03-11-2009, 01:54 AM
This is an excerpt from a forthcoming monograph under construction titled TIME AND THE CALENDAR IN INDIA A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE " - a tentative title
Pl. see the remarks on the propensity of the Occidental to ignore or downgrade the indic contribution
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
In order to understand the Indic approach to the challenges faced by the human , one must understand the cosmology and the calendar of the Hindu. The calendar and the cosmos have always played a large part in the consciousness or weltanschuung of the Hindu and he spent a large portion of his observational powers in deciphering the universe around him. In this he was not alone, as we know now that other ancient civilizations, such as the Babylonian, the Egyptian and the Chinese had similar interests and a curiosity about the heavens. But the answers the Indic came up with were quite prescient for his time and the resulting numbers were far more accurate than the European world realized or knew, even millennia after the Indic discovered these periodicities. The extraordinary allergy that the Occidentals, with a few notable exceptions, have exhibited to the serious and scholarly study of the Indic mathematical tradition, and when they have done so, the vehemence with which they have denied the value of these traditions, is astonishing to say the least. In those instances where they recognized their value, they have tried their best to assert that it was plagiarized from the Greeks and later the Babylonians. When such a stance became more and more difficult to sustain, they maintained that it was not autochthonous to the subcontinent but brought in from elsewhere by the largely mythic people called the Aryans. The consistency with which the Occidental denied the Indic contributions is exemplified in the writings of various Indologists such as Whitney , Bentley , Moriz Winternitz Albrecht Weber , W W Rouse Ball, G R Kaye, Thibaut and continues on till today in the works of David Pingree . As we have emphasized, there were exceptions such as Brennand, Playfair, Colebrooke, Sewell, and Bailly.
â
THE RELUCTANCE OF INDOLOGISTS IN THE OCCIDENT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE VEDIC EPISTEME
The resulting illiteracy on the part of the western scholar on matters pertaining to India was lethal to the understanding of their own history and leaves Occidental historians, the task of explaining why there was no progress in Europe between the time of the Greek contribution to the mathematical sciences and the flowering of the renaissance resulting in the Keplerian paradigm shift, a period exceeding 1600 years. We are compelled to remark that the sudden explosion of knowledge that took place during the renaissance, occurred shortly after the Jesuits sent 70 scholars to Malabar in the 1500âs . When it came to reconciling himself with the obvious depth of knowledge of the ancient Indic, the occidental had no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that the Indic had borrowed everything from Greece. But he is more than reluctant to accept that a massive transfer of knowledge took place from India to Europe, even though the evidence is far more compelling. We will remark in passing that there is a palpable difference in the manner in which the Occidental views the transmittal of knowledge, depending on the directon in which the transmittal is alleged to have transpired.
DIFFERING STANDARDS OF CLAIMS FOR TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE
In fact no study of this kind would be complete without a reference to the differing standards by which Occidentalists have concluded whether a particular discipline was imported or exported out of the Occident. We quote C K Raju
âHowever, we have also seen that the standard of evidence is not uniform, but varies with the claim being made. The standard of evidence required for an acceptable claim of transmission of knowledge from East to West, is different from the standards of evidence required for a similar claim of transmission of knowledge from West to East. Thus there is always the possibility that similar things could have been discovered independently, and that western historians are still arguing about this, even in so obvious a case as that of Copernicus. Finally we have seen that this racist double standard of evidence is not an incidental error, but is backed by centuries of racist tradition, religious exhortations by Popes, and by legal interpretations authoritatively handed down by, say the US Supreme Court.â
Priority and the possibility of contact always establish a socially acceptable case for transmission from West to East, but priority and definite contact never seems to establish an acceptable case for transmission from East to West, for there is always the possibility, that similar things could have been discovered independently.
âHence to establish transmission we propose to adopt a legal standard of evidence, good enough to hang a person for murder. Briefly we propose that the case for any must be established on the grounds of
1. Motivation,
2. opportunity,
3. Circumstantial evidence and
4. Documentary evidence.
The importance of epistemological continuity has been repeatedly stressed above; any such claim must also take into account epistemological issuesâ
Examples abound, especially when it comes to areas such as Mathematics, Astronomy and Linguistics and the discovery of the origin of scripts. In particular we cite the instance of David Pingreeâs PhD thesis titled âMaterials for the Transmission of Greek astrology to Indiaâ. Notice he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. That is a given, a hypothesis that need not be proven. This is another example of a circular argument. Assume the answer that there was a transmittal, in the initial hypotheses, merely because there was probable contact however, tenuous that may be, and then claim that it is an incontrovertible fact.
The conventional wisdom in the West was that the Jesuits were sent to convert the Indics to the Christian faith and as a byproduct teach them the finer points of the occidental civilization. In reality it turns out, they were sent to learn a whole host of topics such as navigation, mathematical techniques including trigonometry, and the Indian approach to calendrical astronomy. In short the Jesuits embarked on a systematic study of the Indic episteme, since it was obvious that the Indics had made considerable advances, which the Jesuits were quick to realize were far in advance of their own . We are in the process of chronicling the study of those individuals who in turn studied India or studied subjects in which the Indics had great proficiency, beginning with ancient Babylon to the British, primarily to understand the role that India and the Indic episteme played in the renaissance of Europe. While there is nothing here that can be regarded as being morally reprehensible, one wonders why there was the extreme reluctance to admit that they learned from others too. In this one has to concede that the Arab scholar during the heyday of Islam observed a higher degree of ethics than his brethren in the Occident, because he never exhibited the slightest hesitation in attributing to the Indic the episteme that he had learned from him.
Typical of the stance of the Occidental is the attitude of the late Professor David Pingree who occupied the only faculty position that I am aware of on the History of mathematics in the western world at Brown University. On the one hand, Professor David Pingree, spent most of his entire professional career studying Indian texts and manuscripts. He compiled and catalogued a comprehensive bibliography of all materials available on the computational sciences in India. The work was so voluminous, that the net result was a 4 volume compendium which he appropriately termed the Census of the exact sciences. Yet he kept insisting that India lacked the astronomical tradition necessary for the development of these techniques. To those who defend Prof Pingree, I have a simple question to ask. Why did Prof Pingree spend his precious time cataloging the census of the exact science in India, especially when he was vociferously proclaiming that India did not have an Astronomical tradition? He hints at the answer to this, by saying that historians have had to rely on disparate and often desperate sources to decipher what the Greeks knew. In other words, he makes the assumption that the Greeks had a rich tradition in astronomy despite the paucity of materials attesting to such a tradition, whereas the Indics, who had a voluminous literature on the topic, should be decreed as having no tradition in astronomy. The obvious non-sequitor inherent in such a stance, seems to escape the notice of most people, and even if it does not, the attitude seems to be to let this massive misrepresentation continue as long as it is not challenged It is unfortunate that such blatantly racist views go unchallenged, especially by the people most affected by this massive lie..
We view the study of history and philosophy of science as central to the understanding of any civilization and its ethos. And hence we make no apology for the emphasis on science, and especially on Astronomy in our own studies of the Indic peoples. Such an emphasis has been lacking in the past partly because major advances in the sciences, that have the potential to be of use in the study of history, have occurred only recently in the last 100 years and partly also because it has been difficult to find individuals who have proficiency In more than one discipline, such as Astronomy and Archaeology.
The Ancient Vedics seemed to have an obsession for precision as well as a fascination for large numbers. They also subscribed to the notion that the planet earth and the solar system were of immense antiquity without a beginning, in contrast to the creationist theories propounded by many in the Occident till recently. A combination such as this makes an excellent prerequisite for time keeping and for devising a useful and practical calendar. So, they turned to the sky and began to decipher the meaning behind the various cycles and periodicities that they observed, in order to help them plan their activities, such as the planting of their crops. In general it has to be admitted that the Indic approach to the measurement and calibration of time and the calendar, has been extraordinarily thorough, and if precision were the sole criterion it is obvious they had an inordinate respect for the importance of such precision. Let us see how they went about developing a calendar that would convey a lot of information merely by knowing the day of the month, after constant observation of the sky both during the day and the night over centuries. The result was a highly efficient and accurate calendar. The added bonus of such a system is the usefulness of the recordings of ancient astronomy to decipher the age at which various events took place, and the development of methods now known collectively as Archaeo-astronomy. In this chapter we will give a rather brief introduction to Indic astronomy, and in subsequent chapters we will come back to the historical development of the key ideas behind calendrical astronomy
The basic information the ancients used for purposes of time keeping were the motions of the sun and the moon relative to the earth. So far nothing unusual, as did all the other ancients. The cycles they used including the day, the week, the fortnight, and the month are shown in Table 1.
TABLE 1 CYCLES OF TIME IN ANCIENT INDIA
60 ghatikas (or 30 muhurtas or 8 praharas) in a 24-hour period (ahoratra)
15 tithi in a paksha or a fortnight, 15th is Poornima or amavasya
The Lunar Month (2 pakshas in a month), shukla waxing and krishna waning
The Sidereal Year(Nirayana) , the Tropical Year,the Anomalistic Year
The six seasons of a year (each season comprises 60 days )
60 year Jovian cycle/ 360 year âdivine cycle
2700 year cycle of the Sapta Rishi or the Ursa Major
25,800 year cycle of the asterisms called the Great Year or the precession cycle
432,000 year cycle called a yuga (= duration of Kaliyuga)
4,320,000 year cycle known as the Maha Yuga
Kalpa, the cycle consisting of 4.32*10**9 years
We will give a brief history of Indic astronomy in the next chapter, to put the astronomical discoveries in the proper context within the larger canvas of Indic history. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of occidental versions of the Indic narrative, as exemplified by the writings of David Pingree, India had a very strong and consistent tradition of scholarship in the so called exact sciences of antiquity (as Neugebauer called them) such as astronomy and mathematics. The list of famous astronomers and mathematicians is staggering both in the quantity, and in the quality of the contributions, as well as the time span over which it occurred. We list in Table 15 in the appendix, significant contributers to the episteme. That such a list would include such a large number of individuals who made significant contributions, was certainly a revelation for me.
INDIAN COSMOLOGY AND TIMELINES OF HISTORY
We give a introduction to the Indic concept of Time and the cosmological time frames of the Yugas. There are some who feel that the reference to a Mahayuga going back 4,320,000 years, is without foundation, since we do not have recorded history going back that far and the more appropriate measure to us is a time scale that is consonant with the start of river valley civilizations . There is a suspicion that somewhere along the historical past, there was confusion in the interpretation of the various definitions of the year, which has resulted in such long periods being assigned to the Yugas such as Kaliyuga. We will discuss later the relevance of the divine year which is mentioned as being comprised of 360 tropical years. For example the duration of a Kaliyuga in Divine years is a more manageable 1200 years and the entire Mahayuga is 12000 years which is of the same time scale as the beginning of river valley civilizations, if we assume that there was a confusion regarding the interpretation of the year. We will discuss this later. In my view, it is the attempt of the ancient Indic to describe geologic time scales associated wth the beginning of recorded hstory that causes confusion and has invited the ridicule of some in the occident such as Thomas Babingtin Macaulay and has prompted him to chatracterize the entire literature of India as being worthless. ..
Pl. see the remarks on the propensity of the Occidental to ignore or downgrade the indic contribution
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
In order to understand the Indic approach to the challenges faced by the human , one must understand the cosmology and the calendar of the Hindu. The calendar and the cosmos have always played a large part in the consciousness or weltanschuung of the Hindu and he spent a large portion of his observational powers in deciphering the universe around him. In this he was not alone, as we know now that other ancient civilizations, such as the Babylonian, the Egyptian and the Chinese had similar interests and a curiosity about the heavens. But the answers the Indic came up with were quite prescient for his time and the resulting numbers were far more accurate than the European world realized or knew, even millennia after the Indic discovered these periodicities. The extraordinary allergy that the Occidentals, with a few notable exceptions, have exhibited to the serious and scholarly study of the Indic mathematical tradition, and when they have done so, the vehemence with which they have denied the value of these traditions, is astonishing to say the least. In those instances where they recognized their value, they have tried their best to assert that it was plagiarized from the Greeks and later the Babylonians. When such a stance became more and more difficult to sustain, they maintained that it was not autochthonous to the subcontinent but brought in from elsewhere by the largely mythic people called the Aryans. The consistency with which the Occidental denied the Indic contributions is exemplified in the writings of various Indologists such as Whitney , Bentley , Moriz Winternitz Albrecht Weber , W W Rouse Ball, G R Kaye, Thibaut and continues on till today in the works of David Pingree . As we have emphasized, there were exceptions such as Brennand, Playfair, Colebrooke, Sewell, and Bailly.
â
THE RELUCTANCE OF INDOLOGISTS IN THE OCCIDENT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE VEDIC EPISTEME
The resulting illiteracy on the part of the western scholar on matters pertaining to India was lethal to the understanding of their own history and leaves Occidental historians, the task of explaining why there was no progress in Europe between the time of the Greek contribution to the mathematical sciences and the flowering of the renaissance resulting in the Keplerian paradigm shift, a period exceeding 1600 years. We are compelled to remark that the sudden explosion of knowledge that took place during the renaissance, occurred shortly after the Jesuits sent 70 scholars to Malabar in the 1500âs . When it came to reconciling himself with the obvious depth of knowledge of the ancient Indic, the occidental had no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that the Indic had borrowed everything from Greece. But he is more than reluctant to accept that a massive transfer of knowledge took place from India to Europe, even though the evidence is far more compelling. We will remark in passing that there is a palpable difference in the manner in which the Occidental views the transmittal of knowledge, depending on the directon in which the transmittal is alleged to have transpired.
DIFFERING STANDARDS OF CLAIMS FOR TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE
In fact no study of this kind would be complete without a reference to the differing standards by which Occidentalists have concluded whether a particular discipline was imported or exported out of the Occident. We quote C K Raju
âHowever, we have also seen that the standard of evidence is not uniform, but varies with the claim being made. The standard of evidence required for an acceptable claim of transmission of knowledge from East to West, is different from the standards of evidence required for a similar claim of transmission of knowledge from West to East. Thus there is always the possibility that similar things could have been discovered independently, and that western historians are still arguing about this, even in so obvious a case as that of Copernicus. Finally we have seen that this racist double standard of evidence is not an incidental error, but is backed by centuries of racist tradition, religious exhortations by Popes, and by legal interpretations authoritatively handed down by, say the US Supreme Court.â
Priority and the possibility of contact always establish a socially acceptable case for transmission from West to East, but priority and definite contact never seems to establish an acceptable case for transmission from East to West, for there is always the possibility, that similar things could have been discovered independently.
âHence to establish transmission we propose to adopt a legal standard of evidence, good enough to hang a person for murder. Briefly we propose that the case for any must be established on the grounds of
1. Motivation,
2. opportunity,
3. Circumstantial evidence and
4. Documentary evidence.
The importance of epistemological continuity has been repeatedly stressed above; any such claim must also take into account epistemological issuesâ
Examples abound, especially when it comes to areas such as Mathematics, Astronomy and Linguistics and the discovery of the origin of scripts. In particular we cite the instance of David Pingreeâs PhD thesis titled âMaterials for the Transmission of Greek astrology to Indiaâ. Notice he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. That is a given, a hypothesis that need not be proven. This is another example of a circular argument. Assume the answer that there was a transmittal, in the initial hypotheses, merely because there was probable contact however, tenuous that may be, and then claim that it is an incontrovertible fact.
The conventional wisdom in the West was that the Jesuits were sent to convert the Indics to the Christian faith and as a byproduct teach them the finer points of the occidental civilization. In reality it turns out, they were sent to learn a whole host of topics such as navigation, mathematical techniques including trigonometry, and the Indian approach to calendrical astronomy. In short the Jesuits embarked on a systematic study of the Indic episteme, since it was obvious that the Indics had made considerable advances, which the Jesuits were quick to realize were far in advance of their own . We are in the process of chronicling the study of those individuals who in turn studied India or studied subjects in which the Indics had great proficiency, beginning with ancient Babylon to the British, primarily to understand the role that India and the Indic episteme played in the renaissance of Europe. While there is nothing here that can be regarded as being morally reprehensible, one wonders why there was the extreme reluctance to admit that they learned from others too. In this one has to concede that the Arab scholar during the heyday of Islam observed a higher degree of ethics than his brethren in the Occident, because he never exhibited the slightest hesitation in attributing to the Indic the episteme that he had learned from him.
Typical of the stance of the Occidental is the attitude of the late Professor David Pingree who occupied the only faculty position that I am aware of on the History of mathematics in the western world at Brown University. On the one hand, Professor David Pingree, spent most of his entire professional career studying Indian texts and manuscripts. He compiled and catalogued a comprehensive bibliography of all materials available on the computational sciences in India. The work was so voluminous, that the net result was a 4 volume compendium which he appropriately termed the Census of the exact sciences. Yet he kept insisting that India lacked the astronomical tradition necessary for the development of these techniques. To those who defend Prof Pingree, I have a simple question to ask. Why did Prof Pingree spend his precious time cataloging the census of the exact science in India, especially when he was vociferously proclaiming that India did not have an Astronomical tradition? He hints at the answer to this, by saying that historians have had to rely on disparate and often desperate sources to decipher what the Greeks knew. In other words, he makes the assumption that the Greeks had a rich tradition in astronomy despite the paucity of materials attesting to such a tradition, whereas the Indics, who had a voluminous literature on the topic, should be decreed as having no tradition in astronomy. The obvious non-sequitor inherent in such a stance, seems to escape the notice of most people, and even if it does not, the attitude seems to be to let this massive misrepresentation continue as long as it is not challenged It is unfortunate that such blatantly racist views go unchallenged, especially by the people most affected by this massive lie..
We view the study of history and philosophy of science as central to the understanding of any civilization and its ethos. And hence we make no apology for the emphasis on science, and especially on Astronomy in our own studies of the Indic peoples. Such an emphasis has been lacking in the past partly because major advances in the sciences, that have the potential to be of use in the study of history, have occurred only recently in the last 100 years and partly also because it has been difficult to find individuals who have proficiency In more than one discipline, such as Astronomy and Archaeology.
The Ancient Vedics seemed to have an obsession for precision as well as a fascination for large numbers. They also subscribed to the notion that the planet earth and the solar system were of immense antiquity without a beginning, in contrast to the creationist theories propounded by many in the Occident till recently. A combination such as this makes an excellent prerequisite for time keeping and for devising a useful and practical calendar. So, they turned to the sky and began to decipher the meaning behind the various cycles and periodicities that they observed, in order to help them plan their activities, such as the planting of their crops. In general it has to be admitted that the Indic approach to the measurement and calibration of time and the calendar, has been extraordinarily thorough, and if precision were the sole criterion it is obvious they had an inordinate respect for the importance of such precision. Let us see how they went about developing a calendar that would convey a lot of information merely by knowing the day of the month, after constant observation of the sky both during the day and the night over centuries. The result was a highly efficient and accurate calendar. The added bonus of such a system is the usefulness of the recordings of ancient astronomy to decipher the age at which various events took place, and the development of methods now known collectively as Archaeo-astronomy. In this chapter we will give a rather brief introduction to Indic astronomy, and in subsequent chapters we will come back to the historical development of the key ideas behind calendrical astronomy
The basic information the ancients used for purposes of time keeping were the motions of the sun and the moon relative to the earth. So far nothing unusual, as did all the other ancients. The cycles they used including the day, the week, the fortnight, and the month are shown in Table 1.
TABLE 1 CYCLES OF TIME IN ANCIENT INDIA
60 ghatikas (or 30 muhurtas or 8 praharas) in a 24-hour period (ahoratra)
15 tithi in a paksha or a fortnight, 15th is Poornima or amavasya
The Lunar Month (2 pakshas in a month), shukla waxing and krishna waning
The Sidereal Year(Nirayana) , the Tropical Year,the Anomalistic Year
The six seasons of a year (each season comprises 60 days )
60 year Jovian cycle/ 360 year âdivine cycle
2700 year cycle of the Sapta Rishi or the Ursa Major
25,800 year cycle of the asterisms called the Great Year or the precession cycle
432,000 year cycle called a yuga (= duration of Kaliyuga)
4,320,000 year cycle known as the Maha Yuga
Kalpa, the cycle consisting of 4.32*10**9 years
We will give a brief history of Indic astronomy in the next chapter, to put the astronomical discoveries in the proper context within the larger canvas of Indic history. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of occidental versions of the Indic narrative, as exemplified by the writings of David Pingree, India had a very strong and consistent tradition of scholarship in the so called exact sciences of antiquity (as Neugebauer called them) such as astronomy and mathematics. The list of famous astronomers and mathematicians is staggering both in the quantity, and in the quality of the contributions, as well as the time span over which it occurred. We list in Table 15 in the appendix, significant contributers to the episteme. That such a list would include such a large number of individuals who made significant contributions, was certainly a revelation for me.
INDIAN COSMOLOGY AND TIMELINES OF HISTORY
We give a introduction to the Indic concept of Time and the cosmological time frames of the Yugas. There are some who feel that the reference to a Mahayuga going back 4,320,000 years, is without foundation, since we do not have recorded history going back that far and the more appropriate measure to us is a time scale that is consonant with the start of river valley civilizations . There is a suspicion that somewhere along the historical past, there was confusion in the interpretation of the various definitions of the year, which has resulted in such long periods being assigned to the Yugas such as Kaliyuga. We will discuss later the relevance of the divine year which is mentioned as being comprised of 360 tropical years. For example the duration of a Kaliyuga in Divine years is a more manageable 1200 years and the entire Mahayuga is 12000 years which is of the same time scale as the beginning of river valley civilizations, if we assume that there was a confusion regarding the interpretation of the year. We will discuss this later. In my view, it is the attempt of the ancient Indic to describe geologic time scales associated wth the beginning of recorded hstory that causes confusion and has invited the ridicule of some in the occident such as Thomas Babingtin Macaulay and has prompted him to chatracterize the entire literature of India as being worthless. ..