Chicken or egg?

The Chinese for the verb “to memorise” is 背 bèi, which is “back” as a noun.  In ancient China, when a child (practically always a boy) started his education, the tutor would hand him the Four Books and the Five Classics (四书五经 sì shū wǔ jīng), the standard foundation set on which to start off one’s education.  The pupil would go away and memorise the nine tomes, without understanding a single word.  He would go back to the tutor and, turning his back to the books, would start his recitation.  If he couldn’t remember a section or a line or even a word, he would be sent off, and return later, with this process repeating itself until he was word perfect.  Then, the tutor would declare him ready to start his lesson proper, and he would sit down.  The tutor would then be able to pluck anything out of the nine tomes, e.g., “In Mencius, Chapter xx, when Mencius said yy to the king…”, the pupil should be able to call up the cited section as the tutor analysed the meaning behind the words.  That was the reason for the pupil to be word perfect.

In the 50-episode Korean drama, set in the 1400s to 1500s, that I’ve been watching on DVD, there is a scene where the woman on the exile island, who was a brilliant healer, handed the heroine a huge pile of medical texts and asked her to go and memorise them.  The heroine said, “What?!  Memorise all this?!?”  The miracle worker said, “Yes.”  The heroine said, “Oh well, I can ask you about anything I don’t understand.”  The miracle worker said, “No, you will automatically understand once you have memorised it all.”

So, chicken or egg?  Do you understand the meaning behind the text once you know the wording of the text, or do you remember the wording once you start to understand the meaning?