The Magic of Vedas

Priyanka Rout

The Magic of Vedas

Do you know that the Vedas were written in approximately 2000 BC, but that writing in India originated around 2,500 years later? Have you ever imagined how this massive amount of information was transferred on to generations after generations orally, without even the tiniest bit of mistake?

Vedas: The Powerhouse Of Knowledge; Image Source: Joshua Hehe- Medium

Today's students face several challenges. There is a very competitive environment, many hours of classes and tuition, and a lot of pressure. But consider the predicament of ancient Indian learners millennia ago. Pupils were expected to remember a collection of books precisely, word for word, by completing their education, but there was one catch: these texts just weren't recorded anywhere. They could not have been referred to or contacted in the event of a misunderstanding. These books lived only in people's minds for thousands of years!

Today, we see children around us busy running to the tuition classes, memorizing mathematics and physics formulas, studying fourteen hours a day, and whatnot. However, at the end of the exams, little do they remember the facts they learned throughout the year. The human mind is capable of incredible feats. Still, instead of making it sharper by applying innovative methods, we dull it by using unrealistic methods that don't work in the long run. Vedic Mathematics and the Japanese instructional methods have been regarded as facilitators of learning. We have just touched the surface of what our great culture offers us.

Historically, the human mind is capable of astonishing accomplishments, none more so than the transmission of the Vedic corpus orally, without mistake, for hundreds and thousands of years. How did they manage to achieve it? They had some tricks of mnemonic devices and specific techniques of academic play that boosted the mind's creative and retentive skills. This gave rise, around the turn of the century, to Avadhna. This method allowed emerging academics to focus on many subjects simultaneously, such as literature, music, astronomy, astrology, and medical science, to mention a few.

Unfortunately, just a few people are still in the loop.

The word avadhna is derived from the Sanskrit root avadh (place down, plunge into, apply or direct the mind). The practitioner, the avadhn, is competent (at the very least) in trying to use their mind to craft poetry while solving a computational problem, debating sastric matters, answering riddles, and playing chess – all at the same time – and can tell how often a bell sounded random while the deliberations were going on.

The Vedas are the most revered and oldest of Hindu writings. The Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda are the four Vedas. The Rigveda, by far, is the oldest and consists of over a thousand hymns made up of roughly 10,600 lines. The others are often shorter; the Samaveda has around 1,500 verses, the Atharvaveda has approximately 6,000 mantras, etc.

The memorisation technique to remember these humongous Vedas was shruti, meaning 'what is heard.' The Vedic oral tradition (shruti) consists of numerous pathas, or "recitations" or techniques of singing the Vedic mantras. Such Vedic chant traditions are sometimes regarded as the oldest uninterrupted oral legacy. The fixing of the Vedic texts (samhitas) is preserved, reaching back to about the time of Homer (early Iron Age).

The four tones employed in Vedic singing are Udatta (medium tone), Anudaatta (lowest tone), Svarita (elevated tone), and Deergha Svarita (high tone expanded). Intuitive svara marks — an underline for softer tone, a thin vertical line just above a letter for louder tone, and two vertical lines for Deergha Svarita — are frequently used. These different tones help the students remember the other parts of Veda and allow them to differentiate one verse from another.

The many pathas, or recitation techniques, are intended to facilitate complete and faultless recollection of the book and its articulation, such as the Vedic pitch accent. Because they contain word order reversal, the following eight types of chanting are designated as complicated recitation styles or Vikrutipathas. In the Vedic (Sanskrit) language, backward chanting of words does not affect their meanings. There are eleven such ways for reciting the Vedas: Samhita, Pada, Krama, Jata, Maalaa, Sikha, Rekha, Dhwaja, Danda, Rathaa, and Ghana.

Before learning the eight complicated recitation techniques, pupils are taught to memorise the Vedas using more straightforward methods such as continual reiteration (samhitapatha), word-by-word reciting (pada patha) in which compounds (sandhi) are broken, and krama patha (words are organised in the sequence of ab bc cd...). The samhita, pada, and krama pathas are the inherent recital styles or prakrutipathas.

Ancient Indian civilization exerted enormous effort to ensure that these scriptures were faithfully handed from generation to generation. Many different types of recital or pathas were developed to help with recitation accuracy and the transfer of the Vedas and other intellectual books from one generation to the next. All hymns in each Veda were repeated; for example, Rigveda's 1,028 hymns with 10,600 verses. Each text was repeated in various ways to make sure that the varied styles of recitation checked each other.

As you can expect, mastering the Vedas flawlessly was a significant accomplishment. Every Brahmin boy was expected to memorise at least one Veda. When they discovered more, they frequently altered their titles to reflect it! Yogi was used for people who could memorise one veda, Dwivedis had learned two of the four Vedas (Dwi=two), Trivedis were people who had perfect retention of three Vedas, and Chaturvedis were families that had an ancestor who had attained mastery over all four Vedas.

UNESCO classified Vedic chant as a Masterpiece of Humanity's Oral and Intangible Heritage on November 7, 2008. In the prologue of his book, Veda Recitation in Varanasi, Wayne Howard writes,

"The four Vedas (Rig, Yajur, Sama, and Atharva) are not 'books' in the conventional sense, though each Veda has appeared in multiple printed copies within the last hundred years. They are composed of tonally accentuated lyrics and mesmerising, enigmatic tunes whose true manifestation necessitates oral rather than visual communication. They lose their essence when transcribed to paper because the myriad subtleties and delicate intonations - essential components of all four collections - are utterly lost. The ultimate authority in Vedic affairs is never the printed page, but rather the few individuals who are presently preserving centuries-old traditions."