Oral KNOWLEDGE Tradition of India

In the tradition, knowledge has been constituted, stored and maintained in the framework of the oral culture. According to Bhartrhari, knowledge is constituted in our inner self. There is the antarplata, constituted by the input of the senses (indriya), processed by the mind (मन mun) and the intellect (बुद्धि buddhi), and finally constituted knowledge exists as our transformed, alert self, चित्त citta (Vakyapadrya, 1.112-14).

Therefore, while both perception and inference are given primacy as epistemologies, तर्क tarka (argumentation) is also accorded an important place; the Indian mind has not relied completely on mind and senses and has accorded the central role in knowledge formation to meditation and deep reflection, चिंतन cintana and मनन manana.

Also शब्द प्रमाण Sabda-pramana (verbal testimony) has always enjoyed authority with major systems of thought.

Seeing with “mind’s eye” is the typical epistemology of Indian thought. The Jaina thinkers, interestingly, define perception as आत्म प्रत्यक्ष atma-pratyaksa — what is present to the inner self’ and not as what is present to the senses. To put it in contemporary vocabulary, Indian mind has depended more on hypothetico-deductive methodology than on observational inductive methodology.

Just as knowledge is by and large constituted in the mind, it is also stored in the mind, not outside the mind.

This is another requirement of oral culture. This requirement, we noted earlier, has determined the structure and style of the texts.

As oral texts, they are constituted to facilitate memorization as they have to be held in the mind and transmitted orally in the गुरु-शिष्य guru-Sisya mode. So even the dictionaries, अमरकोश Amarakosa for example, are metricalized.

Other features of speech are also employed both to help memorization and to communicate meaning — thus, for example, Panini employs pitch variation to mark the change of topic in his grammar अष्टाध्यायी Astadhyayi.

They are highly structured, are necessarily brief and are composed in abbreviated, sUtraic, mnemonic style — a highly nominalized style with the language replete with technical vocabulary.

This meta-language, with its other complex devices of abbreviated expression, such as अनुवृत्ति anuvrtti, reading parts of earlier statements into subsequent statements, adds to the density of the texts.

The oral texts, we said, are highly structured.

The Indian mind is acutely taxonomic and the layered structure of the texts reflects the structured analysis of the domain of knowledge.

Overt organizers such as अधिकरण adhikarana and प्रकरण prakarana signify the inter-relationships and the order of treatment of subjects. Such embedding may extend up to four layers. This enables the identification of statements through a four-point reference to their location in the over-all text down to the particular सूत्र sutra and karika as is the case with the ऋग्वेद Rigveda, महाभारत Mahabharata and अर्थशास्त्र ArthaShastra, for example. One notices then that though the texts are oral, they have a high degree of complexity and stability.

The complexity of organization and the density of statement are the causes of the need to abbreviate them so that they can be held in the mind along with other texts of all the contending schools in that domain of knowledge.

A different philosophy of knowledge and of cognitive processes informs this mode of orality.

Knowledge in this mode is simultaneous, not sequential/ linear — as is the case in the scriptal traditions.

It is important to note that oral culture is an alternative culture of knowledge and not a default culture, one that is there because writing systems are unknown as is often alleged. Nobody could say this of India where there is evidence of the existence of a script in the ancient Mohenjo-Daro civilization and where Asoka’s inscriptions (fourth century BC come in three scripts — Brahmi, Kharosthi and proto Dravid.

In the oral culture of knowledge, the scholar has a library in his mind and the speed of information processing is very high, much higher than in the scriptal mode where the information is first transferred to the mind through senses.

In this case the mind-memory is loaded with large bodies of data — remember that the mind has a much larger capacity to store data than the hard disk of a modern computer — and there is direct visualization of data with the eyes shut.

This explains the puzzling requirement in the scholastic tradition for a scholar to be the master of fourteen disciplines, puzzling — because how can one master so many disciplines?

It is not possible in the time consuming, linear mode of written texts that can be of inordinate length. But it certainly appears possible in the mode in which the texts are highly abbreviated and are capable of being stored in the mind.

Orality thus as a specific mode of knowledge formation and knowledge storage determines both the structure and the use of the texts.

Of course, the texts have a relatively high degree of opacity.

The primary texts at least are not expository — they do not give the history nor do they explain the methodology of constituting knowledge. They simply state the conclusions in categorical, declarative sentences that have a ring of finality about them. Partly this was determined by the needs of brevity but, more importantly, it has something to do with the intellectual system in which the thinker in a given domain worked in a framework in which the academy shared all the earlier texts.

He made a new statement only when he made an advance on the tradition.

The entire tradition of texts in that domain is interwoven in a later text.

Therefore, only minimal explicit statements are made and hence the texts are more or less opaque.

It has nothing to do, as is often alleged, with the socio-political gesture of keeping knowledge esoteric and restricted only to a class of people.

It was, in fact, the condition for facilitating countrywide academic sharing and continuity of thought.

The full explication of the master mind’s sutraic statements belonged to the other part of the scholastic tradition — the commentary tradition, the टीका परंपरा tika parampara.

These modes of text constitution in fact enabled the maintenance of texts over long stretches of time, much more exact and assured maintenance than is apparently possible when the texts are held outside the mind in perishable mediums such as paper, floppy and CD.

The texts were mnemonically composed and could be held in the mind with a little practice.

To ensure exact reconstruction of the texts, they were re-analysed and re-arranged in various permutations and memorized by a number of scholars. This ensured exact reconstruction of the text any time purely from memory.

We are referring to the elaborate and complex पाठ patha-tradition which analyzed and re-organized texts in various permutations and combinations which when stored in the mind in different arrangements/combinations ensured accurate reconstruction of the texts even when, and if, all the exteriorized, written versions were to be destroyed.

The texts have thus been maintained intact and un-corrupted through intricate techniques of mental storage and oral transference.

Great value has always been attached to knowledge and tremendous intellectual effort has gone into maintaining the texts of knowledge. As we have noted elsewhere even though the Hindu culture is not bibliolatrous, it has accorded a special status to certain texts, the texts of knowledge, and made them perennial objects of study.

The difference, however, is that there has been a complete freedom to interpret and come up with competing interpretations, a freedom that is not always present in other cultures.

But it has not been simple, this successful maintenance of texts. Various processes have been employed in this experience of loss, recovery and renewal. Dynamic communities do not allow their systems of thought to die.

As we have described elsewhere, Oral Cultures have in-built mechanisms for the recovery of texts.

A culture may, therefore, employ one or any of the following seven text maintenance/renewal mechanisms to keep the thought alive and re-contextualized:

1. COMMENTARY — Such as Katyayana’s वर्त्तिका Varttika, 350 Bc; Patanjali’s महाभाष्य Mahabhasya, second century BC; Kasika, seventh century AD Patanjali’s Mahabhasya and Sankar Bhasya;
2. RECENSION (a critical revision} — Such as Candra Vyakarana, fourth century AD, a Buddhist recension of Astadhyayi that interestingly eschews what it believes is its philosophically loaded technical vocabulary; Jainendra Vayakarana/Sabdanusasana, composed in the fifth century AD by Devanandin or Siddhanandin), and Astavakra Gita;
3. REDUCTION (a re-arrangement) — Such as Rupamala of Vimala Saraswati, Siddhanta Kaumudt of Bhattojidiksita, sixteenth century AD and Laghusiddhanta Kaumudi, eighteenth century AD of Varadaraja;
4. ADAPTATIONS — Hemasabdanusasana by Hemacandracarya, eleventh century AD, an adaptation of Panini’s grammar to describe Prakrt, contemporary spoken Prakrts or Sankaradeva’s Assamese adaptation of Valmiki Ramayana and such other adaptations, thirteenth-fourteenth centuries onwards in almost all Indian languages.
5. TRANSLATIONS — For example, majority of translations of major literary and philosophical texts in almost all the modern Indian languages, fourteenth century or so onwards; Hindi paraphrase of Astadhyayi by Shri Narayana Misra and English translation of the text with incorporations from Kasika by Sri S.C. Vasu (1898).
6. POPULAR EXPOSITION — The कथा प्रवचन परंपरा katha-pravacana parampara, a hoary tradition, has been chiefly instrumental in both the maintenance and renewal of texts of thought. The two parallel traditions, the learned and the popular, have been all through and’ are even today mutually enriching each other and contributing in equal measure to the development of thought through processes of paraphrase, explication, verification, falsification, illustration.
7. Re-CREATION — The Mahabharata, for example, is maintained by the repeated creative use of its themes and episodes, by re-creations, such as those by Masa who wrote a number of plays on epic characters and episodes.

There is

(i) the availability of the text,

(ii) the ability to understand the text, and

(iii) the relevance of the text,

all of which are in the scope of maintenance.

Of these, in the learned tradition, the commentary, टीका tika, is the most important means as the continuous and cumulative टीका परंपरा tika parampara, the commentary tradition, ensured all the three dimensions — availability, comprehensibility and contextual relevance of the texts.

The commentary tradition is a cumulative tradition, i.e., a number of commentaries on a given text follow each other in succession with every succeeding commentary taking into account and building on the preceding ones.

Almost all the major texts have been cumulatively commented upon.” These commentaries take many forms from bare annotation (पंजिका panjika) to exhaustive, encyclopedic analysis (महाभाष्य Mahabhasya)” and the purpose is, as Vamana-Jayaditya say “. . . to bring together and unify the . . . knowledge that lies scattered in the वृत्ति vrttis, भाष्य bhasyas and all शास्त्र Sastras. . . .”

Thus, texts over a period of time

(i) grow opaque, and

(ii) become asymetrical with the context, and/or

(iii) their connection with the tradition of knowledge in that domain becomes incoherent.

If the Indian intellectual texts have not become “dead” and are still studied in the learned, though now relatively esoteric tradition, it is because the टीका परम्परा tika parampara has kept them alive and pertinent.

Some of India’s most original minds have been exegete, commentators — from Yaska (ninth century BO, Sabarasvamin (first century AD), Kumarila Bhatta (sixth century AD), Adi Sankara (seventh century AD), Sri Ramanuja (eleventh century AD), Madhvacarya (thirteenth century AD), Sayanacarya (fourteenth century AD), Jnanesvara (fourteenth-fifteenth century AD) right down to “The Great Moderns,” Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, Radhakrishnan, Vinoba Bhave (who all wrote commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita in the illustrious line of Sankara and Ramanuja).

Thus, the texts of knowledge have been constituted, maintained and transmitted in the oral framework of Indian history of ideas.

Excerpts from Indian Knowledge Systems Volume —1, Editors – Prof. Kapil Kapoor & Avadhesh Kumar Singh