stuff in the next episode. Now let us look at them as just words each comprising a set of alphabets.

 

There are well defined rules that allow you to order the words and repeat them if need be. One of the simplest ‘forms’ is what is called Krama Pata where you repeat the second word in a pair before you utter the next word.

 

The ancient sages went a step further and came up with several forms of the same Mantra with the words reordered and repeated in a well-defined way. Each form has a specific name such as Jata Pata, Mala Pata, Ratha Pata, and so on. The most complex of these forms is called Ghana Pata.

 

Through experience, they found that reciting each mantra in these forms helps in memorizing them and also improves the pronunciation without violating any grammatical rules.

 

This is an elaborate practice meticulously followed for thousands of years. Some people claim that this way of memorizing the Vedic corpus is what has preserved it over thousands of years, even though it was not written down. Even today, you can find many Vedic scholars in India who are adept in chanting the entire Vedas in various forms.

 

 

But training the motor memory is not the only means to remember a massive text. As we discussed in the previous episode, our brain also remembers things by ‘meaning association’. How exactly that is achieved is what we are going to discuss in the next episode.

 

The mantra audio clips in this episode are from Suresh Paddhathi.

 

A series discussing the most ancient of the Indian scriptures, nay the world scriptures namely the Vedas. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2021