The name Dwivedi meant someone who had mastered two of the four Vedas (Dwi= Two), the name Trivedi could be adopted by a person who had flawless retention of three Vedas, while Chaturvedis were families who had an ancestor who had completed mastery over all four of the Vedas. When they learned more than that, they usually changed their names to reflect it! Every Brahmin boy had the duty to learn at least one Veda by heart. Reciting the entire Rigveda in the Ghanam style just once could take up to 450 hours! Family honourĪs you can imagine, learning the Vedas flawlessly was considered to be a great feat. This would sound something like “the-sun sun-the the-sun-isis-sun-the the-sun-is | sun-is, is-sun, sun-is-shining shining-is-sun sun-is-shining…” Ghana-patha (Compact recitation): There is an arithmetical system of permutation and combination in the chanting, which goes like 1-2 2-1 1-2-3 3-2-1 1-2-3 | 2-3 3-2 2-3-4 4-3-2 2-3-4 etc. So much so, that in the south, the name Ghanapatim denoted someone who had mastered the Ghana style of reciting the Vedas, and it would take them almost 13 years of full-time study dedicated to learning to get there! However, one of the most complicated ways was the Ghana-patha. There were other even more complex recitation styles such as mala (garland), shikha (peak), dhvaja (flag), rekha (line), danda (stick) and ratha (chariot). Jata-patha (Woven recitation): Two words were first recited in their original order, then repeated in the reverse order, and finally repeated again in the original order, as in, 1-2 2-1 1-2 | 2-3 3-2 2-3 | 3-4 4-3 3-4 | 4-5 5-4 4-5, which would go like “the-sun sun-the the-sun | sun-is is-sun sun-is | is-shining shining-is is-shining | shining-today today-shining shining-today.” It got even more complicated as the students grew older. 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.
#What is the atharva veda in induism 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.
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