Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1883 — What the Human Memory Can Do. [ARTICLE]

What the Human Memory Can Do.

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 thus they 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 500 B. C. Very much the same was it with those rabbinical schools amid which the Talmud gradually grew up. All of that vast literature, exceeding many times in bulk Homer and the Vedas and the Bible all together, was, at any rate until its later periods, the growth of oral tradition, too, which is the hardest to rememher, and yet it was carried down, century after century, in the memory; and long after it had all been committed to writing the old memorizing continued in the schools. Indeed, it has not entirely ceased even now, for my friend, Dr. Gottheil, of New York, tells that he has had in his study a man who thus knows the entire Talmud by heart, and can take it up at any word that is given him, and go on repeating it syllable by syllable, without hesitation and with absolute correctness.— Atlantic Monthly.