Why the Brahmins Didn't Want Writing

     "And when you have seen, heard, perceived, and known the Self you will know all things," the wise man Yajnavalkya once told his wife, Maitreyi.

Yajnavalkya, spoken of in the Upanishads

      Before we go into the reasons for this particular religious class, as opposed to those throughout history like the priest of the 1500's who have hoarded their knowledge of writing, we should probably talk about why the Aryans started schools in the first place.  The Aryans, whose religion we find out about through the Rigveda, believed that in order to escape a never-ending cycle of birth and death, otherwise known as transmigration, one needed to become a part of the Whole, to merge one's soul with Brahman, or the universe.   In order to do this, one needed to know.  The Vedas, an Aryan religious text, comes from the root word vid, which means "to know."

The Vedas, an Aryan religious tex

      This desire for liberation from a continuous death was the beginning of the Vedic schools, where students would spend with a guru, their teacher, to learn.  To escape transmigration meant to gain knowledge, a process that began by sravana (listening to the words of one's teacher), manana (reflecting on the words), and nididhyasana (meditating and realizing the truth), and later the schooling that took place based on the Upanishads.  Being able to talk to one's guru was incredibly important; the reflection that comes of hearing an idea and reflecting upon it was essential for reaching their final rest as a part of the universe.

     As the author of The History of Education in Ancient India, which is the book I'm referencing for this post, Doctor Suresh Ghosh, explains, "...we can argue that the oldest religious scripture [the Rigveda] has given us the oldest education system in the world" (8).  The Rigveda is considered the oldest religious text in the world, created over 1500-1000BC, and has over one thousand hymns used in the sacrifices necessary to appease the gods and goddesses of what later became the Hindu religion, all remembered orally.

    After a time, the Brahmins who taught in the schools stopped searching for new knowledge, as the Rigveda suggested, and instead began compiling past scriptures and commenting on them (11).  It was interesting to hear what Professor Burton had to say in class about writing enabling people of many cultures to comment on, to build from, and not just to memorize information because Doctor Ghosh explains that this was a period of preservation and not exploration for the Brahmins.  They were instead concerned about keeping the knowledge they already had in tact.  In addition, the Brahmins wouldn't allow the Vedas to be written down!! (The exclamation points may not have seemed entirely necessary here, but this is a post about the shift from an oral tradition to a literate tradition, so it's pretty significant that Brahmins believed recording scripture was sacrilegious.  End of side note).

A reed pen, a common writing tool

    It wasn't until 400AD that the Brahmins changed their minds and religious texts were finally written down to help in preservation.  When this movement first began, one man, Kumarila Bhatta, commented that "that knowledge of the truth is worthless which has been acquired from the Veda... if it has been learnt from writing."  This is a pretty profound statement if you think about how the students in Vedic schools had dedicated their whole lives to studying the Vedas, and just by that interaction between student and teacher being taken away, the power of it was entirely negated.  

Talipot palm leaves

    Even so, it's interesting to see that we do have records from times afterward, which may have been a result of the influence of Buddhist schools where everyone, and not just the priestly and kingly classes, could come to learn.  Knowledge there was more easily accessible for the common man, during a time when the working class was not even allowed to study the Vedas.  There were young boys were taught writing, or lipi, using a reed pen and charcoal-made or lampblack ink on talipot palm leaves since 400BC, the age of Sutra.  The books that existed were compilations of these sheets, strung together, and sometimes bounded with decorated wooden covers (139-140).  

A depiction of the process of transmigration

    So, we know that the literate tradition of the Aryans in the Indus River valley started off pretty rocky; the most powerful class, the Brahmins, did not want holy scripture to be written down.  It may have been to keep power in their own hands; the Brahmins were the only ones who could perform the necessary rituals to keep the world from chaos, and the sacrifices required after a birth or death, so they lived pretty well.  It could have been to make sure the scripture was not available to the Sudras.  In either case, writing was not a skill a Brahmin would condone during the time of the study of the Vedas.