Presidential address to the

Symposium on Ancient Indian Scientific Knowledge.

(Feb.25, 2003)

I am delighted to be here today in the midst of so many luminaries

and under the benign divine presence of the most respected sage
that ever walked on Earth in the twentieth century. The Samskrita
Academy and the KSRI have to be congratulated for having thought
of this symposium on Ancient Indian Scientific Knowledge. I am
greatly honoured to have been asked to preside over this
symposium. Since there are five expert speakers lined up to speak
today, three in the forenoon and two in the afternoon, I shall restrict
my presidential remarks to a few general observations, mostly as an
introduction.

The Ancientness of Indian knowledge goes back not just to a few

centuries or even a few millenia, but it goes back to several yugas,
where each yuga is itself several hundreds of millenia. The words
Scientific Knowledge may prompt you to think that we are talking
of the Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology that we now
know of from our contacts with the western world. There is a
mistaken impression in some quarters that science and scientific
knowledge are the prerogatives of only the past few centuries of
history. It is not so. From time immemorial all knowledge in India
had been scientific. When I use the word scientific, please do not
think only in terms of modern laboratories where they experiment,
enquire, hypothise, make further experiments and arrive at
theoretical conclusions, only to be reconfirmed and revalidated by
further experiment and enquiry. It is the scientific methodology
that is the important factor here. Remembering the meaning of
scientific methodology, we can safely claim that all knowledge in
India has been scientific only. One of the most ancient of all books
in the world, the Taittiriyopanishad, chapter 3

adhIhi bhagavo brahmeti .... sa tapas taptvA.

The disciple is enjoined to investigate the cause of all causes by

doing tapas that is, one-pointed self-negating concentration, a
spiritual travail for which ancient India was legitimately famous.
The disciple goes through the process step by step. At every stage of
his finding he comes back and reports to the Guru. The latter is
not satisfied with the finding and exhorts the disciple to investigate
again.

Punareva --- pitaramupasasAra>

The disciple proceeds from the obvious and the outer to the deeper
and inward principles one by one: from matter to life, from life to
mind, from mind to intelligence, and finally from intelligence to
bliss;

From anna to prANa, from prANa to manas, from manas to vijnAna

and from vijnAna to Ananda.

This spirit of enquiry is the sum and substance of all quest in

ancient times. Whether the object of enquiry was spiritual or not,
the method always incorporated this spirit of relentless enquiry and
experiment. This is why I call all ancient Indian knowledge
scientific.

In the beginning no distinction was made between the so-called

spiritual pursuit and the secular pursuit of material knowledge. But
even in later times when such a distinction was made, the spirit of
scientific enquiry continued. Whether it was the magnum opus of
the 6th century B.C.E., namely, the ashTAdhyAyI of Panini the
Grammarian, or the Vaiseshika sUtras of Kanada (of about the
same time) about the atomic theory of matter or the vast treasures
of Jain literature (around the 2nd century B.C.E.) on Infinity and the
law of indices, or Pingalas Chandas-shAstra of the 1st century
B.C.E. talking about Vedic metres, or it was Vedanga jyotisha, or
the Sulva-sutras of Bodhayana and Apastambha (7th and 8th
centuries B.C.E.), or the AryabhatIya of Aryabhata, or the
conceiving of the Shriyantra that goes back to even the
atharvaveda, or the Surya-siddhanta of Varahamihira of the 6th
century C.E., or the Brahmasphuta-siddhanta of Brahmagupta of
the 7th century C.E., or the Rasa-ratnAkara of Nagarjuna of the
10th century, or the Siddhanta Siromani of Bhaskara of the 12 th
century -- whatever it was, the scientific quest continued.

In spite of the significant and voluminous contributions of the

Greeks to Number Theory, Geometry and Mensuration, the credit of
inventing a practically useful notation for writing and
communicating with numbers goes back to the Hindu school of
thinkers of the first century B.C.E. It is again an amazing fact that
long before these notations were used, probably even before the
time of the Mahabharata, Samskrit literature had already been
using unique word names for powers of 10. Listen to a passage from
Krishna Yajur Veda (4th Khanda, 4th Prashna): This is a prayer and a
wish for the wealth of cows to abound in large numbers, like
millions and millions.

sahasrAyatvemAme agna ishTakA dhenavassantv ekA ca shatamca

sahasramcAyutamca niyutamcaprayutamcArbudamca nyarbudamca
samudrashca madhyamcAntashca parArdhashcemAme agna
ishTakA dhenavassantu.

The counting of cows here goes by hundreds, thousands, and

thousands and millions of hundreds. The actual sequence of powers
of ten has a word for each power of ten upto the seventeenth,
though not all of this is used in that passage just quoted. The
actual sequence as defined in books of Mathematics like Leelavati
is:
 Eka, shata, sahasra, ayuta, laksha, prayuta, koti, arbuda, abja,
kharva, nikharva, mahapadma, shankha, jaladhi, antya, madhya,
parArdha.

Here parArdha is 10 to the power of 17. It is the number of human

years in one half of Brahmas life. The very fact that these words
are picked and used in the veda itself shows how ancient the
concept is. These names have been freely used both in literary and
scientific writings from the mahAbhArata times onward.

I dare not invade into the topic of the first speaker today, Prof. M.S.
Rangachari. But having enjoyed all my life the charms and beauties
of Mathematics I cannot resist the temptation of quickly and briefly
summarizing for you the greatness of our ancients in the
Mathematical field. The number zero, one of the most significant
inventions, is the subtle gift of the Hindus of antiquity to
mankind.. To it must be credited the enormous usefulness of its
counterpart, the place value system of expressing all numbers with
just ten symbols. And to these two concepts we owe all the
arithmetic and mathematics. The mathematical climate among the
Hindus, was congenial for the invention of zero and for its use as
the null-value in all facets of calculation. Then there is Vedic
Mathematics which has caught the rapt attention of the whole
world as a pedagogical short-cut to manipulatory mathematics.
Among the Sulba sutras, the Bodhayana Sutras (800 - 600 B.C.)
contains among other things a general statement of the
Pythagorean theorem, an approximation procedure for obtaining
square roots and a number of geometric constructions that
include an approximate squaring the circle, and construction of
rectilinear shapes whose area was equal to the sum or difference of
areas of other shapes. To the Jaina thinkers must be given the
credit of being the first, in the chronology of scientific thinking, to
have recognised that all infinities were not the same. They also
were aware of the Theory of indices. The Bakshali manuscript has
the unique distinction of having, for the first time, in the entire
history of Ancient Indian mathematics, the subject matter
organised in the sequence: a rule; a relevant example in word form;
the same in notational form; the solution and finally the
demonstration or the proof.. It was from here the Rule of Three
was taken to Europe via the Arabs and it was then known as the
Golden Rule. It became very popular in Europe after the
Renaissance. The apex of mathematical achievement of ancient
India occurred during the so-called classical period of Indian
Mathematics. The great names are: Aryabhata I (b.476 A.D.) ;
Brahmagupta (b.598 A.D.); Bhaskara I (circa 620 A.D.) ; Bhaskara
II (b.1114 A.D.); Aryabhata gave the formula for the area of a
triangle. His Aryabhatiyam is a monumental work. It was partly
through a translation of the work of Brahmagupta, who was
himself inspired by Aryabhata, that the Arabs became aware of
Indian astronomy and mathematics. The sheer ingenuity and
versatility of Brahmagupta's approach to indeterminate equations of
the second degree is the climax of Indian work in this area. It was
not until 1767 A.D. that the western world had a complete solution
to such types of equations, wrongly called Pell's equation, by
Lagrange's method of continued fractions. Bhaskara II introduces
the notion of instantaneous motion of a planets. He clearly
distinguishes between average velocity and accurate velocity in
terms of differentials. His work on fundamental operations, his
rules of three, five, seven, nine and eleven, his work on
permutations and combinations and his handling of zero all speak
of a maturity, a culmination of five hundred years of mathematical
progress.

Not only in Mathematics but in other fields also the ancients of

India showed excellence. Take Chemistry for example. The
excellence in the smelting of metals that was achieved in India as
early as two millenia ago (as is validated by the 1500-year-old non-
rusting iron pillar at Delhi), the distillation of perfumes and
fragrant ointments, the making of dyes and pigments, the
extraction of sugar all these point to a good understanding of the
rudiments of chemical knowledge that surpassed the
corresponding knowledge that was obtainable in the rest of the
world at the time. One can go on listing the scientific glories of
ancient India. In fact the speakers of today are going to do exactly
that job. But after all the wonder that India was in ancient times, as
the centuries advanced and as we bent back to successive
generations of invading seekers of imperial glory and exploiters of
the countrys wealth as well as knowledge, by the time of the
nineteenth century, India was a country, in Rabindranath Tagores
words, enveloped in dense and deep darkness, as at the deadly
midnight hour, afflicted by many ills and in a state of stupor...
These words occur in the same poem of his, the first stanza of
which we nowadays sing with great pride, as our national anthem.
In the fourth stanza of the same poem, he says: ghora-timira-
ghana-nibiDa-nishithe pIDita-mUrcita-deshe .... Why did this fall
happen? Why this all-round decline? I hope the speakers will give
some of their time to this.

I congratulate every one of the experts who are going to share with
us today their findings on this interesting topic of Ancient Indian
Scientific Knowledge. I am glad I have this opportunity and
responsibility to listen to all of them. And I look forward to a
thought-provoking symposium. In the process I expect to learn a lot
from them. Thank you.

Copyright V. Krishnamurthy 1 Jan. 2007 Homepage