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There has been many a discussion about Indian thinkers

discovering and inventing things at the same time or


sometimes before their western counterparts. We have
studied about the zero, plastic surgery and all. But I
found something more subtle. While studying for my
post grad, I found a book titled tarka bhasha (a book on
logic). In this book, while discussing the gunas or
attributes of various sense organs, the author of the
book Keshava Mishra discusses about sound.
Now here he begins a serious discussion. He proposes
a question as to if the sound is generated at one point,
how does it reach the ear of the listener who is at a
distance from that point? He then mentions a
phenomenon called vichi taranga nyaya ().
Both the words vichi and taranga mean wave and
nyaya means phenomenon. By this phenomenon it is
proposed that sound originating from one point doesnt
travel to the listeners ear directly but through a series of
origination and destruction. The original sound gives
birth to another sound and then dies, this second sound
gives birth to the third and too dies, this process goes on
until it reaches the ear of the listener. What the listener
hears is the last sound, and so isnt the actual sound
which had originated. And so Keshava Mishra calls it as
an illusion to say that I have heard the drum as no one
can listen to the actual first sound, but hears the last

one. Hence the sound travels in waves.


The author is said to have been born in 1275 A.D. So his
book must belong to 13th or 14th Century A.D. Also to
be noted is that the book belongs to philosophy. But
discusses wide range of things including gravity. I do not
propose that the this wave theory has been originally
given by an Indian. As far as I have searched on the
internet, the credit of the original thought is given to the
Greek philosopher Chrysippus (c. 240 B.C.). This book
has its origins in the Vaisheshika Darshana (a part of the
six darshanas or books on philosophy) which is said to
have been composed from 600-200 BCE. This one has
simply mentioned that sound is produced by conjoining
and disjoining of matter. Apart from this he discusses
gravity, micro particles and stuff. So itd be too wild to
imagine that after Sage Kanad () wrote Vaisheshika
Darshana, the next improvement or addition in the
information happened in 14th century. Just imagine if the
Nalanda University wasnt destructed, we could have
found the missing links of the improvement of various
fields of knowledge. Even in the case of borrowing of the
concept, we earn a good score as our ancestors could
accept valid information from elsewhere too, they
werent anti-west.

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