ORAL TRADITION
Dr. Yerneni VenkateswaraRao
Retd Principal
Akkineni Nageswara Rao College ,
GUDIVADA
“The soul of a
society resides in its oral tradition”, they say. Story-telling, with its
natural ease and its capacity to convey several meanings simultaneously, forms
the bedrock of such a tradition. Though with the march of time and movement of
people stories undergo some inevitable changes, yet they manage to retain their
vital spark and essential core intact. Of the different forms of verbal
communication and oral arts, story- telling is the best in several respects. By
telling/narrating stories, one can instantly connect and create a bond with his
audience.
No wonder story-telling has been a long
established tradition with us in India; saints and sages routinely used it to
instil ethical values, spiritual insights and universal verities along with
worldly wisdom into eager minds, especially the young ones, and to effectively
get across their timeless messages on righteousness and virtue and the right
code of conduct.
Great teachers like the Upanishadic seers,
the Buddha, Jesus Christ and Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa took recourse to tales, anecdotes and parables because, for one
thing , everyone loves to listen to a story and for another, tales straight
forward as well as allegorical, tell and instruct through entertainment while
parables and anecdotes, the former being easy on the ear and multidimensional
in their penetration, and the latter being all too human in scope and
captivating by nature, convey recondite scriptural tenets abstruse truths and
profound verities in a delectable form and arresting fashion.
“Stories provide others with the benefit of
shared experiences an allow them to easily relate to fact, context and emotion
and to bring their own interpretations to what they hear (or read). Meaning
happens from interaction, not from blind passive reception”, as Michael Lussack
and John Roose so rightly wrote.
The language of Vedantic texts like the
Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads like that of literary classics, has such a
density and depth as to require a person of spiritual maturity and intuitional
insight to absorb their full meaning and purport. In fact, in such works, whose
purpose is to instruct and elevate, the truth lies hidden well beyond the
intellectual reach of the average mind and needs to be annotated. And
therefore, to expound on them with a view to convey the messages and truths so
gleaned to the average readers of these texts with their limited power of
discrimination, teachers need newer and easier methods /modes to facilitate
explanation and comprehension, and what fits the bill better than
story-telling, for stories, tales and parables, although unreal are readily
understood by all owing to their easy ‘relatability’ to the listener’s own life
and experience. Like a picture, they make immediate sense to a layman as well
as an intellectual. They ignite the thought, rouse the feelings, awaken the
sensibilities, help one to delve into the content, relate to context, grasp the
lesson/message and perhaps take a stand too. Equally valuable and effective, if
not more, are anecdotes in inspiring the listeners by infusing confidence in
them that they too could own and live
some of the values and principles highlighted by them, they being the accounts
of real life incidents and events .
The humour-laced tales and parables told by
Ramakrishna, the story teller par excellence and his homely illustrations are
elucidations of the eternal truths of the Upanishads of a highly esoteric
nature which do not make for easy interpretation, and his won spiritual experiences
and insights of an equally esoteric and profound nature, too deep for ready
comprehension by the ordinary devotees, the theme being always the same—how to
attain God—how “to strive ,to seek, to find and not to yield”.
Story-telling electrifies the atmosphere ,
enlivens the audience instantly and rivets their attention as if by magic. That
is why all experienced and enlightened teachers fall back on this time-honoured
and hoary practice every so often. Even today for enlivening their classrooms
and instructing their students on matters of sublime nature involving logical
subtleties and semantic nuances with implied significance and import, too fine
to comprehend ordinarily, and too complex to be unravelled by the average
student.
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