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One may wonder
whether the need for these procedures exists since the manuscripts
or books of Rig Veda Samhita are easily available, the latest
available manuscript being dated prior to 500 CE. The answer is
yes. We have focussed only on the
syllables in the text. But every syllable has to be intoned in a
particular way and the intonation cannot be completely specified
by written symbols. The correct preservation of the oral version
with proper intonations still needs the
vikratis. The chanting of the forms
are treasured regardless of their utility as an
error-correcting code. Rig Veda Samhita
has been the object of intense study in western universities for
more than one hundred and fifty years, the interest tapering off
only in the last fifty years. The vikratis
were often regarded as another instance of the Hindus superstition
or obsession to make things more complicated, and thus ignored.
Again the conversion of the binary string to a decimal number and
vice versa mentioned by Pingala was
ignored by the translators like Weber more than 100 years ago.
Fritz Staal mentions that the concept
of the context sensitive rule in linguistics already mentioned
extensively by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini,
Circa 500 CE, was not recognized by the so called major experts of
the Sanskrit Grammar like Kielhorn or
Whitney. Only after the discovery in the West
in the twentieth century by Chomsky did Staal
and others point out their use almost
twentyfive hundred years earlier. What all of these
examples state is that the predilection of the earlier western
investigators that they knew everything prevented them from
understanding the Sanskrit texts of which they claimed to be
experts. |
