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Rig Veda Samhita happens not only to be the most ancient poetry in
humankind, but also the principal religious composition of the
Hindus. It consists of 1017 hymns with a total of about ten
thousand verses, mainly couplets, divided into ten
mandalas (circles) or
cantoes. The language of these hymns
is Vedic Sanskrit. The entire work is metrical, each verse being
in one of fifteen metres. The
composition is dated prior to 3400 B.C.E. The composition was
preserved by oral transmission, the teacher training his students
in these chants. The oldest manuscript of the Rig Veda Samhita is
dated circa 500 CE. Hence the methods used for preserving the
integrity of the contents are based on the recitation methods
only, not on the manuscript. Hinduism was and is highly decentralized in its structure without
any central organization charged with preserving the integrity of
their composition. Still all the manuscripts available and the
chanting of experts from different parts of India are almost
identical to one another. There are exactly two different versions
differing from each one other in one syllable of one particular
verse among the ten thousand verses [1]. Such an achievement,
achieved no where else in the world (or even in India regarding
their other books) is possible only because special chanting
methods were developed so that the knowledge of the rules behind
these chanting procedures allowed the reciter
to detect the errors in his own chanting or the chanting of
others.
Every syllable of every verse has to be intoned in one of three
ways. The written text has intonation marks. These intonations
have to be preserved also. The intonation is based on a group of
context sensitive rules. Preservation of the integrity of these
intonations is one of the key features of the error correcting
procedures. We will not discuss this topic here.
Most Rig Vedic verses are couplets, each line of couplet having a
small number of words numbering say from three to about 10 or 15.
The text is available in two versions. In the first version,
Pada version, every word in the
verse is clearly delineated and it is meant for study and error
correction. The second version is the Samhita version appropriate
for music-like chanting where neighbouring
words are combined by certain rules of euphony so that the entire
verse can be chanted without any breaks. For instance two
distinct neighbouring words in the
pada version like
rama and
isha such that ending vowel of first word is a
and the beginning vowel of the second is i,
then the two words together are chanted as
ramesha, i.e. a and i
together becomes e.
The Pada version is recited without any break between
words and without altering the identity of the words.
ERRORS
Error free recitation implies the correct recitation of every word
in the appropriate order with the appropriate intonation on every
syllable. In this paper we focus only on the integrity of text of
word and the order of words in a hymn.
Even though the reciters are careful
by training, still one word x in a verse is recited unconsciously
as x', where x' is a word phonetically close to x occurring in
some other verse. For instance in RV there are many occurrences of
words ending with pati, but only a
small number ending with pata, leading
to the type of error mentioned above.
Even though the order of words in a Sanskrit sentence is not
relevant as far as meaning is concerned, still the preservation of
the word order is crucial for preserving the sound quality. So
there are several methods of binding pairs of adjacent words in a
verse. Still the transposition error i.e. flipping the order of a
pair of adjacent words has to be taken care of.
There are also several special error families. For instance a
common error is jumping from one word in a verse to completely
another word in a completely different verse because of the
similarity of the context. We will mention ways of handling
some of these error. |
