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Committing AshTAdhyAyi to Memory

19 posts by 13 authors
Raama

6/26/12

Dear Members,
I am not writing this mail to boast about myself but to have a healthy discussion to see if like minded people have
some information to share on this topic. Here is my personal experience In the recent past I have learned Purusha sukta, Sri Sukta, Bhoo Sutka, Durga sukta and sandhyavandanam over
skype. I did not have any prior knowledge of verses of the above mentioned text. The class was once a week on
weekends (for about 45 mins to 1 hr).
Through out the teaching - my teacher would recite once and I had to correctly repeat it twice after him, if I make a
mistake then I have to repeat it 4 times or until I read it correctly two consecutive times whichever is higher. For first 3
classes he did not allow me to read through text, he used to say "just listen to me and repeat after me."
He broke all the big samasas / sentences to smaller manageable parts and once we finish a shloka like that then he
would take up quarter verses and then half verses and then full verses. Once we reached to full verses level, take up
sets of 5 verses.
I recited these verses by looking at the text, after doing this for couple of times, he made me recite the verses without
looking at the text. He would fine tune the accents and this method did wonders. Few sessions like that and I could
recite these text well in meter with proper accents and without a book.
I tried to apply same methodology to AshTAdhyAyi learning. So far I am not disappointed with the results.
I managed to add gaps in the AshTAdhyAyi Audio thats available on skydrive created by Sai Susarla & team and split
it into parts of 20 sutras. The gap is enough to repeat the sutra two times. After 20 sutras, in the end it includes the
first word of next set of 20 sutras as a memory aid to next set. DO NOT go to next set until you memorized the

04/11/14 11:12 PM