INDIA’S
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN CIVILIZATION
By P. Priyadarshi
The
story of origin of knowledge in India and its dispersal to the west leading to
development of modern western civilization.
Although
Modern Civilization took its shape in the West, its roots are in India and to
some extent in China. Modern Civilization is definitely not a product of
Judo-Christian tradition but rather it is an anti-thesis of that tradition. In
fact, modern philosophy and science are a delayed fruition of the tree that was
ancient India. On the other hand, Semitic religions were quite fixed in their
ideas about God, heaven and divine will and freethinking against these concepts
was not possible. Science had a very poor chance to grow in those societies.
India, China and Egypt were the most developed civilizations in second
millennium BC. Ancient Greek civilization developed from sixth century BC and
was brought to an end, first by Roman invasions and later by Christianity.
Ancient Egypt was brought to an end initially by Christian efforts and later by
Muslim conquest.
We
will briefly review how knowledge grew and developed in the world.
1.
Dark Ages in Europe
Up
to the sixteenth century, Europe was in the Dark Age.
Historians call this period as the Dark Age because there was no
knowledge like mathematics, science, medicine etc. in Europe. Long back, there
was a brief period of enlightenment in a limited part of Europe, i.e. Greece
from sixth century BC for a few centuries by import of knowledge from India.
This period is called the first awakening of Europe and the reappearance of
knowledge in the 16th century is called the Renaissance (meaning rebirth or
re-awakening). We will briefly review how science came to Greece from the East
for the first time, then how it was destroyed and scholars killed by the Romans,
and then by the Christians and finally Muslim invaders. We will also see how
knowledge survived outside Europe during the Dark Ages and finally reached the
West to propel Europe into a renaissance.
During
the dark ages, people of Europe used the cumbersome Roman numerals, and even the
so-called mathematicians would calculate sums by counting on the fingers!
Decimals were not known and real calculation was not possible with that type of
number system. Science was inevitably bound not to grow. Universities were
basically centers of copying religious texts by hand in beautiful letters.
Medicine meant blessings of priests. Value of hygiene was unknown and Europe was
a permanent home of diseases.
Even
calculation of calendar was difficult for them and dates were not able to cope
with the sun. Religion was the real ruler. Verdict of the priests would be the
final words in any matter. The man was surrounded by ghosts, witches and bad
spirits. Churches were permanently busy finding out the witches and sorcerers
and killing them: the only way known to them for helping the ailing humanity.
National tragedies and epidemics were caused by the non-believer, who was a
representative of the devil, and an enemy of the society. Prayer remained the
only medicine in most of the hospitals. The priests were the doctors and nuns
were the nurses, without any education and training in health and medicine
(modern doctors derive their designation of ‘doctor’ from the priests,
doctor being the highest degree of Christian theology). They would go to the
beds everyday, in the hospitals, and pray for each of the admitted patients.
Hosp itals were essentially an attachment to the churches. And in fact, during
the Dark Ages, it was the responsibility of the theologians to treat the
patients. But it was not so, long long back, before the advent of Christianity,
when the southeastern corner of Europe was vibrating with knowledge, when Greece
was a centre of learning. Turkey was not inhabited by the Turks then and it was
called Asia Minor. Its coastal parts were inhabited by the Greeks and the
central parts were inhabited by various tribes of Indo-Iranian origin.
2.
Indian influence on the West in the early BC period
India
has been the birthplace of science over ages. Takshashila University (in
Pakistan now) was a great centre of learning where students from Iran and
further west came to study. In the first millennium BC, Iran was highly Indianized and
could be considered an expansion of Indian culture and civilization. At the
western fringe of it was Asia Minor, modern Turkey, which was a place of
interaction between Greeks and Iranians. In the 6th century BC, Iran expanded
its boarders to include Assyria, Babylon, whole of Asia Minor and major parts of
Greece. Egypt also fell to Iran soon after. Thus while Iran was engaged in
expansion at its western boarders, its eastern part was in peace, continuously
receiving Indian knowledge and religion. Zoroaster, fifth century BC, lived in
the eastern reaches of Persia, not far from India, and his belief to wage war on
evil, and the idea of con stant struggle between good and bad, light and
darkness, is believed by the scholars of history of theology, to be Indian (Upanishadic)
in origin. Monotheism had reached a full development in the Upanishad literature
much earlier in India, from which Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and also Akhenaton of
Egypt (1350 BC) had borrowed it. Upanishadic knowledge did not stay long in
Egypt and faded away soon after the death of its only patron Akhenatan.
Mithraism was another branch of Vedic religion, which spread widely over
Iran, Europe and Egypt. Mithra is a Vedic God (the Sun-God). Mithras celebrated
the birthday of God (Sun) on the 25th December, which became adapted by the
Christians as the date of birth of God (Jesus). These religions of Indian origin
in Middle East, introduced the principle of righteousness and monotheism to
Judaism and Christianity and thereby to Islam later. Hence ethical monotheism,
the backbone of Judaism, Christianit y and Islam found its origin in Hinduism.
Apart
from these, Indian wandering monks traveled the breadth and length of this whole
area. From Western sources we know that in the third century BC, a big Indian
community lived at Alexandria in Egypt with their Vedic sannyasins as well as
Buddhist bhikshukas. Indian sea- traders also dominated the sea -trade up to the
period of rise of Islam. It was under this background that the Indian religions,
philosophies and science travelled to the West to enlighten it in the ancient
times. Indians developed mathematical formulae called ‘Sulvasutra’ in
1500 BC. Geometry developed because of its need in constructing specially
designed Yajna Kundas, and also because accurate measurement of agricultural
land was needed to fix the farm boundaries. Trigonometry was invented to study
the locations and the movements of the stars, which was vital for navigation in
sea, during sea trade. Hypothesis of atom was made in the field of physics,
which we find mentioned in the Upanishad literature. Bacteria were conceived
(which have been discussed in the Jain literature in detail) as early as the 6th
century BC. Physicians and surgeons like Jivaka were experimenting even
craniotomy (operation on the brain) in the 6th century BC.
Human
psychology was studied in detail and considered an essential part of academic
curriculum (q.v. ‘Eastern Psychology’ in ‘The Theories of Personality’
by Hall and Lindsey). There was an all round development in all spheres of
learning.
3.
Why Indian religions were pro-science - On the other hand, Jewish religion was
based on the faith that only their God is real and all others false. Hence it
was not only belief in one God but it was also a belief in correctness of only
one religion. It was a belief in correctness of only one view of reality.
Christians also adopted the same attitude and Islam also asserted the same. The
words of the God as revealed to the Prophet are final and anything contradicting
them is wrong and has to be destroyed. This gave the concept of heresy. Fighting
the followers of other religions/nonbelievers (jihad/crusade) was considered the
sacred duty of every truly religious person in these traditions.
4.
Dawn of knowledge in the west with Pythagorus turning Hindu
History
of knowledge in Europe starts with Pythagoras. Pythagoras, in the 6th century BC
was the first European (Greek) who brought Indian knowledge and mathematics to
Greece in an organized way. He was the first European to convert completely to
Hinduism also. Pythagoras was born around 560 BC; on Samos an island not far
from the coast of the Asia Minor. His mother was probably a native of Samos but
his father was probably a Phoenician.
His life history was recorded from oral traditions a couple of centuries
after his death, and even that information has survived only in fragments. (In fact, the Ancient Greek civilization was not really
European. The first Greek city, Miletus was established around 1100 BC in Asia
Minor. Samos, an island adjoining Asia Minor was inhabited in 1000 BC. From
Milesia, Greeks spread to establish colonies round the Black Sea founding the
cities of Sinope, Trapezus and Olbia etc. They also crossed the Aegean Sea to
establish colonies in Macedonia and then south of that to the land what is
called Greece today. Cyrenaica (Cyrene) and Carthage were other colonies of
these people, which was at the coastal Libya in Africa. The famous Troy (of
Helen fame) was in the Asia Minor. These colonies were not united into a nation
state but were autonomous, and bound to the metropolis< metro, mother; polis,
city; in Sanskrit matripuri>. Hence,
Greek culture, far from being European, was act ually Asian.).
At
that time, Greeks did not have mathematics or sciences. Education was limited to
music and gymnastics. After studying the very best available in his country
(music and gymnastics), Pythagoras set out for more. He went to Egypt, which had
already received Indian Geometry through its contact with Indians as well as
with Indo-Iranians and had at that time, scholars teaching geometry and a bit of
astrology. During his stay in Egypt, Egypt was invaded by Iran and he was
brought to Iran as a captive, where he stayed at Babylon and other cities.
Babylon was no more a Semitic city by that time, and it had been thoroughly
Indo-Iranized in language, religion and knowledge at least a century earlier,
when the Medes and the Persians thoroughly overran the country of Babylon, and
it was now a part of Persian Empire and culturally a part of Indo-Iran. It is
probable that Pythagoras went to the Punjab and thence to the Himalayas a s
well. It thoroughly changed his life style and thinking. He permanently rejected
the long Greek robes, and adopted trousers, turning away from Ionian culture and
identifying himself strongly with the East. Before Pythagoras, trousers were not
known to Europe. Woolen trousers were worn by Indians living at high altitudes
in the Himalayas, like people of Nepal, Laddakh, Tibet, and Kashmir etc.
(The statue of Indian king Kanishka, found in Afghanistan, is wearing a
long double-breasted coat and trousers). Variants of trousers like pajamas and
shalwar were worn in the northern plains of Indo-Iran. The costume, which
Pythagoras introduced into the Europe, was going to become the ethnic costume of
the West!! (Wertheim, Pythagoras’s Trousers)
Having
lived twenty years in the east, he returned to Greece, and settled in Croton, a
Greek-speaking town of South Italy. He formed an order of ascetics devoted to
develop a sense of community with the help of religious injunctions and
instructions. This was aimed to give the members a real insight into the
concordant nature of universe. He preached that the world, like human society,
was held together by the orderly arrangement of its parts, and it then became
their clear duty to cultivate order in their own lives. It is the order in any
system, which sustains it. He was describing the concept of Dharma, which
means the order, which sustains the system. He was now acting as an
ambassador of Hinduism to the West. Pythagoreans believed in transmigration of
life through different life forms. His contemporary poet Xenophanes writes:
Pythagoras was once passing by when a man was beating a dog .He took pity on the
animal and said, Stop it; Indeed it is the soul of a friend of mine; I
recognized it when I heard its voice. Pythagoras was even able to recall the
details of his own previous incarnations. Pythagoras preached the essential
unity and kinship of all forms of life, which is the fundamental principle of
Hinduism (and also of other later Indian religions). He preached non-violence
and banned killing and eating animals in his order of ascetics. He was a firm
believer in Karmic law and preached immortality of existence. The human body is
temporary; therefore one must purify the soul by abstaining from bodily
pleasure. By these means soul would ultimately win release from the wheel of
becoming and realize its true divine status. In other words, he was preaching
karma, samsara and moksha. Pythagoreans believed that anyone who downgraded his
life by immoral and impure acts would be born as animal in his next life. A
particular type of sayings, he named akousmata (things heard) which were
probably Greek translation of the shruti (Sanskrit, Things heard). In his
brotherhood, members were of two kinds. Acousmatics would visit him and seek
guidance on how to lead a simple, non-violent and virtuous way of life. Others
called Mathematikoi lived inside the math (monastery, mutt) and studied the
nature of reality more deeply. From mathematik is derived the word mathematics.
Pythagoreans studied and further developed the science of mathematics and
philosophy, which was brought to them from Indo-Iran by their great Guru. The
chain reaction started by Pythagoras resulted in a boom of scholarship in Greece
and finally we find authorities like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. The
background provided by the Pythagoreans provided sound basis of logic to enable
these thinkers to arrive at sound conclusions. During this whole period transfer
of knowledge from India to Greece was never interrupted. This may be assumed
from the fact that whatever theory was given in India e.g. atomic theory, theory
of micro-organism, theory of non-dualism, Brahman, atman, the five elements (the
Greeks accepted only four, and did not include space), it appears in Greek
literature as well soon after. The three doshas of Indian medicine are present
in exactly the same way. It was a good thing. A living and growing civilization
is always ready to find out and assimilate whatever valuable it notices in other
civilizations.
5.
Alexandria university: a center for Indo-Greek learning - After Alexander
established the Hellenistic Empire comprising Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, Iran,
Bactria and North -West India (including Punjab and modern Afghanistan), the
transfer of learning from India to Greece was very much facilitated. Alexander
himself got thoroughly Indo-Iranized. He started shaving beard (fashionable in
the East, but considered uncivilized in the Greek world at that time), and
started leading life like an Indian monarch. Alexander himself rounded up
hundreds of Brahmin scholars and took them with him to increase the wealth of
knowledge of his country. He also married several Indo-Iranian women. Tens of
thousands of Greek soldiers married Indo-Iranian women and took them to Greece.
Many of the children of such mothers would be speaking Sanskrit or Prakrit
dialects and Indo-centric in attitude, further influencing flow of literature
from India to Greece in successive generations. Trade routs and diplomatic
channels were also established which would facilitate flow of knowledge from
India to Greece.
The
Greeks, who came to India, were highly impressed by the Takshashila University
in Punjab. Probably being inspired by that, Ptolemy –the Greek Governor for
Egypt, who later became independent ruler of Egypt-- also established a great
university at Alexandria in Egypt. This was the first university ever built
outside India. In Alexandria, scholars from Greece, Asia Minor (modern Turkey),
Iran, India and Egypt would come to study and to teach. Being very near to the
centre of Hellenistic world, Greek remained the main language of book writing at
Alexandria. A large number of Indian texts were translated into Greek and kept
in the library at Alexandria.
ALEXANDRIAN
SCOLARS AND SCIENTISTS Some
of the most famous scholars of the Alexandrian University are as follows:
Aristarchus
of Samos (Asia Minor; 310-230 BC) : Archimedes and Plutarch quoted his book
“On the size and distance of Sun and Moon”. The values he gave were
inaccurate but he wrote that earth rotates at its axis and revolves round the
sun.
Heracledes
(390-310 BC), only his name is quoted by others, nothing more is known.
Euclid
(? 325-265 BC): Nothing is known of Euclid’s life except that he taught at
Alexandria and that he wrote the Elements.
Conon
(280-220 BC): Born in Samos, contemporary of Archimedes, lived at Alexandria.
Wrote De Astrologia.
Hipparchus
(born in Nicacaea, Asia Minor; 190-120 BC): Wrote commentaries on Aratus and
Exodus.
Claudius
Ptolemy (not the Egyptian ruler called Ptolemy; born in Egypt; 85 AD-165AD). He
compiled an encyclopedia of astronomy from available Indo-Greek literature and
also discussed trigonometry in this book. This book was translated into Arabic
in 827, and from Arabic into Latin in the later part of the 12th
century. This book is called Almagest, and served the basic astronomical
book for the Arabs and the Europeans till the 17th century. (The
original title of the book is not known and Almagest is just a corrupted
form of what could have been the title in Arabic, and that again in turn was a
corrupted form of whatever was the original name in Sanskrit or Greek. Given the
nature of the contents of the book, which was a monopoly of Indian astronomers,
it could have well been a Sanskrit book originally, translated into Greek at
Alexandria by Ptolemy. In that case the Sanskrit origina l title of the book
might have been ‘Mahishtha’ meaning ‘around the earth’, and by several
changes it became Al magest, which has no meaning in Arabic language. Actually
only one dot is needed in Arabic script to change ‘mahishtha’ into
‘magest’ because only one dot is needed to transform the letter ‘hey’
i.e. H into ‘jeem’ i.e. J.)
Diophantus
(200-284 AD): Essentially nothing is known of his life. Called father of
Algebra, wrote Arithmetica. (See Appendix)
Plotinus
(born in Upper Egypt at Lycopolis; 204-270 AD): Received education at Alexandria
University. When the Roman Emperor Gordian took a campaign against the Persians,
Plotinus accompanied him in order to learn more of the Indo-Iranian cosmological
knowledge (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.britannica.com).
Again indicating that India was far ahead of Alexandria in the third century AD.
These scholars usually called Greek scholars should not be called so because of
various reasons. They can at best be called Alexandrian scholars. Firstly
Alexandria was in Egypt, and therefore calling them Greek and not Egyptian is
not realistic and has a pro-Euro racial bias. Secondly, if we consider the place
of birth of these people, most of them barring a few exceptions were born on
Asian land like Samos, Nicacaea, or in Africa like Egypt and Libya. Thirdly,
nothing is known about majority of the Alexandrian scholars except their names
and their work. But even that has survived from Arabic sources and then
translated into Latin and thence to English, French etc. In this process the
names were changed from Arabic forms to a new Greek sounding form. In fact many
of the Greek sounding names were inventions of the Latin translators of the
Arabic texts. But actually, at the time of translation of the manuscripts into
Ar abic from Sanskrit and Greek, Arabs also had manipulated with the names.
Hence we cannot know what were the real names of many of these scholars like
Euclid, Diophantus etc. The work of Euclid, Diophantus etc are more similar to
Indian tradition of mathematical work. Given the absence of any good number
system, non-Indians could not be expected to produce any mathematical work of
any good value. Therefore it is more than likely that Euclid, Diophantus etc
were Indian scholars working at Alexandria whose actual names were different in
the same way as the real name of Sandrocottus was Chandragupta.
It
was Thomas Heath (1861-1940), a great believer of White superiority and an
Oxford mathematician, who worked on the Alexandrian scholars like Euclid etc.
and finally labeled them all to be Greeks, even though nothing was known about
the lives of most of these scholars. After him nobody examined this subject.
Much of the manuscripts at Alexandria must have been translations of Indian
works. We need to study any surviving Arabic scientific texts carefully with a
view to deciphering correct possible Sanskrit names of the Indian-Alexandrian
scholars, rather than accepting blindly what Latin translators have done with
their limited knowledge of Sanskrit and their ethnocentric attitude.
When
Judaism and Christianity threatened the scientific community living at
Alexandria, a fresh surge in Pythagoreanism was generated, which was called Neo-Pythagoreanism.
Hypatia was one of the neo-Pythagoreans.
ORIGIN
OF CHRISTIANITY AND THREATS TO ALEXANDRIA
Jesus
Christ started his religion when Alexandria was blooming. Jesus was very much
like an Indian ascetic. Like Hindu saints, he followed renunciation and
practiced celibacy, and preached non-violence and love. It is claimed that he
had been to India and had received spiritual training in Indian tradition.
Whatever be the fact, we find that many of the preaching and parables of Jesus,
Pythagoras and the Upanishads are common. When Christianity was taking shape,
Hindus inhabited that part of the world as well. When they converted to
Christianity, they introduced many things to this new religion e.g. folding
hands in Indian style when praying to God; ringing typical Indian styled bells
in the churches; introduction of a circular solar halo round the picture of
Jesus, burning incense and lamps (or candles) in the church etc. Practice of
celibacy, monastic life, renunciation of material life by the monks and
asceticism ad opted by Christian saints were Hindu influences on Christianity,
because they are not found in other Semitic religions.
But the vast majority of people who initially accepted Christianity were
Jews. Therefore, they brought in with them the Old Testament (the Jewish
scripture) and most of the beliefs and practices of the Jews.
Therefore, after the death of Jesus, Christians now believed, as the Jews
did, that only theirs’ is the right religion and only theirs’ is the true
God. Sorcery, miracle, witchcraft, mysticism, idol-worship, etc. are satanic
acts and people accused to be involved in them would be killed. (Little
remembering that the Jews had accused Jesus himself of being a sorcerer, before
killing him). Raising any doubt or suggesting modification in religion was
termed heresy, punishable with death. Fighting the non-Christians to convert or
eliminate them was considered religious duty. This new religion was very
anti-science, because science did not support what this religion preached. It
was no more pacifist or liberal than the Jews. It hated paganism. It hated
heresy. This religion considered the Alexandrian scholarship to be
pagan. The applic ation of logic and free discussion of theological questions
was considered blasphemous. Man cannot investigate the divine acts, they held.
Once Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth
century, the pagan monuments were destroyed and pagan worshippers killed and
force-converted in wholesale numbers. Therefore destruction of this Indo-Greek
university was the most sincere duty of the Christians of the period.
DESTRICTION
OF GREECE AND DEMOLITION OF ALEXANDRIA BY ROMANS, CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS
In
the third and second centuries BC, Rome rose up as a big power. Having no
respect for knowledge, they destroyed much of Greek civilization. They expanded
their empire to include North Africa, Asia Minor and South Europe. Greek
tradition of learning was disrupted in Europe, scholars killed, cities
destroyed, although it continued in Alexandria in Egypt. A few Greek scholars
escaped being killed in Europe as well, who continued their pursuit of knowledge
although in a low profile up till the Byzantine period. It was Justinian, the
Byzantine Emperor who in 529, closed the nine-hundred-year- old Academy of Plato
in Athens and completely destroyed the last remains of Greek knowledge in
Europe, claiming it was a hotbed of paganism and heresy and therefore it was
against Christianity. The scholars were killed or converted into Christianity.
Many of these Greek scholars, fearing for their lives and intellectual freedom,
fle d to Persia, where they established a kind of Academy in exile.
In
48 BC, Julius Caesar set fire to ships in the harbor at Alexandria and according
to Plutarch, burned 40,000 scrolls at Alexandria. Queen Zenobia of Palmyra
captured Alexandria in 270 AD. Much of the city was destroyed during a counter
attack by the Roman Emperor Aurelian.
In
early fourth century Constantine who had already become Christian, acceded to
Roman power. Christianity now became the state religion. Nonbelievers
(non-Christians) were persecuted, burned and murdered by animated Christian mobs
called zealots. Mathematicians, scientists and philosophers were particularly
targeted. Europe was entering into an era called Dark Age with complete
elimination of all the works of science, mathematics and philosophy. But
University of Alexandria was still surviving in Egypt. In AD 389 Christian
Emperor Theodosius ordered Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria to destroy all pagan
monuments. Hindus were also called pagan by them. The Christian mobs burned the
pagan scholars and the library. This rampage was most fierce in AD 391. Even
after this, many scholars survived and continued their work.
BRUTAL
MURDER OF A MATHEMATICAL GENIUS
One
of the mathematicians who survived the holocaust and continued her work was Hypatia,
a great scholar of mathematics, and one of the few female mathematicians in
history. She was wise, learned, virtuous and beautiful. There was much mistrust
among Christians, Jews and Pagans, but Hypatia taught everyone. She wrote
commentaries on Euclid, Apollonius and on Arithmetica. She wrote books
discussing new mathematical problems and solving old ones. She also wrote books
on astronomy, compiled tables of positions of celestial bodies and designed
several scientific instruments. It was a time of revival of Pythagoreanism, the
Greek form of Hinduism, as a Hellenistic (Greek) alternative of the rising tide
of Christianity.
In
AD 412 Cyril, a fanatic Christian became the patriarch of Alexandria and began
the campaign to rid the city of both Jews and the Pythagorean scholars. Hypatia
was asked to accept Christianity several times. But she always refused. That
commitment cost her life. “In AD 415, she was set upon a mob of Christian
zealots, dragged from her carriage and beaten to death. In the account of a
fifth century author: they stripped her stark naked: they raze the skin and rend
the flesh of her body with sharp shells, until the death departed from her body:
they quarter her body: they bring her quarters unto a place called Cinaron and
burn them to ashes...” This is only one out of thousands of such atrocities,
which was going to finish scientific knowledge, as well Indian influence, from
the West for a thousand years. (Pythagoras’s Trousers)
Even
after such attacks, Alexandrian school was surviving for further two hundred
years.
CALIPH
OMAR GIVES THE DEATH BLOW TO
ALEXANDRIA
In
AD 642 Caliph Omar overran Egypt. Victorious Caliph ordered, those books that
were contrary to Koran should be destroyed and furthermore those books that
confirmed the Koran were superfluous and they too must be destroyed. Manuscripts
were used to stove the public baths. The University library was torched to
ashes. The volume of manuscripts was so large that it kept on burning for six
months. Needless to add that all the scholars were slaughtered except those who
embraced Islam. All over Egypt and Libya, books were searched out and burned. As
a result of this, the history and literature of Egypt was lost forever, only a
fraction of it to be rediscovered later by the Europeans out of the Pyramids.
Greek literature in Egypt was also lost and the same happened to Babylonian
history.
Some
of the Greek scholars of Alexandria, who embraced Islam and survived, were able
to smuggle some of the manuscripts to their homes. Later they translated these
into Arabic language. These translations included Greek medicine (now called
Unani after Ionia, a Greek city), much of Greek philosophy e.g. Plato (Aflatoon),
Aristotle (Arastu), Socrates (Sukrat) etc. It contained Alexandrian sciences as
well as six of the original thirteen volumes of the mathematical text called
Arithmetica, seven volumes of it being lost forever. The Arithmetica was
translated many centuries later into Latin. (Arithmetica, Elements, Surya
Siddhanta and the Indian books on algebra, trigonometry, and arithmetic
contained the basic knowledge, which would later propel Europe into modern age.)
It
is to be remembered here that all of Greek medicine, all of Greek books of
philosophy and science were already burned to ashes in Greece and Europe by
Christian zealots. End of knowledge in the West was complete now. When the
falsehood fears that it is likely to be exposed, it attacks knowledge, because
knowledge is the worst poison for ignorance.
6.
Grwoth of Knowledge in India during this period - In India, scenario was
different. Science, mathematics, logic, philosophy, art, everything was growing
at an unlimited pace. In India, religion’s central dogma was knowledge, and
experience, experiment and reasoning were accepted as very important means of
obtaining knowledge. Arguments were encouraged in religious matters and
religious philosophy and metaphysics had to be based on scientific knowledge.
This scientific bias of Hinduism had led to the growth of science earlier as
well, from which Pythagoras and many other people of the West had been benefited
over ages. Hence by the time of Caliph Omar, India was the only place in the
world where knowledge was progressing unhindered. It is also worth mentioning
that when Islam came to Iran, Zoroastrianism was followed only by a minority
(15%) of the Iranian people. Others followed Buddhism, Shaivism, Mithraism,
Judaism, Nestorian Christianity, and other religions.
Earth
is round was never disputed in India. So much so that you will find Varahavatar
lifting the rounded earth on His tusks in many sculpture. You will find a lion
(Buddha) fighting with a dragon (ignorance), which is holding a round earth by
its tail, in many northeastern Indian Buddhist icons. Every Hindu is aware of
the metaphoric story of the demon king Hiranyaksha, who finding the earth as a
round ball, seized it to play with it; then Lord Vishnu had to kill him to save
the earth. The law of conservation of matter and energy and the law of cause and
effect were the two fundamental laws of Hinduism. Anybody not accepting these
two laws would be considered a nastic or non-believer. The agnostics and people
who refuted the existence of God were considered equally respected as others.
The religion or belief was a matter of personal choice and could not be enforced
on to anybody by either the State or the family or th e society. Clergy and
priests in Western sense did not exist. Priest would come to perform a rite only
if an individual requested him. Needless to add that fatwa or religious decree
kind of things were beyond imagination in India. There was no place for
‘theocracy’ in Hinduism. Religion and politics are two different things for
the Hindus, and state was never under the control of the priests/clergy in the
Hindu/Buddhist period. This institutional difference from the West made India a
fertile ground for growth and development of knowledge of all shorts including
even sex education (Kama sutra). It is not possible to discuss the
achievements of Indian Scholars here. But I will briefly discuss Aryabhata and
name a few others.
ARYABHATA
Aryabhata
occupies a central position in the evolution of knowledge. His works were
translated into Arabic and then into Latin. These texts were taught in the
European universities at the time of Keplar, Copernicus and Isaac Newton. Had it
not been, these scientists would not have been able to discover what they did.
The Latin version of Aryabhata’s work was absolutely needed, which provided a
knowledge base for arrival of modern concepts in science.
Most
of Aryabhata’s work is no more available. What we know about his work is from
what has been quoted by later Indian and Arabic scholars.
In
‘The Calendar’ Duncan writes on Aryabhata, “In 476, far away in the time
and place from Charlemagne’s dark, imposing castle at Aachen, beyond the
Eastern boarder of Frankland… a Hindu genius was born ... A blend of Ptolemy
the astronomer, Pythagoras the mathematician and Bacon the rebel, Aryabhata was
one of a remarkable group of Indian scholars, and a pivotal figure on one of the
stranger journeys ever taken by an assemblage of ideas across time and
geography. …..(the ideas) turn to the west, centuries later, landing the great
centers of Islamic learning after the Arab conquest of Persia and India. The
Arabs in turn carried the knowledge to portals in Spain, Syria and Sicily, where
it made its way to Europe (pp150-1)…
…Aryabhata
grew up during the final years of Gupta golden age, when India was a world
centre of art, science, literature and architecture. Learning was considered a
sacred duty, and educated Hindus were expected to know not only the basics of
reading, writing and numbers but also to be adept at poetry, painting and music.
This was the age of Kama Sutra, the text that treats love as a fine art…
.. Excavations attest (presence of).. a large middle class, which enjoyed
prosperity on a par with the golden age of Rome (pp 151-2)”. Duncan further
writes, Aryabhata thought of the heliocentric solar system a thousand years
ahead of Copernicus (pp155).
Some
of the interesting work of Aryabhata is worth notice here.
1)
Value of pi: Aryabhata
calculated its value to be 3.1416.
2)
Length of Tropical Year:
Aryabhata gave a value of 365.3586805 days.
3)
Heliocentric solar system:
Aryabhata said that earth is a sphere and it rotates on its axis causing day and
night. He also suggested that earth revolves round the sun once in a year and it
is the sun, which is at the centre of the khagola, not the earth.
4)
Incredibly, he believed that the
orbits of revolutions of moon and the planets are elliptical and not spherical
or circular.
5)
He gave the radii of planetary
orbits as ratio of earth/sun orbit, which are quite correct.
6)
Diameter of earth as 8316 miles
(almost accurate to modern measurements).
7)
Moon and the planets are not
luminous and they shine by reflection of sunlight.
8)
Lunar eclipse is caused by
earth’s shadow falling on the moon. Solar eclipse is caused by moon coming in
between sun and the earth.
9)
Table of sines: He listed the
values of sines of angles up to 90 degrees at intervals of 3.75 degrees for a
radius of 3438 measures. The value 3438 is one radian expressed in minutes!
10)
He gave calculations of
equations based on Fractions, Quadric Equations, Sums of Power Series, Imaginary
Numbers (square root of –1),
Concept of Version (1 - cos).
Equally
notable were the achievements in medicine. Sushruta has described the procedure
for many surgical operations including prostate (trans-rectal route), cataract.
Charaka, Dhanvantari and Jivaka were other famous physicians. Plastic surgery
was invented and developed in India (ref. Noted in Sabiston’s Text book of
Surgery, under the History of transplant surgery). Madhavacharya, a 12th
century physician, writes in his book ‘Madhavanidanam’, that vishama jvara
(Typhoid fever) is caused by invisibly small organisms, which live in dirty
water and infect the body when that water is drunk. It is impossible even to
make a brief mention the works of these intellectual wizards and I leave it
here.
The
last in the glorious tradition of scholars was Bhaskaracharya, who invented the
gravitational force also. David E. Duncan writes in his book The Calendar,
“After Brahmagupta, India continued to produce noted mathematicians,
including Bhaskara (1114--1185), considered by mathematicians to be the most
brilliant in his field anywhere during the twelfth century.” At this period
North India fell to Muslim invaders and Mohammed Ghouri established the Delhi
Sultanate. All the great Indian Universities viz. Taxilla, Nalanda, Odantapuri
and Vikramashila were burnt down to ashes and all inmates killed by the invading
commanders propelling India into darkness. Scholars were hunted down and Indian
system of education was abolished being replaced by Islamic Muderssas. All
education needs state funding. Once state came under Muslim Rule, all indigenous
knowledge vanished except Sanskrit Grammar, a bit of mathematics, logic,
medicine and philosophy, which were preserved by individual efforts of
practitioners and scholars. To sustain their lives these people had to serve as
priests or cooks in the households or face starvation. Hard pressed under
excessive land revenue and communal taxes (like jezia, birth tax, cremation tax)
common people did not have enough money to donate to maintain the lives of
scholars. This led to further demoralization of the scholars. Once the light of
knowledge was gone, ignorance and social evils embraced India from all sides.
Even the books of History had been burnt down by the invaders and the India of
18th Century had no information about her pre-Muslim history.
But
many of the books dealing with religion, philosophy and history had been taken
away to Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet and China before Islamic invasion. From these
much of Indian History has been reconstructed by now. It is remarkable to note
that soon after the Mughal Empire was gone from India in 1858, a great
mathematician was born again (in 1887). David Duncan writes “ In 1887 another
mathematics genius was borne in India, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who tragically died
at the age of 33.” Ramanujan solved many disturbing mathematical problems
although he never had any Western education.
7.
Transfer of knowledge from India to Arabic language - Duncan writes in The
Calendar “In 773, some 250 years after Aryabhata’s death, a
delegation of diplomats from lower Indus River Valley arrived in the new Arab
capital of Baghdad. Dressed in bright coloured silks, turbans and glittering
gems, ... Arriving at last outside the gates of al-Mansur’s (the
founder of the Abbasid dynasty) magnificent city.....
..........This
particular delegation also brought with them an astronomer, ..Kanaka. An
expert on eclipse, he carried with him a small library of Indian astronomical
texts to give to the Caliph, including the Surya Siddhanta and the works
of Brahmagupta (containing material on Aryabhata). Nothing more is
known about this Kanaka. An Arab historian named al-Qifti wrote the first known
reference to him some five hundred years later. According to al-Qifti, the
caliph was amazed by the knowledge in the Indian texts. He immediately ordered
them to be translated into Arabic and their essence compiled into a textbook
that became known as the Great Sindhind
(Sindhind is the Arabic form of the Sanskrit word Siddhanta).”
Incidents
like this were necessary “in order to bring the works of India into the sphere
of the early Islamic scholars, whence they would travel to Christian Europe
through Syria, Sicily and Arab controlled Spain. A version of the Great
Sindhind would be translated into Latin in 1126. This was one of the
dozens of critical documents that would contribute to the knowledge base needed
to propel Europe into the modern age” Duncan adds.
The pre-Islamic Iran had Zoroastrian, Mithraic, Shaivite and Buddhist
followers. These religions can be called Hindu or Hindu-like and were not
against investigation of truth. Iran also had the privilege of being just
adjacent to India. Therefore the knowledge was quite developed in Iran at the
time of Islamic invasion. When Iran fell to Islam, people accepted Islam but the
undercurrent of Hinduism remained flowing here and there in the form of Sufism
and Yoga-Mysticism. Early Sufis were quite vocal of their philosophy. They were
persecuted and many killed by the orthodox Muslims. Most famous of them was
Mansur -bin-Hallaz who was killed because of his fancy for Upanishadic statement
‘an- al- Haq’ (Aham Brahmasmi; I am the reality/God). Many of the
later Sufis adopted all the external features of Islam, but maintained Hindu
ideas and attitude of tolerance in philosophy and teachings.
The
pre-Islamic Iran had a rich intellectual interaction with India, Greece and
Alexandria. It had acted as a transmitter of Indian knowledge to Egypt for two
millennia and to Greece for one millennium. When Justinian persecuted the
Nestorian people, they had fled to Baghdad with sacs of Greek scientific
texts in the sixth century AD. Nestorian (or Assyrian or Eastern) Christians
were the people who believed that Jesus was human as well as divine. Nestorius
was a Bishop at Byzantium, contemporary of Cyril whose fanaticism was
responsible for killing of pagan scholars at Alexandria including Hypatia.
Nestorius was declared a heretic by Cyril and others, because he pleaded that
Mary was not a God-bearer, as Christ was born human but only later he attained
divinity. Nestorius must have had some background of Indian philosophy, because
he was born in Iran of Persia n parents. Nestorians founded the Eastern Church
and considered Greek literature as important reservoir of knowledge. Much later
after the death of Nestorius, the Nestorians faced a severe persecution and
genocide at the hands of Justinian. After persecution, they fled away to Iran,
(pre-Islamic) Arabia and south India. In this process they carried the Greek
books with them. Indian Nestorians became re-affiliated to the Roman Catholic
Church in the 16th century.
Although
majority of pre-Islamic literature had been destroyed in Iran by Muslim
crusaders, some Pahlawi and Greek literature could survive and got translated
into Arabic later. It was at the time of the third Caliph that the capital of
Islamic Empire was shifted to the Iranian city of Baghdad (in modern Iraq).
After the initial phase of victories and overrunning other nations, which lasted
about a century after the death of the Prophet, the Caliphs from al-Mansur
onwards started showing interest in science and philosophy. These people had
come out of the deserts of Arabia where few were literate; they brought little
material culture to the ancient civilizations now under their sway. The initial
reaction of the Muslims overrunning these civilizations was that of hatred for
the infidel, causing large-scale destruction of lives and knowledge wherever
they went. But credit should be given to the early Abbasid Caliphs, who
transformed his people into a knowledge-loving nation, although only for a few
centuries.
The
period of the reign of al-Mansur and his successors, Caliph Haroun ar-Rashid
(786-809) and his son al-Mamun (809-833) was the time when Indian texts
were brought to Baghdad in large scale and were translated into Arabic. They
were studied along with the Arabic translation of the manuscripts of the Greek
Alexandrines and Nestorians, which had escaped destruction, by the army of
Caliph Omar as well as surviving bits of Iranian scholarship. Eventually they
were synthesized into the forms, which would later reach Europe. Scholars,
engineers, scientists and artists flocked to Baghdad and were honoured and well
paid. Many came bearing manuscripts. This was a great era of translation. The
project was made infinitely simpler when the first paper factory opened
in Baghdad in 794, using a process the Arabs learned from a Chinese prisoner
captured during the AD 712 conquest of Samarkand, in modern Uzbekistan.
This art would be passed on to Europe centuries later in the 12th century
(Duncan, The Calendar).
As
the translations of Indian manuscripts began to stack up, al-Mamun ordered a
museum and library complex to be built which was completed by 833 and became
known as the House of Wisdom (Bait al-hikma). It was now only
third in size in the world after the libraries of Taxila and Nalanda
Universities. The Zero, decimal system, Indian numerals, astronomy, astrology,
trigonometry, ayurveda, chemistry, everything even up to the Hindu
dream-analysis, had now reached Baghdad, and the local Irani scholars were now
in a position to formulate further theorems. Fascinated by Indian astronomy,
Caliph al-Mamun ordered an observatory built in Baghdad in 829 and one soon
after outside of Damascus. Another
less well known fact is that almost all of the scholars known as Arabic to the
posterity were actually Iranian or Iranianized Turks e.g. al-Khwarizmi, al-Biruni
etc and some were Spanish but they wrote in Arabic, Arabic being the language of
the Emperor. On the other hand not much intellectual activity was going on in
Arabian Peninsula, which was still the centre of Islamic religious activities.
The
Indian ideas reaching Baghdad sparked off an intellectual revolution. When the
Baghdadis came to know from the translations of the works of Aryabhata
that the earth is a sphere of a diameter of 8316 miles, rotating on
its axis, many of them believed it and wanted to measure it themselves too.
Similar inspirations led to development of experimentation in the Abbasid people
and observatories etc were constructed in the Abbasid world as well.
The
word for mathematics in Arabic is ‘Hindi sat’ meaning the ‘Indian
Art’. One of the greatest mathematicians in the Arabic empire was al-Khwarizmi
(full name, Abu Jafar Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khwarismi, 780-850) who was summoned
to Baghdad in 820 by al-Mamun and appointed the ‘first astronomer’ and later
the head of library. He led three scientific missions to India to meet scholars
and collect manuscripts. Based on them, he wrote a book ‘Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah’
(Calculation by addition and subtraction, ‘jabr’ here is an Arabi-ised form
of Apabhramsha Indian language word ‘jor’ meaning addition, and not the
Arabic word meaning ‘difficult’; algebra is a short Latinised form of the
word). Later, its Latin translation became a standard textbook of mathematics in
European universities. He wrote out the oldest surviving ziz--set of
astronomical tables-- surviving from the Indian charts bro ught to Baghdad by
Kanaka. This ziz later made the journey to Spanish Cordoba and onwards to
the rest of Europe where a Latin translation made in 1126 became one of the most
influential works on astronomy in medieval Europe. These are to count just a few
of the books al-Khwarismi wrote on mathematics, the Indian art. In 825, al-Khwarizmi
wrote on the concept of logarithm (this is a Latinised form of his name itself),
zero and positional notation system after learning them from the Indian texts
especially Brahmagupta, in his book ‘Algoritmi de numero Indorum’
(this is the title of the Latin translation).
This book (in its Arabic form, which unfortunately is not available any
more) reached Spain (which was under Arab control at that time) where, in the
990’s, Gerbert of Aurillac taught the Hindu numbers to his students,
but it could not be very popular in Europe. In c.1100, an Englishman Robert
of Chester visited Spain and translated al-Khwarizmi’s little book into
Latin in 1120. This and other translations of al-Khwarizmi, inspired writing of
several Latin textbooks on the ‘new arithmetic’ including description of the
decimal system and positional notation. Sti ll it took several more centuries
before Europeans entirely abandoned Roman numerals despite their clumsiness and
inferiority to Hindu numerals (Duncan, The Calendar).
Another
standout at Baghdad was al-Battani (c. 850-929), known in Europe as Albategneus
who studied Indian astronomy and expounded Indian trigonometric methods to show
that the distance from the earth to the sun varies during the year (Ibid.). Half
a century later another Iranized Turk (but known as Arab) astronomer, Abu
ar-Rayhan Mohammed ibn Ahmed al-Biruni (call him al-Biruni; 973-1048) was
born in central Asia. He extensively studied the Arabic translation of the
Indian mathematics and astronomy and by the age of thirty, had written at least
eight works. Most important of them was one in which he discussed arguments for
and against the earth’s rotating on its axis, taking up the debate of
Aryabhata versus other Indian astronomers. He went to India with an invading
Muslim army of Mehmood Ghaznawi. There he learned Sanskrit and studied
every ancient text he could find. He compiled his findings into a book
called Kitab-ul-Hind (Kitab fi tahqiq ma li ‘l-Hind). This offers a remarkably
candid and critical analysis of Hindu mathematics and siddhantas as well as
philosophy and religion (Ibid.).
Al-Biruni
wrote a note on Patanjali’s Yoga sutra, Bhagavad-Gita and Sankhyakarika. But
he also seems to be under fear of fanatics and always writes in reference to
what Indians believed. Like, the Indians believe that the earth is five billion
years old, which is wrong because the Islam says it was created only four
thousand and five hundred years back. But overall, he greatly admires Hindu
genius and metempsychosis. He
discusses in detail the Hindu concept of cycle of evolution and dissolution and
re-evolution of universe. He also describes the Hindu concept of geography. He
mentions, the Hindus describe an island, which is diametrically opposite Rome on
the globe. These ideas would be later translated into Latin from which people
like Columbus would gain inspiration to try reach India by going westward and
that would lead to the discovery of Americas.
8.
Translation of Hindu literature in India - Before Taxila, Nalanda, Odantpuri,
Vikramshila and other Indian universities were burned down and their inmates
killed by the Muslim invaders, much of Indian science (especially mathematics,
astrology, medicine and philosophy) had already reached Baghdad and been
translated into Arabic.
The
destruction of Indian literature was so extensive that no record of pre-Islamic
history remained in India. In fact whatever systemic history of ancient India we
know now was reconstructed by the Europeans with the help of the Indian
historical books which survived mainly in Sri Lanka and to a lesser extent in
China, Myanmar, Tibet etc. plus non-historical religious oriented Puranas, then
archaeological remains and the Vedas; and most extensively by
imagination. But still there
were too many manuscripts scattered over the vast country, which escaped
destruction. These related mainly to philosophy and religion. Amir Khusraw
was impressed by the depth of learning among Indians and their ability to speak
any language. He greatly admired the Brahmanas for their ability to teach all
subjects, who had devised the numerical system, written Kalila wa Dimma on the
art of government and invented chess. Although a Muslim chauvinist, he admitted
that the Hindus believe in the unity and eternity of God. Nakhshabi
translated two Sanskrit texts. Following his conquest of Nogarkot in 1362
Firuz Shah Tughlaq acquired 1300 books from Jwalamukhi temple. He
commissioned Sanskrit scholars to translate some of them into Persian. On the
basis of the translation of works on physics and astronomy, ’Izzu ‘d-Din
Khalid Khani compiled the Dala ‘il-Firuz Shahi. ’Abdu‘l
’Aziz Shams Baha-i Nuri translated Brihatsamhita into Persian (it was
earlier translated by al-Biruni into Arabic). Sultan Zaynu’l-’Abidin
of Kashmir, Sultan Sikandar Lodi and several other Muslim rulers
ordered the translation of various Sanskrit works into Persian with a view to
enriching their language. Akbar established a translation bureau (the
Maktab Khana) for translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian and Arabic. Yet
more Sanskrit books were translated during Jehangir’s period. Dara
Shukoh translated Upanishads into Persian. Later Anquetil Duperron
translated the Persian version into French and Latin. This Latin version
influenced many intellectuals in Europe including German scholar Schopenhauer
who found its study ‘the solace to my life’ and ‘the solace to my death’
(Rizwi, The Wonder that was India, vol 2; Basham, The Wonder that was India, vol
1)
Knowledge
moves west
The
Arabs ruled over a vast area from Indus to Spain in the eighth century when they
started getting knowledge from India. As the Arabic schools were established all
over the Abbasid empire to produce a regular supply of clergy and teachers, the
Arabic version of Indian knowledge spread all over the empire. Caliph Abd
ar-Rahman III (891--961), a patron of art and learning built a massive new
library at Cordoba in Spain and filled it with a vast treasure trove of
manuscripts brought from Baghdad. The library contained 400,000 volumes. By 976,
Hindu numbers started appearing in modified form, which were going to be the
forerunners of modern International form of Indian numerals (Duncan, The
Calendar). &nbs p;
Some
of the earliest translations of Arabic manuscripts into Latin were penned in
northern Spain beginning in the mid-tenth century at the monastery of Santa
Maria de Ripoll. In the tenth century, Gerbert of Aurillac (c.
946--1003) learned the Indian counting system from the Moors of Spain who in 999
became the Pope Sylvester II. In 990s he taught the Hindu numerals to his
students and monks. H e trekked to northern Spain to carry home Latin
translations of Arab treatise on abacus and astrolabe. He encouraged adoption of
these systems especially by merchants. Needless to say that the new numbers were
going to revolutionize accounting which was essential for leading Europe into a
successful mercantile community (Ibid.)
Another
was Adelard of Bath(c. 1075--1160). He journeyed by ship along the new
eastern trade routes to the Crusader held coast of Syria, where he translated
Euclid into Latin using Arabic translation of the original. Most prolific of all
these early translators was the Italian Gerard of Cremona ( c. 1114--1187).
Fluent in Greek and Arabic, he was leading figure in the new ‘College of
Translators’ set up by Spanish archbishop Raymond after the capture of Toledo
(and its library). He rendered into Latin the Arabic texts by Galen, Aristotle,
Euclid, al-Khwarismi and Ptolemy, among many others. Some of the works of the
ancient Greeks were translated back to Greek from Arabic at this time (Ibid.).
.
We have already seen how al-Khwarismi’s Algoritmi de numero Indorum was
translated into Latin by an Englishman Robert of Chester living in Spain in
1120. The Indian astronomical works as translated by al-Khwarismi was translated
into Latin in Cordoba in1126. This brought Indian numbers, arithmetic, algebra
and Astronomy to the Latin world. This contained the works of Aryabhata.
Aryabhata’s work contained enough mathematical knowledge that was needed for
further work in physics. The work on astrology was the stuff which was needed
for creating a base for more advanced calculations. This knowledge was now in
the hands of Europeans who had been counting with their fingers till that time.
This was going to provide the knowledge base required for further scientific
discoveries to Kepler, Copernicus and Newton.
The
translation of Hindu-Arabic literature continued till the end of sixteenth
century. Apart from Spain, and Italy, other centres of translation were Syria,
Damascus, Palermo and Sicily. The Arab emirs governing Sicily imported texts
from Baghdad and had a rich library there. A Christian, Roger Guiscard
(1031--1101), son of a baron of Normandy, conquered Sicily in 1072
when he renamed himself Roger I, Count of Sicily. His son Roger II ruled
over Sicily and southern Italy. These two Rogers and their successor,
Frederick II encouraged translation of Arabic texts. Frederick was elected
the Holy Roman Emperor in 1220. He surrounded himself from philosophers and
sages from Baghdad and Syria, dancing girls from India and Iran (Ibid.).
It
may be added here that Hindu girls were forcefully taken away from their
families by the Muslim rulers. They were trained into expert dancers for
prostitution and luxury of the Muslim aristocracy in India and the surplus was
sold to the sex-traders in the Middle East. These girls were again sold to the
European customers. This brought to the Eastern Europe, Indian costumes and the
classical dance dramas of Indian style. This in turn influenced the Western
European dances. Such efforts introduced many Indian elements into the classical
dances of the West.
Frederick
founded the University of Naples in 1224 endowing it with a large
collection of Arabic manuscripts. From Spain he brought a translator who created
a Latin summary of Aristotle’s biological and zoological works. The library
was endowed with a large collection of Arabic manuscripts of ancient Greek and
Indian scholars as well as commentaries of the Arab scholars on them. Copies of
Latin translation were sent to universities in Paris and
Bologna. . Frederick also led the Fifth Crusade to Palestine in
1228--1229, successfully and recaptured Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth. All
these efforts brought to Europe the works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the
Greek Medicine, which were earlier, destroyed from Europe by over zealous
Christian zealots. It also brought to Europe the works of Indian genius in the
fields of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, physics, chemistry, philosophy and
music. Europeans learned the art of papermaking from the Arabs and printing
press from the Chinese. In 1450s Gutenberg operated the first European
printing press in Germany.
The
Europeans were very slow to absorb this much of knowledge and new type of
numbers. Much of the work in universities and monasteries was limited to copying
the manuscripts or to translating them. They were not able to use decimals until
a Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin (1548--1620) explained the
system in a book called La Thiende (The Tenth). After him, Magini
and Christopher Clauvius used them in their works. It was Galileo
in the late sixteenth century who for the first time tried to understand what
was containd in the Latin translation of the Sindhind of Brahmagupta.
Once he understood the theory of rotation of earth he had to suffer the
persecution of the Church. In 1621, Bachet published the Latin version of
Arithmetica from Arabic (Ibid.). By
this time, the era of Europe’s Dark Age was over. Understanding of science led
to removal of Church’s domination in everyday life. People were now able to
work further on the subjects of science beyond the works of the Hindus, which
was presented, to them after being translated twice-- first in Arabic and then
in Latin. The
decline of Christian faith coupled with rise of knowledge ushered
Europe into all round development and they came in a position to dominate the
world. The power associated with knowledge converted the Europeans into Economic
and Military powers. Now
supremacy of knowledge is quite established all over the world, except in a few
pockets of fundamentalist ideologies. But the contributions that India made to
the growth and dissemination of knowledge over several thousands of years will
remain the everlasting success of India.
References:
1.
Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers, Fourth Estate Ltd, London,
1997, pp.17-24, 33-37. 2. David E.
Duncan, The Calendar, Fourth Estate, London, 1999, pp.150-2103. S.A.A.
Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, Part II, Rupa & Co, Bombay, 1999,
pp.251-257.4. A L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, Part I, Rupa
& Co, Bombay, 1999, pp.486-487.5. Simon Singh, The Fermat’s Last
Theorem, Fourth Estate, London, (destruction
of Alexandria, and Arithmetica) 6. Encyclopedia Britannica on website
www.britannica.com; Majority of the topics and names discussed in this article
occur in it. 7.Mary Macgregor, The Story of Greece, Thomas Nelson and
sons, Edinburgh. 1960 pp.3-4.8. G. L. Dickinson, The Greek View of Life,
Methuen & Co. LTD, London. 1938 pp.1-25.
EPILOGUE
It
was the story of knowledge. Now are the few appendices discussing isolated
topics.
Appendix
I - Influence
on Western philosophy: The
knowledge has survived in spite of all odds against it. Not only in Science, but
also in the field of Modern philosophy, West has borrowed heavily from
India. Europe got all of Indian logic and philosophy through the channel of the
Arabs, and earlier through the Neo-Plutonian channel. Later when the
British came to India they had first hand knowledge of Indian philosophy.
Goethe, Schopenhauer and most of the German philosophers had
studied Indian philosophy and most of them got influenced by it. They in turn
influenced the other students of philosophy by their writings. ”The monism of
Fichte and Hegel might never have taken forms they did if it had not
been for Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of the Upanishads and the
works of pioneer Indologists. In English-sp eaking world the strongest Indian
influence was felt in America where Emerson, Thoreau and other New
England writers avidly studied much Indian religious literature in translation,
and exerted immense influence on their contemporaries and successors, notably
Walt Whitman” writes A. L. Basham. The list of authors who admitted Indian
influence on them is very big and includes such authors as Carlyle, Richard
Jeffries, Edward Carpenter, Stephen Zwig, Romya Rolland, Jung, etc. Indian
influence is visible on all the major authors of Existential school as
well as the Humanistic school of philosophers. The New Age Dharma
is a new surge of Western interest in Indian way of life and thinking. At
the moment the West is trying to understand the yoga, meditation and
transcendental states. The concepts of kindness to the animals,
animal rights, vegetarianism, universal brotherhood, tolerance for differing
faiths, etc. are gradually becoming more and more popular. Paganism is another
movement to understand reality in a post-modern context. The birth and death of
star, the concept of life as a unity etc are recognized more and more by Western
people. Indeed, Ancient Indian thoughts preserve enormous potentialities for the
future of humanity.
Appendix
II Decline
of Knowledge in the Arab World
Baghdad
was destroyed first by a civil war among the later Abbasids. Then in 1258 the
invading Mongol army of Changhiz Khan destroyed it to the last brick. Although
the Islamic Empire was reconstructed, the scientific temper of the Abbasids
could never be restored to the Arabs. Later when Abdul Wahab started his
movement, Muslims would look more and more into religious books rather than
investigate the material world.
Appendix
III
Why
Indians did not pursue their quest of knowledge after 12th century?
India
had a several thousand years old tradition of education, research and training.
After Delhi fell to the Turko-Afghan rulers, the great Indian universities were
demolished. Libraries were burnt down. The village schools spread all over the
country got starved of funds. The Govt funds would now go to muderssas, which
would teach Koran and Arabic and Persian languages. Even the Indian texts on
science and philosophy were translated into Arabic and Persian and were made
available to only the Arabic and Persian knowing people, the Muslims who
attended the mudrssas. Persian was maintained as the medium of instruction till
the British took over the governance of India, so that Hindus could not take
benefit of education. A false allegation has been leveled against the Brahmanas
that they were not imparting education to the masses. But the fact is that the
Brahmanas themselves quickly got deprived of education and became ignorant
within a few generation time after establishment of Turkish rule and muderssa
system of education. Now Brahmana became a caste and lost the Varna character.
Unless they were employed in any educational institution (i.e. muderssas in that
period), how can we expect them to teach the public? People were not ready to
pay privately for learning Sanskrit, which would not get them any jobs in a
Muslim establishment. As it became
a non-sustainable vocation, teaching disappeared from the Hindu people. The few
Brahmanas, who had knowledge, freely imparted it to whoever came, even to the
Muslims. Al-Biruni and Amir Khusaraw etc were taught Sanskrit language and
literature without any consideration of caste or religion by Brahmin scholars.
The
Muslim rule converted Brahmanas into priest. This fact can be verified by
carefully reading history. In pre-Muslim period we never find mention of a
Brahmana who lived in a village doing puja-work (priest craft). They lived as
scholars or teachers. They could attend a yajna done by a king as a respected
guest. But such occasions were very infrequent. Abolition of education
profession compelled the Brahmanas to adopt new professions. Some become village
priests. Others became doctors (vaidya), astrologer, farmer or even cooks. But
the majority of Brahmanas never adopted the degrading job of priests. Many
Brahmanas who hated priest-craft became farmers like the Chitpawan, Anavil,
Mohiyal, Nagar and Tyagi Brahmanas etc and survived on agriculture.
Appendix
IV A
note on Arithmetica:
Six
volumes of Arithmetica that could survive were translated into Arabic. Many
centuries later this Arabic text was translated into Latin. Nothing is known
about its author except that he worked at Alexandria University and that the
Latin version of his name is Diophantus. In Arabic it was something like Dwbnt.
What was the actual name or country of birth of the author of Arithmetica,
nobody knows. Arithmetica itself is a meaningless word in Latin or Greek
languages. But in Sanskrit, Arthamitica is a meaningful word meaning calculation
(miti) of money matters (artha). It can be inferred that the author of the
Arithmetica was an Indian mathematician teaching at Alexandria and this book was
a Greek version of a compilation of Indian mathematics .His name was probably
something like Devabhuti. This raises a grave question. Almost all of Greek
literature was lost. The overwhelming majority of the literature known today to
be of Ancient Greece is actually translation from Arabic. In a large number of
them, only information available about the author is his name. And these books
describe the Indian philosophy in entirely unmodified form. Is it not possible
that the Europeans who translated these Arabic texts did not discriminate
between what had come into Arabic from India and what had come from Alexandria.
Their motive was definitely mala fide is clear from many other facts. They very
well knew by very name of the text itself (Algoritmi de numero Indorum) that the
decimal system and the new numbers were Indian. But they kept it secret from the
masses that started calling them Arabic numbers. It was only after ancient
Indian stone inscriptions containing those numerals predating Islam were found,
that the Europeans openly accepted the reality. Similarly, the Europeans
including the Greek themselves are kept into darkness about the fact the Greek
philosophy they are reading was actually translated from Arabic, the original
having been lost centuries before. These attempts are done in a very organized
way to keep up the morale of their masses but not to let the morale of anyone
else go up. Duncan sites one example of mischief by the Euro-centric historians
(The Calendar, pp166): “The Greeks of the classic age had no symbol for zero,
because their numeral system did not require a zero place…Nevertheless,
Euro-centric scholars long assumed that the symbol for zero was invented by the
Greeks, with no proof at all, speculating that it came from the Greek letter
omicron-O-the first letter in the word ouden, meaning ‘empty’. But
this unwarranted belief that Indians could not have come up with such a basic
concept has given way to recognition that ancient Greeks did not really use such
a symbols for zero, and that Indian mathematicians seem independently to have
invented the dot and then the round goose-egg symbol.”
Appendix
V Plotinus: A Greek Vedantin Plotinus (born at Lycopolis, in Upper Egypt
in 204 BC).
Plotinus
studied the very best of philosophy available at the Alexandria University. He
was not satisfied with that and even went to Iran with an Invading Army of the
Roman Emperor Gordian. Finally he wrote his books on the subject of Atman and
Brahman. His pupil Porphyry edited them in fifty-four treatises. After the
destruction of Alexandria University, the books survived as Arabic translation
and later translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1492. It was later
translated into Greek by Basel in 1580.
Plotinus
writes “Many are the ways by which to reach the goal of spiritual attainment:
that love of Beauty which inebriates the poet; that devotion to the one and that
cognitive ascent which represent the aspiration of the philosopher; that love
and those prayers by means of which spirits full of devotion and ardour, in all
their moral purity, aspire to perfection. There are the Great main ways which
lead to the peak, beyond the earthly, the actual and the particular, where we
can raise ourselves up into the immediate presence of the infinite which bursts
forth in all its radiance from the depths of the soul.” (Quoted as the opening
page in, Essence & Purpose of Yoga, by Raphael, Element Books Ltd, Dorset,
UK, 1996)
This
paragraph summarizes what we understand today by Advaita Vedanta. It is clear
that Plotinus’s understanding of Advaitic philosophy was more profound than
that of Plato. He admits the insolubility of human reason of the basic
metaphysical problem i.e. how becoming arose out of immutable being (Brahman)
and plurality out of Unity. He also asserts that ‘the highest principle has
neither thought nor consciousness, so the nous, which is purely
contemplative, has no reflective logical thought. This is the work of the world
soul (Paramatma), which is the link between the intelligible and the phenomenal
world. Matter is conceived by Plotinus not exactly as an emanation from the
world-soul, but rather in the guise of a receptive or passive principle (Prakriti)
in contrast to the formative or active (Prusha).”
Plotinus
is considered founder of what is called Neo-Platonism. He even conceived of
founding an ideal city to be named Plutonia, but it could not materialize. Later
his work would be translated into Arabic after the fall of Alexandria. His works
along with similar other philosophical works, after translation into Arabic,
helped in the growth of Sufi mysticism, which was also inspired directly by
Sanskrit texts from India. (www.britannica.com).
Appendix VI Plutarch on
re-birth
In
the Moralia, Plutarch, the famous Alexandrian scholar, expresses a belief in
reincarnation. This indicates the influence of prevailing Hindu ideas on him.
His letter of consolation to his wife, after the death of their two-year-old
daughter, gives us a glimpse of his philosophy:
"The soul, being eternal, after
death is like a caged bird that has been released. If it has been a long time in the body, and has become tame
by many affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take another body and
once again become involved in the troubles of the world. The worst thing about
old age is that the soul's memory of the other world grows dim, while at the
same time its attachment to things of this world becomes so strong that the soul
tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But that soul which remains only a short time within a body,
until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers its fire and goes on to
higher things." (www.britannica.com)
Appendix
VII Indian Influences on Greece
before Pythagoras
Cremation
of the dead is one of the most characteristic features of Indian or Hindu
civilization. Hindu (Sanatana), Buddhist, Jain and Sikhs cremate their dead.
Passages from Homer indicate that Greeks also cremated their dead for some
period before 6th century BC. Cremation is more advanced form of
disposal of the dead; as the West is advancing, more and more people are now
cremating their dead in the West. Therefore it is interesting to note that
Greeks did adopt cremation even if for a short period. The following passage has
been quoted from ‘The Greek View of Life’ by G. L. Dickinson; Methuen &
Co., London, 18th Ed, 1938.
“Let
us take another passage from Homer to illustrate the same point. It is a place
where Achilles is endeavouring to light the funeral pyre of Patroclus, but
because there is no wind the fire will not catch….’standing aside from the
pyre he prayed to the two winds of North and West, and promised them fair
offerings, and pouring large libations from a golden cup besought them to come,
that the corpse might blaze up speedily in the fire, and the wood make haste to
be enkindled.’ …’So all night drave they the flame of the pyre together
blowing shrill; and all night fleet Achilles, holding a two handled cup, drew
wine (madhu) from a golden bowl, and poured it forth and drenched the earth,
calling upon the spirit of hapless Patroclus.’ …’But at the hour when the
morning star goeth forth to herald light upon the earth, the star that
saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and spreadeth over the sea salt, then grew
the burning faint and the flame died down.’
(Iliad, xxiii, 193. Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers.)”
Also
interesting to note here is the mention of ‘saffron’ colour, which has a
special importance in Indian culture and is symbolic of Indian culture whether
(Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism). In fact saffron and red were considered the
colour of spirituality in ancient Greek civilization as well (pp. 12, Dickinson,
ibid.) The ritual of pitri-tarpan
was prevalent in the Homeric Greece as well. “ The family centered in the
hearth, where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered sacrifice and
prayer to the ancestors of the house,” (p.11, Ibid.). It is a common practice
that the head of the family is the karta (priest) of major yajnas and
rituals along with his wife. The Brahmin who comes to help is actually not the
real priest but he comes to help the house-holder in performance of the rites by
narrating the steps, e.g. now do this, now do that etc. It is more than likely
that the Christian tradition of calling the priest as father came from the Hindu
tradition of the father of the family presiding at the religious rites. Hinduism
was definitely the principal religion in Europe at the time when Christianity
was absorbing the masses. Christian theology strongly asserts that the word
father always means biological father and not the spi ritual guide. It is
because of this reason that Jesus is considered the biological Son of God, as
Jesus calls God his father. But in the case of priests this question of
biological father-hood is not raised, and it is a contradiction in Christianity.
In fact, Pope also literally means father (papa).
Hindu influences on Greek Gods
- Greeks held the same view of
nature as the earliest Vedic hymns do. “Every power of nature he presumes to
be a spiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter, the
sea as Poseidon.” See this description of Vedic Rudra in Odyssey (v, 282), “
With that he gathered the clouds and troubled the waters of the deep, grasping
his trident in his hands; and he roused all storms of all manners of winds.”
(Ibid, p.5).
The
ancient Greeks called themselves the Hellenes. This could have been a
modification of Sanskrit word ‘hiranya’ as we see that the Vedic people were
highly influenced by the concept of Hiranya-garbha. Zeus was the sky-god (dyuh
in Sanskrit). Athene was the goddess of war and wisdom, while by her table sat
her favourite bird, an owl (The Story of Greece, by Mary Macgregor; Thomas
Nelson and Sons Ltd, Edinburgh, 1960). It seems that the Greeks fused the Durga,
Sarasvati and Lakshmi into one as Athena. Poseidon
was the sea-god (Varuna in Vedic literature) who lived in a palace beneath the
waves of the ocean. Pluto (? Sanskrit preta) was the guardian of Hades, the dark
and gloomy kingdom of the dead, beneath the earth (Ibid. p.3). This Pluto could
have been none other than the Yama of Vedic literature. Another Greek god Pan
was a protector of animals and shepherds and was half man, half goat. Protector
of folks means Prajapati, and we know from Indian mythology that Daksha
was a Prajapati with half man, half goat features after he was punished by
Shiva. The god Helios was Vedic Hari. And in the same way we find lots of
similarities between Vedic religion and the religion of the Homeric Greeks.
Appendix
VIII Status of Sufism in contemporary Islam
Sufism
contains a lot of spiritual, occultist and cosmological beliefs and practices,
which had over flown from India and survived in Egyptian (Alexandrian as well as
others), Greek, Persian, Buddhist and Sanskrit (Indian) texts. Orthodox Muslims
did not accept these ideas initially and in fact a large number of Sufis were
killed for their faith. Most famous of all is Mansur bin Hallaz. He claimed
‘an al Haq’ (I am the Reality/God), and his claim cost his life. Mainstream
contemporary Muslims do not accept Sufism as an Islamic thought and its
interpretation of Koran is not considered acceptable by the orthodox Muslims.
Appendix
IX A Note on Calendar:
Western
scholars have a tendency to ascribe any discovery by the ancients to Greece, and
if that is not possible then to ascribe it to Mesopotamia. In that attempt,
Western historians have always said that Indians got their calendar from the
Babylonians. Important to consider here is that ‘A’ can borrow something
from ‘B’ only if ‘B’ had it. We will briefly review the calendars of
various civilizations to refute this false claim of the Western historians.
Points
to note regarding Indian calendar: 1) Hindus
runs two types of calendars simultaneously. The solar calendar is exactly of the
same length as the modern International Calendar and the New Years day falls
exactly on the 13th or 14th of April (Vaishakhi) depending
on the leap year of the International era. Lunar calendar follows the lunar
months, but after about two and a half years an extra month is inserted to
restore the synchronicity of the lunar and solar calendars.
There
is no drift of solar Vaishakha and lunar vaishakh, and vishakha nakshatra over a
long period. 2)
One can easily convert any Indian year into Georgian year, i.e. no drift
between Georgian and Indian calendars occur over years, going back up to the 6th
century BC. Hence the length of year is quite equal to the International year.
It also proves that the same length of year was used even in the 6th
century BC. Hence any Babylonian influence has got to have come before that. But
before that period the Babylonians had a very primitive calendar, which was not
accurate in length. We have accurate
Indian chronologies only through the Sri Lankan sources, which have preserved
Indian history only in reference to Buddha. Indian history in India was
thoroughly destroyed by Turko-Afghan invaders. Hence we cannot know any accurate
Indian chronology before the time of Buddha. 3)
The Indian calendars are widely
followed in the South-East Asia and must be quite old. One cannot claim that the
SE Asia also had links with Greeks or Babylonians. 4)
The claims that the Babylonians
invented the modern calendar is false because the Babylonians could not have
calculated the exact lengths of time in the absence of any efficient mathematics
and number system. India had both and therefore, she is the most likely
candidate to have accurately calculated the length of year. 5)
We know from the inscriptions
that the Pre-Iranian (pre-Medes) Babylonia, i.e. in the 7th century
BC, had a very primitive calendar. Hence question of them having invented the
modern calendar is imaginary and biased. Therefore, India could not have got it
from them. 6)
Mesha, vrisha, crocodile,
scorpion etc fit well into Indian fauna and naming of zodiacal signs after them
is more probably Indian than European. Indian solar calendar is based on the
signs of zodiac. When sun enters any new sign of zodiac a new month starts. 7)
The
word Kalend or calendar itself is of Indian origin. Kala means time in Sanskrit
and Tamil. Otherwise, calendar is meaningless etymologically in any European
language. (Kala has no cognate word in any of the European languages and Western
linguists consider it a Dravidian word.)
Babylonian
Calendar Ancient
Babylonians followed a lunar calendar of 354 days. Around 432 BC, after they
were made a part of the Persian Empire, they developed a calendar, which
involved 19 yearly cycles. First 7 years of 13 lunar months was followed by 12
years comprising 12 lunar months. This later became known as Metonic cycle after
the Greek astronomer Meton (5th century BC), but had originated in
China.
Sumerian
Calendar In
21st century BC, Sumerians developed a calendar consisting of a year
of 360 days, with 12 months of 30 days each. It drifted against solar cycle by
more than 5 days every year.
Jewish
Calendar The
Jewish year is a lunar year of 354 days. An extra month is intercalated every
three years, just before the month of Nisan. But the year still drifts and needs
addition of an extra month every now and then by the Jewish elders. (Although
this is what Duncan says about the Jewish calendar, I had a word about the
Jewish calendar with a Rabbi at Luton, who informed me that the Jewish calendar
follows a cycle of twelve years with 12 lunar months followed by seven years
with 13 lunar months. It is possible that different Jewish communities may be
following different systems.)
Chinese
Calendar In
c. 2357 BC Emperor Yao began a calendar which was essentially lunar but Seven
months were added to the year every 19 years. With further experiments, it
eventually became Metonic (vide supra).
Greek
Calendar Greeks
had a standard lunar calendar of 354 days. To it they added 90 days every eight
years as haphazardly inserted months.
Roman
Calendar The
mythic Roman king Romulus founded the city of Rome and also began the Roman
calendar in 753 BC—the first year of Roman calendar, called ab urbe condita (AUC).
This year of 10 months totalled 304 days in a year. The names of the months were
Martis, Aprilis, Maius, Junius (these four months were after the names of gods),
Quintilis (fifth), Sextilis (sixth), September (seventh), October (eighth),
November (ninth), December (tenth). The days of the month were all named and not
numbered. This cumbersome Roman system of naming the dates (e.g. 11 March as
Five Ides) lasted in Europe till as late as seventeenth century.
King
Numa in c. 700 BC added two more months, January and February (the eleventh and
twelfth months), to this calendar making it a standard lunar year of 354 days.
Then he added one more day to the last month to make the year of 355 days (as
even numbers were considered ominous in Rome).
But this year was running too fast against the solar cycle. Later they
started adding one extra month every two years. This made the calendar too slow.
Then the Romans adapted the Greek calendar, adding three extra months every
eight years, which gave an average of 365-day year.
When Julius Caesar concurred Egypt, he came to know the Egyptian calendar. He
introduced this calendar of 365 days and six hours in his empire in 46 BC,
although the names of the Roman months were kept intact.
The
Ancient Egypt and development of Modern Calendar
In
about 4000 BC Egyptians developed a calendar of 365 days. It was a calendar of
12 months of 30 days each and an additional 5 days at the end to commemorate the
gods. (Maya of America also had a calendar of 18 months of 20 days, to which
they added five days at the end). This year slowly drifted to complete a cycle
over 1,460 years. The
Egyptians knew that this year of 365 days was short by about one fourth of a
day. But because of the resistance by the priests, no change was made. When
Alexander concurred Egypt, the new rulers, the Ptolemies adopted the old
Egyptian calendar, and did not impose the Greek calendar. In 238 BC, Ptolemy
III, the king of Egypt, ordered for introduction of an extra day to be inserted
every fourth year—the leap year.
When
the Roman emperor returned to Rome after concurring Egypt, he decided to
introduce the Egyptian calendar to Rome. Caesar called the best of
mathematicians and philosophers, including the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes
to discuss the calendric reforms. The vernal equinox and the winter solstice,
the two most important pagan-Mithraic festivals should fall on the 25th
March and 25th December respectively, as per tradition of that time.
But they had drifted far away. (Probably these festivals were imported from
Indo-Iran, where solstices and equinoxes had fixed dates in the year; and when
these festivals came to Rome, in the absence of an accurate calendar, they
drifted in the year. By the time of Julius Caesar, they had drifted by about 80
days, indicating that more than 320 years had passed since the festivals were
borrowed into Europe.)
Julius
Caesar decided to end the confusion. He added two extra intercalary months apart
from the one regular intercalary month to the year 46 BC. That year ended up
having 446 days and 15 months. This was officially called ‘the last year of
confusion’, but public simply called it ’the year of confusion’. When he
added two extra months to year 46 BC, Julius Caesar had to bring the beginning
of year from March to January for 45 BC in order not to create havoc in the
mercantile world and taxations. Thence, December became the twelfth month of the
year instead of being the tenth month. Julius Caesar to make changes in the
number of days. He organised the 12 months as alternating 31 and 30 days, with
the exception of February, which had 29 days in a normal year and 30 days in a
leap year. The senate changed the name of the month Quintalis to July in respect
of Julius Caesar. After the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, people started
making leap years in three years instead of four until 8 BC. It was the reign of
Emperor Augustus that this fault was detected. He ordered for its correction.
The senate changed the name the month Sextilis to August, to honour the emperor.
But this month had only 30 days. It was considered disrespectful for the Emperor
Augustus to have a month in his name with only 30 days. Therefore one day was
snatched from February and added to the month of August. Now it resulted in
July, August and September, three in a row having 31 days. Making September and
November of 30 days and October and December of 31 days solved this problem.
When
the Roman Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity, this pagan Julian calendar
was imposed to Christianity. Earlier Christians followed various types of
calendars, all lunar. When this Julian calendar was imposed on to them, they did
not know the date of birth of Christ in this system. And the Christian
mathematics was not developed enough to back calculate the corresponding date
from the Jewish calendar. The most popular festival of the pagan Romans, the
birthday of sun god, the 25th December was accepted as the birthday
of Christ by the Roman Emperor. Similarly Easter, the day of death of Jesus was
decided to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the
spring equinox, completely ignoring the existing Judo-Christian tradition’s
dates of their lunar calendar. This calendar was still wrong by a few minutes
every year. It was in the thirteenth century that Indian number system and
mathematics reached Europe. Only then it was appreciated that the calendar had
drifted by many days over a thousand years. Then the mathematicians and
astronomers had to struggle to have calendar reformed. But the Christian
orthodoxy considered all such attempts blasphemous. It was as late as 16th
century that the Pope Gregory VIII became convinced about the flaws of the
calendar and appointed calendar commission in 1581. On the basis of the
recommendations, 10 days were lost forever. After the night of 4th
October 1582 came the morning of15th October 1582. The February month
of the century years e.g. 1700, 1800, etc were to have only 28 days and not 29
days. But years 1600, 2000, e tc, multiple of 400 will be leap years having a
February of 29 days. Not every body accepted it immediately. Last to accept the
loss of 10 days were Russians, who accepted it after communist revolution and
the Chinese Christians, who accepted it in 1949.
It is the biggest joke to say that the Indian luni-solar calendar is
borrowed from the Babylonians who never had any scientific calendar. Equally
laughable is the claim of the Western historians (including AL Basham) that the
Indian solar calendar was imported into India during Gupta period from Western
contact!! Which West? Which was in its darkest age and still confused about
calendar and calculation of time? On the other hand the Indian festivals and
months have not drifted against seasons at all over several millennia.
Appendix
X Other Indian Contributions to the World We
have discussed about mathematics including algebra, trigonometry, geometry,
numerals etc. We have also discussed astronomy and cosmology. Linguistics and
phonetics is another scientific Indian contribution to the West (The Cambridge
Encyclopaedia of Language, David Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p
405) The studies in Samaveda prove that the seven notes of music is an Indian
invention, which was not known to the West before Pythagoras.
We
have also noted that trade in Hindu slave dancer girls contributed to
development of western dances. A L Basham lists India’s contribution to World:
rice, cotton, sugar cane, many spices, domestic fowl (chicken), game of chess
etc. “The heterodox Jewish sect of the Essence, which influenced early
Christianity followed monastic practices similar to Buddhism. Parallels may be
traced between passages in New Testament and the Pali (and Upanishad)
literature. Similarities between the teachings of western philosophers and
mystics from Pythagoras to Plotinus and those of Upanishad have been
noticed…We can say that there was always some contact between the Hellenistic
world and India, mediated first by the Achaemenid empire, then by the Seleucids
and finally under the Romans, by the traders of the Indian Ocean. Christianity
began to spread when this contact was the closest. We know that the Indian
ascetics occasionally visited the West, and that there was a colony of Indian
merchants at Alexandria.” (The Wonder That was India, A L Basham, p 485-6)
It
has been shown that much of Arabic and Persian fiction literature (like, Arabian
Nights, Kissa Chahar Dervish, etc) are translations of Sanskrit and Pali story
literature, e.g. Kathasaritsagar, Panchatantra and Hitopadesha etc. This
literature was again translated from Arabic to Latin giving rise to Esop’s
fables etc. In this way Indian literature contributed to the growth of world’s
fiction literature.
Appendix
XI A note on Theocracy (Theocracy has
been the most successful enemy of freethinking. Freethinking is essential for
exploring reality and thereby growth of knowledge. Hence theocracy usually is
inimical to knowledge. It is therefore, appropriate to discuss a few words about
theocracy here.) Theocratic state is a state, which is controlled by the priests
and theologians. The
Egyptian pharaohs were considered the ‘god on earth’. The king was helped by
a host of priests. Egyptian state was therefore theocratic theoretically, but
still the king was more powerful than the priests and could take independent
decisions and it was not a total theocracy. Pre-Christian Roman emperors held
the title of head-priest (pontifex maximus) and performed religious
functions as well. Priests had a good say in administrative matters. But the
emperor could do many things independently and introduce new things, as Julius
Caesar did. On analysis, this was also not a hundred percent theocracy. The
Jewish holy-book Torah is translated into English as ‘the Laws’. A priest,
Rabbi, is an expert on the ‘laws’ and only he can decide the legal matters.
The training in theology or priest-hood involves training in the holy law and
even when the Jews were not formed into a state, the verdict of Rabbi would be a
binding to a Jew in most of the matters. This is an example of theocracy where
priests administer Judiciary and law. When the Roman emperor adopted
Christianity, a mixture of Jewish and earlier Roman system was introduced. The
Pope was the emperor as well as the head-priest. But now, the Pope had to be
trained in the theology and pass all the theological examination and cross the
ladders of hierarchy of the Church before becoming the Pope. Law, justice,
administration, taxation and education were all within absolute control of the
Church. This system was a complete theocracy. It still exists in the Vatican.
Koran
is the word of God and it deals with a lot of matters related to succession, law
and criminal justice. The words of God cannot be changed. Therefore the Koranic
laws are unchangeable. Hence an Islamic state requires scholars of Islam to
administer justice. Wherever a confusion or controversy arises, a decree (fatwa)
may be issued by the committee of the Ulema (scholars of Islam). In Islam, state
and religion are inseparable. The state has got to be controlled by religion.
Hinduism and Buddhism as religions do not control the state. Religion does not
prescribe the punishments etc for crime. State and the religion are actually
entirely independent. In fact, an organised Church with a hierarchical structure
never existed among the Hindus. Priests are more like private practitioners who
may be invited for performance of certain rituals by the client. The basic
relation between a priest and a householder is that of a specialist or
professional and a client. Hence the priest is not entitled to do anything more
than what he has been asked to do. He will advise only on those matters for
which an advice has been sought and he receives his fee. If the householder does
not like his advice, he may consult another practitioner. In other instances,
priests are employed in the temples to keep the deity clean and looked after.
There is no way a priest can control the state. In this system th ere is no
scope for growth of theocracy. This is one of the reasons for development of
sciences in ancient India.
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