IB World Religions 4.3.2. Shruti and Smriti: Composition, Collation and Development Notes

4.3.2. Shruti and Smriti: Composition, Collation and Development

Shruti and smriti

1. Hindus sort their scriptures into two classes by how each is held to have arrived, rather than by subject matter or by age.
2. Shruti (that which is heard) covers texts the tradition holds were perceived by rishis rather than composed. The Vedas and the Upanishads make up its whole content.
3. Smriti (that which is remembered) covers texts of acknowledged human authorship, passed on as recollection of what the tradition teaches. The epics, the Puranas and the dharmashastras belong here.
4. The ranking between them is formal and strict. Where the two conflict, shruti is held to prevail, and a smriti rule that contradicts it is set aside.
5. Rank is not the same as reach. Most Hindus draw their daily practice from smriti and encounter shruti mainly as mantra recited during rites.
6. The boundary has never been perfectly sealed. Devotional communities often treat a favoured smriti text as carrying, in practice, the weight the tradition formally reserves for shruti.

The oral transmission

1. Shruti was carried by memory for many centuries before anyone committed it to writing, and the tradition regarded memory as the proper vehicle for it.
2. Transmission ran through guru-shishya parampara, teacher to pupil, in schools called shakhas (branches), each of which preserved its own recension of a Veda.
3. Vedic Sanskrit is recited with pitch accent, and a syllable spoken on the wrong pitch counts as a different word, so the melody had to be preserved as carefully as the wording.
4. To guard against drift the schools built layered recitation patterns. Padapatha separates every word, kramapatha pairs consecutive words, and ghanapatha braids them forward and backward in a fixed weave.
5. A reciter able to produce a passage in all of these patterns cannot easily drop or reorder a word, because an error in one pattern shows up as a mismatch against the others.
6. The tradition of Vedic chanting was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2003 and inscribed on its intangible heritage list in 2008, and the schools that maintain it still teach entirely by ear.

From recitation to manuscript

1. Writing was available in India long before the Vedas were committed to it, so the delay was a religious choice rather than a technical limit.
2. Verses quoted against the practice put the objection bluntly, listing those who sell the Vedas and those who write them down among wrongdoers.
3. Manuscripts, once they were made, used palm leaf in the south and birch bark in the north. Both perish quickly in the Indian climate, so texts survived by constant recopying as much as by being written at all.
4. Smriti took to writing far more readily. The epics and Puranas circulated in many written recensions and grew in the process rather than being frozen by it.
5. Print changed the situation completely. Max Muller issued the Rig Veda with Sayana's commentary in six volumes between 1849 and 1874, and Indian presses were producing cheap editions of the epics in the same century.
6. Recitation did not end when print arrived. Vedic schools still train reciters by ear, and a printed text is treated as an aid to memory rather than a substitute for it.

Layers within shruti

1. A Veda is not one text but four layers, added over a long period and traditionally recited together as a single body.
2. The samhita is the core collection of hymns, mantras and ritual formulas.
3. The brahmanas are prose expositions of the sacrifice, giving the purpose of each ritual act and the myth that lies behind it.
4. The aranyakas, the forest texts, handle rites regarded as too potent or too esoteric for the village, and they stand between ritual instruction and speculation.
5. The upanishads close the sequence and turn to knowledge, asking what the sacrifice was ultimately for and what the self actually is.
6. The tradition reads the sequence as a movement from karma-kanda, the section on action, to jnana-kanda, the section on knowledge.
7. Hindus disagree about what that movement implies. Mimamsa holds that ritual injunction remains the whole point of the Veda, while Vedanta holds that ritual was preparation for the knowledge the Upanishads supply.

The two epics

1. The best-known smriti works are the two itihasa (thus it was) epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
2. The Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa and is by far the longer. It follows a succession dispute between two branches of one family to a catastrophic war at Kurukshetra.
3. It grew over centuries by absorbing other material, so that legend, law, cosmology and the Bhagavad Gita all sit inside a single narrative frame.
4. The Ramayana is attributed to Valmiki and is tighter in shape. Rama, exiled from Ayodhya, loses his wife Sita to the demon king Ravana and recovers her with the help of Hanuman.
5. Neither epic exists in one authoritative version. Regional retellings are treated as scripture in their own right, and the Awadhi Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas is the Ramayana most north Indian Hindus actually know.
6. Retellings differ in substance and not only in language. Some southern and Jain versions treat Ravana far more sympathetically than Valmiki does, and scholarship on these many Ramayanas has made the variety widely known.
7. Television carried both epics to a mass audience. Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan ran from 1987 to 1988 and Chopra's Mahabharat from 1988 to 1990, and viewers frequently treated the broadcasts as occasions for worship.

Sanatana dharma in story

1. The epics do the work of doctrine through narrative. What the philosophical texts argue, the epics display through characters who succeed or fail at their duty.
2. Hindus commonly call Rama maryada purushottama, the finest of men within the bounds of proper conduct, and he serves as a model of the son, the king and the husband holding to dharma at heavy personal cost.
3. Sita is presented as a model of fidelity and endurance, though Hindus argue among themselves about the episodes in which Rama sends her away, and modern retellings frequently place her at the centre.
4. The Mahabharata works in the opposite direction. It strains dharma until the right course becomes genuinely unclear, and figures as upright as Yudhishthira and Bhishma are shown to be trapped by it.
5. The Puranas extend the same method, telling of Vishnu, Shiva and the Devi in stories that supply festivals with their content and temples with their local charter.
6. This is how smriti sustains sanatana dharma (the eternal teaching) in practice. The stories are performed at festivals, carved on temple walls and told to children, and so they reach Hindus who will never open a shastra.