The Power of Memory

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 19, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 24.

The Power of Memory.

FOR evidence of the power of memory, what better can we desire than the well-known fact of the transmission of the Iliad, with its 15,667 lines, for generations, perhaps for centuries, before it was ever written? Yet even that is a mere trifle compared with the transmission of the Vedas. The Rig-Veda, with its 1,017 hymns, is about four times the length of the Iliad. This is only a part of the ancient Vedic literature, and the whole was composed and fixed and handed down by memory only, as Max Muller says, by “memory kept under the strictest discipline.”

There is still a class of priests in India who have to know by heart the whole of the Rig-Veda. And there is this curious corroboration of the fidelity with which this memorizing has been carried on and handed down, that they have kept on transmitting, in the ancient literal form, laws prohibiting practices that have, nevertheless, become established. Suttee is now found to be condemned by the Vedas themselves. This was first pointed out by their European students, but has since been admitted by the native Sanskrit scholars. Nothing could show more clearly the faithfulness of the traditional memory and transmission. It has, too, this further bearing on the date of the so-called Mosaic legislation. It shows that the fact of customs existing in a country for ages unchallenged does not prove that laws condemning such customs must necessarily be of later origin.

But there is more that is instructive in the transmission of this Vedic literature. There has been writing in India for 2,500 years now, yet the custodians of the Vedic traditions have never trusted to it. They trust for the perfect perpetuation and transmission of the sacred books, to disciplined memory. They have manuscripts; they have even a printed text, “but” says Max Muller, “they do not learn their sacred lore from them. They learn it, as their ancestors learned it thousands of years ago, from the lips of a teacher, so that the Vedic succession should never be broken. For eight years in their youth they are entirely occupied in learning this. They learn a few lines every day, repeat them for hours, so that the whole house resounds with the noise, and they thus strengthen their memory to that degree that, when their apprenticeship is finished, you can open them like a book, and find any passage you like, any word, any accent.” And Max Muller shows, from rules given in the Vedas themselves, that this oral teaching of them was carried on, exactly as now, at least as early as 500 before Christ.