Talk:Jyotisha:Modern Discoveries in Ancient Works

By Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swami

A few scientific discoveries are not mentioned in Varāhamihira's Bṛhat-Saṃhitā.

How do heavenly bodies remain in the skies? How do they not fall? People in the West think Newton found the answer to such questions. The very first stanza in the Sūryasiddhānta, an ancient treatise, states that the force of attraction keeps the Earth from falling.

In Śaṅkara's commentary on the Upaniṣad-s, there is a reference to the Earth's force of attraction. If we throw an object, it falls to the ground. This is not due to the nature of the object but due to the Earth's force of attraction. Ākaraṣaṇa-śakti is a force of attraction, the power of drawing or pulling something. The breath called prāṇa goes up, and apāna pulls it down. So the force that pulls something downward is apāna. Śrī Śaṅkara Bhagavatpāda says the Earth has apāna-śakti. The Praśnopaniṣad (3.8) states: “The deity of the Earth inspires the human body with apāna.” In his commentary on this, Śaṅkara observes that, just as an object thrown up is attracted by the Earth, so prāṇa that goes up is pulled down by apāna. This means that our Upaniṣad-s contain a reference to the law of gravitation. There are many such precious truths embedded in our ancient śāstra-s. Because of our ignorance of them, we show inordinate respect for ideas propounded by foreigners—ideas known to us many centuries before their discovery by them. Jyotiṣa is also as old as the Veda-s and foresaw the mathematical systems prevalent in the world today.

At the beginning of the kalpa, all graha-s were in alignment. But over the ages, they have changed their courses. When another kalpa commences, they will again remain in alignment.

The saṃkalpa we make before the performance of any ritual contains a description of the cosmos, a reference to the time cycle, and so on. All this is part of Jyotiṣa.

Centuries ago, we knew not only about the Earth's force of attraction but also about its revolution around the Sun. Āryabhaṭa, Varāhamihira, and others spoke of the heliocentric system long before Western astronomers or scientists. Until the 16th century, people in Europe believed that the Earth remained still at the center of the universe and that the Sun revolved around it.

They further believed that this was how day and night were created. If anybody expressed a different view, he was burned at the stake by the religious leaders.

“It is the Earth that revolves around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth,” declared Āryabhaṭa. He used a beautiful term to describe the logic behind his view: laghava-gaurava-nyāya. Laghu means light, small, etc., and laghava is derived from it. The opposite of laghu is guru—weighty, big, etc. Guru also denotes a weighty personality, a great man, like an ācārya or teacher, one who has mastered a śāstra. If the ācārya is guru, the disciple must be laghu. The student is small and “light” compared to his guru. So he goes round the latter. This is based on laghava-gaurava-nyāya. By adducing this reason for the Earth going round the Sun, Āryabhaṭa combined science with a traditional śāstric belief.

In the old days, religious leaders in Europe were opposed to science and even burned scientists as heretics. But today we join the descendants of the very same people to make the preposterous charge that the Hindu religion stood in the way of scientific advancement, that it ignored the matters of this world because it was concerned with the other world. Our traditional śāstra-s are a storehouse of science.

“The Sun remains still and it is the Earth that goes round it. It is only because the Earth revolves around the Sun that it seems to us that the Sun rises every day in the east and sets in the west.” This is mentioned in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa of the Ṛgveda. The text says clearly: “The Sun neither rises nor sets.”

That all learned people in India knew about the Earth's revolution is shown by a passage in the Śivotkarṣa-Mañjarī by Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, who was the minister of Tirumala Nāyaka. One stanza in this work begins like this: Bhūmir bhramayati, and from it we must also gather that the author’s great-uncle, Appayya Dīkṣita, also knew about this truth. What is the content of this verse?

Śiva is called Aṣṭamūrti. Earth, water, air, fire, space, the Sun and the Moon, the yajamāna or sacrificer—they are all the personification (mūrti) of Īśvara. Among them, only the yajamāna has no bhramaṇa or motion. All the rest have bhramaṇa, says Appayya Dīkṣita. That he has said so is mentioned in the verse in question by his younger brother’s grandson, Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita.

We see that air has movement, that fire does not remain still, and that water keeps flowing. When we look up into the sky, we notice that the Sun and the Moon do not remain fixed in their spots. As for space, it is filled with sound, and it cannot be still. But the Earth stands still. Even so, says Appayya Dīkṣita, it has motion. “It revolves.”

Let us now consider the shape of the Earth. Europeans claim that they were the first to discover that the Earth is like a ball, that in the past it had been thought to be flat like a plate. All right. What word do we use for “geography”? Bhūgola-śāstra, not just bhū-śāstra. We have known from early times that the Earth is a globe, a sphere.

We call the universe with all its galaxies Brahmāṇḍa. It means the egg created by Brahmā (the cosmic egg). An egg is not exactly spherical, but oval. According to modern science, the universe is also oval. The cosmos is always in motion, so observe modern astronomers. Jagat is the word by which we have known it from Vedic times. What does the word mean? That which does not stand still but is always in motion, that which “is going.”

In our country, too, some people refused to believe that the Earth rotates on its axis. I will tell you the view of one such school of thought. The Earth's circumference is about 25,000 miles. So if it rotates once in 24 hours, then it means it rotates more than 1,000 miles an hour, or 16 or 17 miles in one minute. Those who did not accept the fact of the Earth's rotation tried to prove their point thus: “There is a tree in Mylapore [in Madras]. Imagine there is a crow perched on one of its branches. It leaves its perch this moment and soars high, and by the next minute, it perches itself again on the branch of the same tree in Mylapore. If the rotation of the Earth were a fact, how would this be possible? The crow should have descended to a place 16 or 17 miles away from where it had started.”

I have not checked on how this argument was answered. But when I asked people who know modern science, they said: “Surrounding the Earth for some 200 miles is its atmosphere. Beyond that, there are other spheres. When the Earth rotates, these too rotate with it.” I may have gone slightly wrong in stating the view of modern science. However it be, there is no doubt that when the Earth rotates, its atmosphere also rotates with it.

What are called Arabic numerals belong to India. This fact was discovered by Westerners themselves. The zero is also our contribution, and without it, mathematics would not have made any advances. Bhāskarācārya established the subtle truth that any quantity divided by zero is infinity (ananta). He concludes one of his mathematical treatises with a benedictory verse in which he relates zero to the Ultimate Reality.

When the divisor goes on decreasing, the quotient keeps increasing, does it not? If you divide 16 by 8, the quotient is 2; if the same quantity is divided by 4, the result is 4. Divided by 2, the quotient is 8. Divided by zero? The quotient will be infinity. Whatever the number is divided by, the result will be infinity if the divisor is 0. Bhāskarācārya gives it the name of kha-hāra. Kham means zero, hāram means division. Bhāskarācārya says: “I pay obeisance to the Paramātman that is Ananta.”