Then follows the list of roots (dhâtu) and the three appendices (khila), consisting again of 1000 _s_lokas. Boys begin the three appendices when they are ten years old, and finish them in three years.
When they have reached the age of fifteen, they begin to study a commentary on the grammar (Sûtra), and spend five years on learning it. And here I-tsing gives the following advice to his countrymen, many of whom came to India to learn Sanskrit, but seem to have learned it very imperfectly. "If men of China," he writes, "go to India, wishing to study there, they should first of all learn these grammatical works, and then only other subjects; if not, they will merely waste their labor. These works should be learned by heart. But this is suited for men of high quality only.... They should study hard day and night, without letting a moment pass for idle repose. They should be like Confucius, through whose hard study the binding of his Yih-king was three times cut asunder, being worn away; and like Sui-shih, who used to read a book repeatedly one hundred times." Then follows a remark, more intelligible in Chinese than in English: "The hairs of a bull are counted by thousands, the horn of a unicorn is only one."
I-tsing then speaks of the high degree of perfection to which the memory of these students attained, both among Buddhists and heretics. "Such men," he says, "could commit to memory the contents of two volumes, learning them only once."
And then turning to the _heretics_, or what we should call the orthodox Brahmans, he says: "The Brâhma_n_as are regarded throughout the five divisions of India as the most respectable. They do not walk with the other three castes, and other mixed classes of people are still further dissociated from them. They revere their Scriptures, the four Vedas, containing about 100,000 verses.... The Vedas are handed down from mouth to mouth, not written on paper. There are in every generation some intelligent Brâhmans who can recite those 100,000 verses.... I myself saw such men."
Here then we have an eye-witness who, in the seventh century after Christ, visited India, learned Sanskrit, and spent about twenty years in different monasteries--a man who had no theories of his own about oral tradition, but who, on the contrary, as coming from China, was quite familiar with the idea of a written, nay, of a printed literature: and yet what does he say? "The Vedas are not written on paper, but handed down from mouth to mouth."