The Ṛgveda and the Mahābhārata
On one major exception to the techno-determinism of media ecology
I.
In the discipline of media ecology, the oral tradition is generally thought to be fluid, ever-shifting, ever-evolving, multidimensional, kaleidoscopic, and protean in nature. And if you study, say, any god from a pantheon of pagan gods, you’ll quickly realize why this understanding is so pervasive: a single god will have over a dozen known names, several different origin stories, countless variations on his various adventures, dozens of things he’s meant to symbolize, and so on, and so on. The further you look into it, the more intimately you’ll understand why this is: the stories change over time through the oral tradition, and each written account captures just one moment in a fluid process.
Sometimes, the myths don’t necessarily change but rather accumulate. One group of believers says this; another says that. Sometimes a village will have some god that represents something, while another village will have another god that represents the same thing, and then a third party will come along and combine the two gods into one, even though there was never such an intention beforehand. This is how the oral tradition works. It doesn’t evolve in a developed, principled, predictable manner. It expands agglomeratively, leading the independent analyst to make sense of it all later on, writing down his findings to fix things in place.
Therefore, this tendency toward fluidity is discernible when one studies most things in the oral tradition, whether poems, laws, proverbs, or songs. When writing was invented, however, the first steps toward disrupting this fluidity were taken as soon as this new technology was oriented toward cultural matters. Canonization, for instance, was an absolute assault on fluidity, and it happened cross-culturally during what we now call The Axial Age. (It also was responsible for a bunch of cool and interesting things, like metaphysics and music theory). Media ecology specialists sometimes argue that there’s an embedded ideology in literate communities that holds stasis as the highest value. Here’s John Miles Foley in Oral Tradition and the Internet (2012; emphases mine):
The ideologically driven textual ecology will naturally select which verbal artifacts are to be understood as viable. Single members of that ecosystem—whether individuals, groups, or corporations—will claim that they “own” a particular work, and the operative legalities will bear out that claim. If it’s recognized as a tangible item, you can indeed own it. And if you own it, you can restrict its use. There exists a brick-and-mortar thing to restrict. In the textual arena, strength and continuity reside not in ongoingness but in stasis, not in rule-governed flexibility but in invariability. The [text-based] Agora is a word-market for asynchronous, disembodied, nonsystematic communication. In this marketplace the survival of the fittest means the survival of the “fixed-est.”
The implication behind the phrase “ideologically driven textual ecology” at the top is that literacy subtly alters the mentality of those who have it by dint of its very properties. In today’s world, we accept that an author will want to control how his text is used. We accept that an author’s copyrighted text can’t be copied word-for-word and resold by others, and if that limits a text’s availability, then so be it. Importantly, we and other literate communities typically want to keep a purely written work 100% the same as it always was, with as little variation as possible. The concept of authorship — with “author” meaning the person who composed an original work — is highly important for literate people. For non-literate communities, by contrast, the concept is more complicated. Oral societies are typically fascinated by the person transmitting the poem (or whatever) and thus functioning as its ersatz-author in that moment, but they also acknowledge that the true “author” of the text was one of the gods, or the tradition generally, or something less concrete.
Anyways, these features of literate societies reached their apex during the high point of the printing press (18th-19th centuries), and it took a good, long while to get there (which means there are plenty of exceptions in pre-print and even post-print societies). Foley is broadly generalizing, which is fine.
II.
There is, however, one work that media ecology types rarely discuss, and that’s the Ṛgveda. It forms a complete and utter exception to everything orally-composed and orally-transmitted documents are supposed to be. The Ṛgveda is a long, long collection of praise poems — about 350,000 words, which is around as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. It was composed c. 1400-1000 B.C., and the first known written manuscript for it emerged around 1000 A.D., meaning that for two thousand years it remained unwritten. And the earliest physically extant manuscript for it dates to 1464, which suggests that not too many copies of it were either made or even needed. Even today, the memorization of the entire work continues to be done and the process is taken quite seriously.
So how much variation was there? Two thousand years of transmission — surely there’s a lot, right? As a matter of fact, no! Here’s how Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton explain it in their introduction to the recent translation they put out of it, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (2014), which also happens to be the only good quality complete English translation ever to be written:
The reciters of the R̥gveda did not deliberately change and, for the most part, did not change at all the order of the books of the R̥gveda, the order of verses within hymns, the words of the hymns, or their grammar. There were a few—but relatively few—changes to the order of hymns, such as that reflected in the difference between the Bāṣkala and Śākala recensions in the order of Maṇḍala I. This early “freezing” of the text is very important and one of the characteristics that makes the R̥gveda so valuable for understanding the linguistic, religious, and literary history of South Asia. The R̥gvedic tradition has preserved a very ancient literature with extraordinary fidelity, with no grammatical or lexical modernization or adjustment of contents to later conceptual conditions.
Yes — no modernization at all, and no changing of the composition to meet the standards of the changing times. And the reason is because it was designed for elites, and elites only, and it was transmitted from teacher to pupil with the utmost strictness, using the most effective techniques known. Here’s how Wendy Doniger explains it in her essay “Impermanence and Eternity in Hindu Epic, Art, and Performance” from the collection On Hinduism (2013):
The Rig Veda was preserved orally even when the Hindus had used writing for centuries. They refused to preserve the Rig Veda in writing because it was a sacred magic text, whose power must not fall into the wrong hands. Unbelievers and infidels, Dalits and women, were forbidden to learn Sanskrit, the sacred language, because they might defile or injure the magic power of the words; if the sacred chants were to be spoken by such people, it was believed, the words would be polluted like milk contained in the skin of a dog. The text was, therefore, memorized in such a way that no physical traces of it could be found, much as a coded espionage message would be memorized and then destroyed (eaten, perhaps—orally destroyed) before it could fall into the hands of the enemy. This exclusively oral preservation also ensured that the Rig Veda could not be misused even in the right hands: You couldn’t take the Rig Veda down off the shelf in a library, for you had to read it in the company of a wise teacher or guru, who would make sure that you were not injured by its power.
Now, one might suppose that a text preserved orally in this way would be subject to steadily encroaching inaccuracy and unreliability, that the message would become increasingly garbled like the message in a game of ‘telephone’; but one would be wrong. For the same sacredness that made it necessary to preserve the Rig Veda orally rather than in writing also demanded that it be preserved with meticulous accuracy. The Rig Veda is regarded as a revealed text, seen in a vision or ‘heard’ (shruti) by the human seers to whom the gods dictated it. And one does not play fast and loose with revelation. There are no significant variant readings of the Rig Veda, no detailed critical editions or textual apparatus. Just the Rig Veda. So much for the inevitable fluidity of oral texts.
To be sure, there are features of the Rigveda amenable to oral transmission that you wouldn’t associate so much with a text made under print conditions. It is, after all, a series of poems, and poems are easier by nature to memorize (this is part of the reason why some people have speculated that the earliest human language was poetic and songlike by its nature). We’re certainly not dealing with the philosophy of John Locke or anything like this.
III.
But all the same, this text stands as a huge anomaly amid an otherwise robust set of principles that media ecologists like Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and others would associate with the characteristics of pre-literate societies, or “primary orality,” because of just how resistant to textual alteration it has been. Compare it with an epic poem like the Mahābhārata, which is so hopelessly entangled in the sheer amount of textual variants it has produced over the centuries, to the point where it’s impossible to create a definitive version of it. Again, here’s Doniger:
Just as the oral tradition of the Rig Veda is frozen, the so-called manuscript tradition of the Mahabharata is hopelessly fluid, in part because of the interaction in India between living oral variants and empty written variants. Indeed, Hindus have long been aware of the constant interaction between oral and written traditions of the Mahabharata. They explain that when Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, was ready to fix it in writing, he summoned as his scribe the elephant-headed god Ganesha, patron of intellectuals and merchants. (In doing this, Vyasa was reversing the roles that had been played by gods and mortals in the redaction of the Rig Veda, where gods had dictated the text to mortals, who inscribed it only in their memories.) Ganesha agreed to take Vyasa’s dictation, but only on condition that Vyasa would not lag behind and keep Ganesha waiting for the next line; Vyasa in turn stipulated that Ganesha must not write down anything he did not understand. When, in the course of work, the divine amanuensis seemed to be getting ahead of the mortal author, Vyasa would quickly throw in a ‘knot’ that would make Ganesha pause for a moment. This accounts for the many scribal errors, corrupted lines, and linguistic stumbling blocks in the manuscript tradition of the great epic. The curse of Ganesha torments every scholar who works on a combined oral/written tradition. It is ironic, I think, that the passage narrating the dictation by Vyasa to Ganesha is the very first one that the critical edition relegates to an appendix—indeed, to an appendix to an appendix; the passage that accounts for the irregularities in the epic resulting from its dual oral/written status is rejected as just such an irregularity or ‘knot’.
And as such a hopelessly fluid document, the Mahābhārata is actually quite similar to many other vernacular texts from before the age of print, since scribal variations like these were quite common. In the medieval Middle English genre of chivalric romance, for instance, an editor putting together a “definitive” scholarly edition will often have to pick and choose somewhat arbitrarily which passage will be included in the main text should there be a disparity in manuscripts and no clear way to determine what the original source said.
This predicament happens often enough, because medieval monks and copyists would tend to copy the manuscripts of these knightly adventure stories sometimes using different words or alliterative mnemonic phrases than the ones found in the manuscript from which they copied. The reason being, they were replacing these words and phrases with the ones they remembered from when they had heard it being recited to them. When they copied the manuscripts, they were essentially reciting the poetry in their own heads and letting that version take precedence. So when a modern scholar works on texts like these, which reside in the nexus between oral and written transmission, it’s impossible not to pause and consider just how discontiguous the concept of a definitive scholarly edition really is from what it’s attempting to preserve (and thus freeze in a permanent state of solidity). Although the Mahābhārata is a particularly messy example, it is no departure from the conditions you’d expect to find within a pre-print society that has a literate upper class.
IV.
Going back to the Ṛgveda, you can see how impressive of an accomplishment it really is to have an oral document like that remain intact for thousands of years. And what I want to point out here is that there are some currently popular explanations on why such a thing might have happened that are absolutely doomed to fail. Take the concept of the “meme.” A meme, as it was first defined by Richard Dawkins, is an idea that spreads around like a virus, using humans as hosts, and it reproduces itself through the transmission from one human to another. In this line of reasoning, the idea is so powerfully attractive that human beings simply feel compelled to make all sorts of accommodations for it so that it can be reproduced either as much as possible, or as accurately as possible, or whatever. This is an especially popular concept among tech guys in Silicon Valley.
But I would defy you to look into the Ṛgveda, go over its contents, look into what it says, and ask yourself, is there anything really so exceptional here — philosophical, poetic, mythopoeic, or otherwise — that would prove so irresistible as to prompt such an elaborate process of oral transmission while other seemingly similar texts had failed? And if you’re an honest person, the answer would have to be no, not really. I mean, it’s a great work of literature, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re concluding something like, “It’s all a meme,” then you’ve just simply failed at comprehending what’s happening here.
What keeps an idea alive isn’t just the idea itself but the manner in which humans opt to transmit it, which includes the selection of physical media but also the technical method of transmission — not to mention the manner in which one interacts with a given medium, which I’ll discuss shortly. The people who are seduced by “memetics” — in their zeal to discredit all possibility of human agency and free will — typically ignore this dimension of religion, ideology, epic poetry, conspiracy theories, or whatever else, focusing instead (rather myopically) on the “memes,” or content itself, thinking of perhaps how they pertain one way or another to man’s evolutionary psychology. If I’m being honest, the interest in “memetics” is nearly enough to make me discredit a person’s authority on this matter outright.
The reason the Ṛgveda stayed so well intact was due to an elaborate system of mnemotechnics that these Aryan Brahmins had figured out. I’ve written about mnemotechnics a bit before here, and it remains an underappreciated subject for understanding the evolution of culture. In this case, the Brahmins had a specific way of orally transmitting the text to their pupils, and it was specialized for precision. I’m no Vedic scholar, but I’d guess that these methods involved elaborate procedures or rituals. And without question, these must have been kept in place through some kind of pedagogy that each teacher passed down to each pupil along with the Ṛgveda, so that the neophyte wasn’t just learning the poetry but also exactly how to teach it himself one day.
V.
Going back to the question of what the Ṛgveda tells us about media ecology, I’d say it doesn’t discredit the basic principles of the discipline (which is, let’s face it, a loose area of focus anyhow), but it should make something crystal clear: namely, that the physical medium through which information is conveyed isn’t everything. Although a medium (like the book, the telephone, whatever) suggests a certain kind of engagement and thus a certain effect on whoever interacts with it, one can still shape each medium by tampering with its surroundings and altering one’s mode of interaction with it. One can set up parameters in which the medium is used, one can ritualize his use of it (a ritual is a technique!), one can create a state of diglossia to keep its usage limited to a chosen elite, one can ban or restrict its usage through law or policy, one can augment certain aspects of what it conveys using a kind of mnemotechnics, and so on, and so on. The possibilities are potentially limitless, and you’ll notice they often overlap with questions of the political.
But the point is, people find ways to change their media, just as animals will often find ways to alter theirs (like beavers building dams). Last week, I wrote about drugs and how they’re now being used as a way of augmenting certain aspects of the computer for various tasks, since everyone does everything on a computer nowadays. You use poppers to goon, then you take some Adderall and hunker down for the big test on Friday, and you’re using the same screen for both tasks. I’ll tell you guys a secret: a long time ago, in another life really, I went to graduate school. It’s shameful, I know. But there’s a point to why I’m bringing it up. When I was there, it occurred to me that just about every other student in my department was on some sort of prescribed medication, and many would use drugs that weren’t prescribed to them (such as legalized amphetamines) to write their seminar papers or get through their readings for the comprehensive exams. I was one of just two people I knew who did not partake in any of this (I just used illegal drugs occasionally for fun, like a reasonable person).
Not to go too far off track, but I’ve since become convinced that drugs have played a rather significant role in the gross expansion of far-left ideology or “wokeness” since the early 2010s, since their lingering effects would seem to prove emotionally destabilizing for most of my colleagues, and such ideological fervor is nothing without a wounded psyche to assist its progress. But whatever the case, the reason all this is significant is that drugs are now the way people cope with the internet era, a time in which each individual is flooded with a deluge of information on a daily basis. A drug alters the impact of a physical medium like the computer… enough to where the use of a computer on one drug makes it an entirely different medium from what it would be on a different drug.
It seems quite the pity that we’re reduced to using such a degenerate method of optimizing our media usage when greater minds from the distant past have found more disciplined techniques, waiting to be rediscovered.
After all: even though a medium “massages” its audience into a certain way of thinking, there are always ways to massage the medium.