In classical and especially medieval India books had a high circulation among cultured people. Nevertheless, Brahmanical culture regarded writing as a contemptible activity. In fact, a written text was understood as the defective realization of a perfect sonic essence. In the case of a revealed text, the written realization relied directly on the sonic essence. In the case of a text of human origin, the relation with the sonic essence was only indirect. In both cases that essence remained so crucial that the historical circumstances in which the text had been written down, and the fact itself that it was written down, were always thought of as insignificant. This ideology could have been developed by Brahmanism as a factor of self-identification in opposition to those flourishing cultures that assigned enormous significance to books.