Krama-patha (Step recitation): Each word was repeated twice, being connected to both the word that came before and after it, like, 1-2 | 2-3 | 3-4 | 4-5, which sounded like “the-sun sun-is is-shining shining-today”. Pada-patha (Word recitation): Then they would recite each word of the sentence separately, without any intonation and taking apart any sandhis, as in 1. Vakya-patha (Sentence recitation): Firstly, students would learn each verse by simple continuous repetition, like 1-2-3-4-5, repeating “the sun is shining today | the sun is shining today | the sun is shining today” many times over. Let us illustrate a few of these ways with a simple phrase like “The sun is shining today (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 words)”. There were ten or eleven ways to learn each single verse! In addition to memorising each mantra the standard way, they would learn the same sentence in many different ways – backwards, forwards, combining two words at a time and so on. To preserve the purity of the Vedas, ancient Indians came up with ingenious techniques. Chinese whisper (Source: Christopher Morgan/Wikimedia Commons) Tricks of the trade The fun of the game is that by the time the last person speaks the sentence out aloud, it is often hilariously different than what was intended. Think of the popular game of ‘Chinese Whispers’, where the players site in a row, and have to pass on a message, as exactly as they can, from the first to last person through whispers. We all know that it is extremely difficult to pass on even one sentence precisely among even just five people. It was something to marvel at! Sandhya Vandanam (Source: Rhariram/Wikimedia Commons) Chinese whispers The process of memorisation by listening was called the ‘shruti’, which means “what is heard”, and is often used to refer to the Vedas themselves.
SAMA VEDA IN TELUGU SCRIPT HOW TO
So how was this crazy feat of passing on this massive amount of information, without even the smallest mistake, accomplished?Īlso Read| How to talk to your kids about the elections and voting
The Vedas were composed somewhere around 2000 BC, while writing in India began more than 2,500 years later. The others are typically shorter the Samaveda has about 1,500 verses, the Atharvaveda has about 6,000 mantras and so on. Of the four Vedas, the Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda, the Rigveda is by far the oldest and consists of about one thousand hymns, made up of about 10,600 verses. These texts were the most sacred and ancient Hindu texts, the Vedas.