On the Vedas, their memorization, and the utility thereof

On the 30th of November 2025, a 19 year old boy Devavrat Rekhe completed a danda-krama parayanam of the Shukla Yajurveda. It took him 50 days (starting from October 2, 2025) chanting for about 12 hours a day. The text being recited is considered to be hard in itself, and the specific pattern of recitation, the danda-krama, supposedly makes it even harder. A great achievement for a young boy, and for that he earned praise for all over the country, including the Prime Minister.

Vedamurti Devavrat Mahesh Rekhe

It had already been two days since he completed is parayanam when the mainstream news picked it up which is when I got to know about it. It's been two days since, and I've been thinking about the utility of this. I don't want to sound contrarian just for the sake of it, or belittle the achievement of this young boy. If the articles I read are to be believed, and I do believe them, this is a great achievement, unparalleled in the last couple of centuries. However, I must express what I feel...

Starting from the initial assumption of the Vedic people that the Vedic corpus was indeed holy and had the answers to all of mankind's questions, it of course makes sense to soak oneself completely wet with the knowledge contained therein. The corpus itself being large, it's not possible for every man to know it so thoroughly in its entirety to an extent that for any question that life throws at a person, he may both find and quote the right passage(s) from the text with 100% accuracy. This is just too much work for every brain in a society, considering that some of them are also tasked with other activities necessary for being alive - hunting, farming, caring for the young, milking cows, making clay pots, etc. It's like asking for each and every house in your city to have a library room. Not all houses are large enough, and not all houses are/should be built for that purpose.

Society optimizes for this problem by selecting a few brains already inclined to and also capable of bearing such a burden. These brains, society demands, should spend a major part of their lives stressing themselves in the tasks concerning memorizing, analyzing, propagating these texts, all for the greater good of the society. Other members of the society can spend their lives pursuing other goals, and can query these texts through these people as and when required. 

The problem the Vedic societies had, 2000+ years ago, was that preserving and propagating these texts is particularly challenging. They had primitive paper, or other writing media, but they don't last in Indian weather. It breaks, rots, catches termites, burns, the ink fades away. In some cases, the paper might even get stolen! One may think, then just get a stronger paper, or...even indestructible paper - stone. But stone has its own problems. Though there's practically infinite amount of stone available (just like tree bark to make paper), not all of it is available in flat writable (rather engravable) surfaces. If flat, it may not be large enough. If flat and large enough, it may not be soft enough. Engraving even small sentences is hard, let alone volumes of text. Many many problems...

No media is perfect. Preservation of the texts is still challenging. They can't not store the texts somewhere. The best storage media they could get their hands on? The human brain. Vedic Brahmins spent hours on end memorizing these texts with utmost fidelity and then passing them on to future generations of Vedic Brahmins. They used various memorization techniques like chanting it out loud, group recitations, memorizing the text in different recitations patterns (kramas, like 1-121-12321-..., or 12-23-34-..., etc.), being able to recite from any gives starting point, reciting in both forward and backward direction, etc. All of these aided with lots and lots of practice every day resulted in the texts being so in-grained in the minds of young Brahmins that they would be able to recall them at will. Every now and then, a wiser and even more studious Brahmin would move past mere memorization and move on to (or even parallelly pursue) actually studying the texts, interpreting them if necessary, offering commentary, holding lectures, etc. Such supremely learned Brahmins would eventually attain important positions in society for being the treasures of this holy knowledge, while a vast majority of the common Brahmins would, as far as these texts are concerned, act as mere storage and recall media, making ends meet by offering Vedic services to the commoners.

I may not have elaborated a lot on the specifics of the memorization techniques in the previous paragraphs, but I hope it was enough to establish the point of how important the Vedic recitation and memorization techniques were in making sure that we, today, get a near perfect "tape recording from the Bronze age." But, at this junction, I would like to remind everyone, that the memorization was(/is) just a tool. A tool whose utility lies in understanding the specific problems that the Vedic people faced with respect to the preservation of these texts. Had they not had problems with recording the text in some other (more permanent) media, they would've never resorted to memorization or the complex techniques built for the same. Therein lies the crux of this article.

Memorization is a tool. The different kramas developed for the same are also tools. One may become expert at wielding a tool, just like one may become expert at performing tricks with a table tennis racket and a ball. But that does not make one an excellent Vedic scholar, or an excellent table tennis player. My contention with the current state of Vedic studies is that they haven't kept up with the times and have rather spent something more valuable than gold, their attention, on something secondary. While not taking anything away from the feats of the young boy, I still think that 100% memorization and parayanam (recitation) of the Vedas is still secondary to activities like offering commentary on Vedic texts, tracing their origins, finding parallels in other dharmashastras, maybe other religious texts, etc. which are much much more important. I would even go so far as to say (without giving in to my professional biases) that digitizing (including but not limited to scanning a manuscript into PDF) is a much more worthwhile effort than spending years on rote memorization. We have cracked media storage, we should move on to other much more important things...