* THE SULBA-S UTRAS

Mathematical ideas were explored in more concrete detail in some of the ancillary 1 works classied as Ved an . gas, limbs of the Vedas, mentioned in section 1.3 phonetics, grammar, etymology, metrics, astronomy and calendrics, and ritual practice. This section examines mathematics in Ved an . ga texts on ritual practice, which specied the details of performing the various ceremonies and sacrices to the gods. These texts ruti 2 and describing major ceremonies, or as perwere classied either as pertaining to s 3 taining to smr . ti and explaining the routine customs and observances to be maintained in individual households. The former type included the regular re sacrices performed at particular times of the year and the month, as well as special rituals sponsored by high-ranking individuals for particular aims, such as wealth, military victory, or heaven in the afterlife. Some of the ritual practice texts explained how the different types or goals of sacrices were associated with different sizes and shapes of re altars, which were to be constructed from baked bricks of prescribed numbers and dimensions. 4 The footprints for the altars were laid out on leveled ground by manipulating cords of various lengths attached to stakes. The manuals described the required manipulations in terse, cryptic phrases usually prose, although sometimes including verses called ulba or s utras, literally string or rule, instruction). 5 The measuring-cords, called s ulva, gave their name to this set of texts, the Sulba-s s utras, or Rules of the cord. 6 Many of the altar shapes involved simple symmetrical gures such as squares and rectangles, triangles, trapezia, rhomboids, and circles. Frequently, one such shape was required to be transformed into a different one of the same size. Hence, the Sulba-s utra rules often involve what we would call area-preserving transformations of plane gures, and thus include the earliest known Indian versions of certain geometric formulas and constants. How this ritual geometry became integrated with the process of sacricial offerings is unknown. Did its mathematical rules emerge through attempts to represent
*

Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India, Princeton and Oxford, 2009, pp. 16 19. Ved an . ga, : One of the six six limbs, or suporting disciplines of the sacred Vedas. veda, : knowledge, true or sacred knowledge or lore, knowledge of ritual. ruti, : Sacred texts ascribed to divine revelation, such as the Vedas; literally, hearing. s smr . ti, : Sacred texts ascribed to human authorship; literally, remembering. Cf. Kim Plofker,Mathematics in India, in: Katz, Victor, ed. The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam. A Sourcebook, Princeton University Press, 2007, 385 514, esp. p. 387: Part of the Vedic limb of ritual practice, these works contained rules for laying and building brick altars used for re-sacrices in this period. Certain shapes and sizes of re-altars were associated with particular gifts that the sacricer desired from the gods: he who desires heaven is to construct a re-altar in the form of a falcon; a re-altar in the form of a tortoise is to be constructed by one desiring to win the world of Brahman; those who wish to destroy existing and future enemies should construct a re-altar in the form of a rhombus (Sen, S. N., and Bag. A. K. The Sulbas utras. New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1983 [SenBa1983] 86, 98, 111). , : A rule or algorithm, literally. thread. sutra S utra literally means a thread or line that holds things together, and more metaphorically refers to an aphorism (or line, rule, formula), or a collection of such aphorisms in the form of a manual. It is derived from the verbal root siv-, meaning to sew (these words, including Latin suere and English to sew, all ultimately deriving from PIE *siH-/syuH - to sew) [en.wiki]. : A measuring cord. ulba, s / : Ancient ritual geometry text on the construction of re altars. , Sulba-s utra

2 3 4

The Sulba-s utras cosmic entities physically and spatially in ritual? 7 Or conversely, was existing geometric knowledge consciously incorporated into ritual practice to symbolize universal truth or to induce a satori state of mind in the participants through perception of spatial relationships? No contemporary text can decide these questions for us: the concise Sulba-s utras themselves are mostly limited to essential denitions and instructions, and the earliest surviving commentaries on them are many centuries later than the s utras, which in turn are doubtless later than the mathematical knowledge contained in them. The rest of the historical context of the Sulba-s utras is also rather vague. The ritual practice text corpora to which they belong are ascribed to various ancient sages about whom no other information survives. The best-known Sulba-s utras are attributed ), M ), Apastamba to authors named Baudh ayana ( anava ( ), and K ), in approximately chronological ( aty ayana ( order. They are assigned this order on the basis of the style and grammar of the language of their texts: those of Baudh ayana and M anava seem to be roughly contemporary with Middle Vedic Br ahman a works composed perhaps in 800 500 BCE, while the Sulba. s utra of K aty ayana appears to post-date the great grammatical codication of Sanskrit by P an ini in probably the mid-fourth century BCE. Nothing else is known, and not . much can be guessed, about the lives of these texts authors or the circumstances of their composition. 8 The Sulba-s utras, like other manuals on ritual procedure, were intended for the use of the priestly Br ahman . a families whose hereditary profession it was to conduct the major sacricial rituals. But since animal sacrice and consequently most of the re altar rituals were eventually abandoned in mainstream Indian religion, and since there are few archaeological traces of ancient re altars, it is not certain how the prescribed procedures were typically enacted in practice. 9 The Sulba-s utra texts 10 include basic metrology for specifying the dimensions of bricks and altars. Among the standard units are the a ngula or digit (said to be equal to fourteen millet grains), the elbow-length or cubit (twenty-four digits), and the man-height (from feet to upraised hands, dened as ve cubits). 11 As early as the Baudh ayana- sulba-s utra, methods are described for creating the right-angled corners
7

10

11

This is the hypothesis of, for example, [Sei1978], in which a prehistoric ritual origin for Eurasian geometry traditions is reconstructed from ideas of the sky as a circle, the earth as a square, and so on. And [Sta1999] amplies this thesis for a potential Indo-European ancestor of both Indian and Greek geometry, based on the ritual associations of both Sulba-s utra techniques and the altar of Delos legend of the cube duplication problem. See [SenBa1983]. pp. 2 5. It is suggested in [Pin1981a], pp. 4 5. that the Apastamba and K aty avana Sulba-s utras predate that of M anava. In [Kak2000a]. a much earlier date for Sulba-s utra works is inferred by linking them to astrochronological speculations (see section 2.3). An archaeological site containing one large brick altar in the traditional shape of a bird with outstret ched wings, but differing markedly from the numerical specications described in the Sulba-s utra texts, has been dated to the second century BCE; [Pin1981a]. p. 4, n. 19. And a long-lived South Indian tradition of re altar construction is attested at the present day in [Sta1983] and in [Nam2002]. But since both of these may have originated in a form of Vedic revivalism in some post-Vedic period rather than in a continuous ritual praxis going hack to the composition of the Sulba-s utras, we cannot be sure how far either of them represents the original tradition of re-altar geometry. In [SarE1999], pp. 10 11. such a lapse and revival in the abovementioned South Indian ritual tradition after about the fourth century CE are mentioned. For an edition and annotated English translation of the four major Sulba-s utra works, see [SenBa1983], on whose edition the following translations are based. S utras 1.1-1.2, 1.4-1.13, and 2.12.12 of the Baudh ayana- sulba-s utra are quoted and commented on in [Plo2007b)], pp. 387 393. An earlier study of Sulba-s utra mathematics is [Dat1993]. See the various metrological s utras in Baudh ayana- sulba-s utra 1.3, [SenBa1983]. pp. 17 (text). 77

 The Sulba-s utras of a square or rectangle, constructing a square with area equal to the sum or difference of two given squares, and transforming a square with area preservation into a rectangle (or vice versa), into a trapezium, triangle or rhombus, or into a circle (or vice versa). In the process, it is explicitly recognized that the square on the diagonal of a given square contains twice the original area: and more generally that the squares on the width and the length of any rectangle add up to the square on its diagonal (the so-called Pythagorean theorem). 12 Samples of such rules from various gulba-slitra texts are cited in the following part of this section, along with some of their procedures for more elaborate altar constructions.

Figure 2.1 Determining the east-west line with shadows cast by a stake.

The preliminary step is the drawing of a baseline running east and west. We do not know for sure how this was accomplished in the time of the early Sulba-s utra authors, but the later K aty ayana- sulba-s utra prescribes using the shadows of a gnomon or vertical rod set up on a at surface, as follows: Fixing a stake on level [ground and] drawing around [it] a circle with a cord xed to the stake, one sets two stakes where the [morning and afternoon] shadow of the stake tip falls [on the circle]. That [line between the two] is the east-west line. Making two loops [at the ends] of a doubled cord, xing the two loops on the [east and west] stakes, [and] stretching [the cord] southward in the middle, [x another] stake there; likewise [stretching it] northward: that is the north-south line. (K aSS 1.2) The rst part of the procedure is illustrated in gure 2.1, where the base of the gnomon is at the point O in the center of a circle drawn on the ground. 13 At some time in the morning the gnomon will cast a shadow OM whose tip falls on the circle at point
(translation); M anava- sulba-s utra 4.4-6, [SenBa1983], pp. 60. 128; Apastamba- sulba-s utra 15.4, [SenBa1983]. pp. 49, 113; K aty ayana- sulba-s utra 5.8-9. [SenBa1983]. pp. 57, 124. Baudh ayana- sulba-s utra 1-2; [SenBa1983], pp. 17 19 (text), 77 80 (translation). Henceforth the Sulba-s utra citations will be conned to identifying the text and s utra in the edition of [SenBa1983]. The abbreviations used for the text names are listed on page xiii. Note that the text itself is purely verbal and contains no diagrams. This gure and all the remaining gures and tables in this chapter are just modern constructs to help explain the mathematical rules.

12

13

The Sulba-s utras M, and at some time in the afternoon the gnomon will cast a shadow OA that likewise touches the circle. The line between points A and M will run approximately east-west. Then a cord is attached to stakes at the east and west points, and its midpoint is pulled southward, creating an isosceles triangle whose base is the east-west line. Another triangle is made in the same way by stretching the cord northward. The line connecting the tips of the two triangles is a perpendicular bisector running north and south.

Figure 1. Finding the cardinal direction (Neugebauer 1971).

The procedure to determine the cardinal directions is illustrated in Fig. 1. G is the foot of the gnomon. The path of the end of the shadow enters and leaves a circle, center G, at W and E. Then the line EW is in the eastwest direction. With E, W as centers, circular arcs are drawn intersecting at N, S. Then NS, the perpendicular bisector of EW, is in the northsouth direction and intersects the circle at N and S, the north and south points. The east and west points, E and W can be found by the same procedure since they are on the perpendicular bisector of NS. This method depends on the symmetry of the shadow path about the north-south line. It does not take into account the small change in the declination of the sun during the day. Brahmagupta prescribed a correction for this error in the Brahmasphuta Siddh ant . a. This method of nding the cardinal directions, described in the Pan casiddh ant a (written . ik in AD 505 by Var ahamihira), is found in a much earlier treatise, the Sulbas utra, which contains mathematical topics related to the construction of sacricial altars. The Pan casiddh ant a also has an approximate method for nding the meridian direction . ik from any three positions of the shadow. This method assumes that the path of the shadow is a circle, whereas in India, it is a hyperbola. Neugebauer, O. and D. Pingree: The Pan casiddh ant a of Var ahamihira. Copenha. ik gen: Munksgaard, 1970.1972.
George Abraham, Gnomon in India, in: Helaine Selin (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, Heidelberg: Springer, 22008, p. 1035f.

 The Sulba-s utras Our second example concerns the role of geometry in an old Vedic ritual, called Agnicayana 1 . The ritual is at least 2500 years old. In Vedic religion, re, called agni 2 , was worshipped and there was a cult of a plant called soma 3 , probably a hallucinogen. The major Vedic rituals were dedicated to these two: Agni and Soma. We have a very good idea of what these rituals were like, because in 1955 Frits Staal became aware of the fact that this Vedic tradition was still alive in Kerala in southwest India, and in 1975 he documented Agnicayana, the piling of Agni, or, simply, Agni. 4 The Agnicayana is a complex ritual, which is the result of a long development. It takes twelve days of elaborate performances accompanied by recitations. Agni is a god and a divine messenger, who receives offerings during the ritual. Rituals like the Agnicayana are an essential element of Vedic culture and they have to be performed painstakingly according to strict rules.

Fig. 4. Bricks in the second layer of the re altar. [Source: F. Staal 2001]

One of the central elements of the Agnicayana ritual is the building of an altar consisting of ve layers of bricks. The altar has the shape of a bird (Figures 4 and 5) and it is built in the course of the ritual in a precisely prescribed way out of bricks that have precisely prescribed shapes. Staal reports that the 1975 performance of the Agnicayana ritual was followed by a long series of other rites that were performed only to correct mistakes possibly committed in the course of the preceding twelve days [Staal 2001, Vol. I, p. 15]. Figure 4 shows the order in which 57 of the bricks of the second layer are consecrated. These bricks have names. For example, the bricks 2 through 6 are called Skandhya or Shoulder and the bricks 22 through 26 are
1 2

agnicayana, : the building up of the replace. agni, : The word agni is Sanskrit for "re" (noun), cognate with Latin ignis (the root of English ignite), Russian (ogon), Polish ogie, Lithuanian ugnis all with the meaning re , with the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root being hgni-. Agni has three forms: re, lightning and the sun. [en.wiki] soma, : Soma, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *sauma-, was a ritual drink of importance among the early Indo-Iranians, and the later Vedic and greater Persian cultures. The word is derived from an Indo-Iranian root *sav- to press, i.e. *sav-ma- is the drink prepared by pressing the stalks of a plant. The root is probably Proto-Indo-European (*sewh-), and also appears in son (from *suhnu-, pressed out i. e. newly born). Cf. Frits Staal (in collaboration with C. V. Somayajipad and M. Ittio Ravi Nambudiri), Agni. The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, Vols. I an II, Asian Humanities Press, Berkely, 1983 (Reprint: Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2001).

The Sulba-s utras called Vrstisani or Rain bringing. The remaining bricks of this layer are called Space Fillers. Each layer consists of 200 bricks and each layer has an area of 7 1 2 purusas. The word purusa means man. It denotes both the height of a man with his arms stretched upwards (approximately 2.2 m) and an area measure (approximately 2.2 2.2 = 4.84 m2). Except for the vertical passage at the centre of the altar the interstices between bricks of any layer may never be above or under the interstices between bricks of an adjacent layer. This means that one needs two different patterns of bricks: one pattern for the 2nd and 4th layers and one for the 1st, 3rd and 5th layers. Rules like these concern the geometry of the altar and indeed there exists a class of geometrical sacred works, the Sulba Sutras (sulba = cord or rope), that have been called manuals for altar construction. It is not easy to say what exactly the function of this ritual is, but it is clear that, just as in the case of the hypothesis of Clottes and Lewis-Williams, geometrical structures embedded in a context involving other elements are part of an approach to get in touch with the divine.
Mathematics and the Divine. A Historical Study, ed. by Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans, Amsterdam 2005, pp. 7 10 (Introduction).