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The Sāmaveda texts were preserved orally long before methods of
preservation of written material became robust. Even today the
emphasis is on oral mastery. The traditionalists feel strongly
that all the benefits of singing of Sāmaveda accrue only when
every syllable of every verse in the entire adhyāya or chapter is
chanted or sung correctly. But we do know that the printed books
of vedic hymns printed in this century in India have many errors.
Moreover the pool of persons who completely concentrate on the
oral mastery of these texts is shrinking day by day. What happens
in a few decades or centuries when we have only different versions
of the different texts? How can we locate the correct one among
the many erroneous copies? The Vedic sages were not only great
spiritual savants, but also very practical people. They envisioned
the possibility of having many erroneous copies. They developed a
procedure for detecting the correct version. This procedure is
similar to the modem parity control codes in the electrical
communication and computer literature.
The great vedic scholar Pandit
Sreepad Damodar Satvalekar discovered or recognized these
procedures and he details them in the (Sanskrit) introduction to
his edition of Sāmaveda Samhita published in 1956 (4th edition).
In this procedure, an entire adhyāya
or chapter of about ten verses is regarded as a unit. At the end
of this adhyāya a syllable is given. The syllables for the first
five adhyāyās are ve, khā , the, dī and şhā
From the syllable khā, we can infer
the following numbers for the entire chapter or adhyāya 2:
- the number of unmarked syllables
not at end of a verse in the entire adhyāya, modulo 5: It is two.
- the number of syllables with the udātta, marked 2u, (two symbols on the same syllable, 2 and u
being Sanskrit numeral and vowel): It is two.
- the number of svarita symbols
marked 2 ra: It is six.
One can verify that these numbers
are correct by counting the corresponding syllables. We detail the
algorithm elsewhere. |
