Vijay Srinath Kanchi
Moolji Jaitha Autonomous College
Knowledge Resource Center, Jalgaon, India
email: drvskanchi@mail.com

doi: 10.19090/cit.2023.43.75-85
No. 43 (November 2023), p. 75-85

Knowledge Preservation: Need for a Multi-pronged Approach
– Lessons from Ancient Indians

Summary

The leaps and bounds with which the knowledge domain of our modern civilization is growing pose a formidable challenge as to how this wealth of knowledge is to be preserved for posterity. Are we sufficiently prepared should there be any cataclysm of gigantic proportions or a major catastrophe such as a nuclear war? What if the whole world is thrown awry and crippled by such major events? How do we ensure that future generations of humans who would have inherited a substantially destroyed world can rebuild it back to its glory? How to safely supply the wealth of knowledge we amassed from modern advancements in science and technology to those generations who have to rebuild everything from scratch? This paper examines the techniques espoused by our wise ancient Indian sages to transmit knowledge to posterity across many millennia, the wisdom and philosophy behind such adopted measures and whether there are lessons for us to learn from them.

Keywords:

knowledge preservation, knowledge transmission, stone carvings, symbolism, story format, reliance on memory, oral transmission

Submitted: 20th April 2023
Correction to the manuscript: 2nd October 2023
Accepted for publication: 12th October 2023

Knowledge Preservation: Need for a Multi-pronged Approach – Lessons from Ancient Indians by Vijay Srinath Kanchi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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