Oral and Written Transmission of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit

Abstract

The size of the four Vedas combined would be very close to that of the Old Testament, which is, in King James version, 3,720,000 bytes. One of the reasons of similarity may be that this much size was nearly maximum for an ordinary man to correctly memorize. In other words, the memory capacity of a person is about that of one floppy disk. Some extraordinary persons may have four floppy disk capacity – in ancient India such person might have been highly respected as caturvedin, ‘one who is versed in the four Vedas’. In fact the Vedas were not written composition but they were ‘what were heard’ ( sruti) by the inspired sages and they were transmitted exclusively by oral method in the first millennium after its formation. Even after the written method of recording was introduced from the west sometime around the fourth century B.C., oral method was preferred to written method. This was observed by Monier Monier-Williams in his Introduction to the Sanskrit–English Dictionary (Oxford, 1888, page xxv) as follows: