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Science in Saron

Skeptical Essays on History of Science

Meera Nanda

First Edition January 2016

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system,

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-93-83968-08-4

B-957 Palam Vihar, GURGAON (Haryana) 122 017 India

Phone: 91-124 2369023, +91 98681 26587, +91 98683 44843

info@threeessays.com Website: www.threeessays.com

Printed and bound by Chaman Oset Printers, New Delhi

In memoriam

Praful Bidwai 1949-2015

Ajita Kamal 1978-2011

dear friends and comrades

Contents

Introduction 1

1. Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? 19

2. Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps 49

3. Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient

Indian Medicine 93

4. Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda rewrote

Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra 127

References 181

Index 193

Introduction

Some years ago, I happened to watch an advertisement for Rajnigandha

paan masala on TV that stuck a nerve with me. is is how it went:

A bespectacled young Indian man in a tweed jacket is sitting in a

classroom in an American campus where a professor is writing some

rather complicated looking mathematical equations on the chalk board.

e young man appears bored; he is looking out of the window and

doodling on his notepad. Speaking in an exaggerated American drawl,

the professor asks how much time the class will need to solve a prob-

lem, and all the European and Chinese-looking students balk at the

task, saying the problem is too tough. Muttering racist-sounding epi-

thets about "you Indians" and "trees," the professor calls upon the desi .

e Indian student gets up, takes out a small can of paan-masala from

his jacket and puts some in his mouth. He then walks up to the board

and solves the mathematical problem without a moment's hesitation.

e American classroom breaks into cheers, and the young man takes a

bow. e image of a packet of Rajnigandha paan masala appears on the

screen with the following voice-over: "जवाब तो हम पहले से जानते थे, सवाल

का इि�ज़ार करना हमारी तहज़ीब है" (We already knew the answer. Waiting

for the question is our culture"). e advertisement ends with a jingle:

"मुंह में रजनीगंधा, पैरों पे दुिनया " ( "With Rajnigandha in your mouth, the

world is at your feet.)"1

1 e advertisement can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=kBbBISCtkv8

With some foresight, the ad-agency could have amassed a con-

siderable fortune by selling this slogan (sans the jingle) to the Sangh

Parivar. e young paan-masala consuming fellow could have achieved

lasting fame as the mascot of the new geeky Indian that we are so love

to celebrate.

"जवाब तो हम पहले से जानते थे, सवाल का इन्तज़ार करना हमारी तहज़ीब है"

would make an excellent backdrop for any number of "science in the

Vedas" events that the Parivar and its allies like to host. e beauty of

the slogan is that it can capture the spirit of whatever scientic जवाब you

may be in the mood to t into "the Vedas" on any particular day – ro-

botics, nuclear energy, quantum physics, Einstein, theory of evolution,

genetics, consciousness … the list is limited only by your imagination.

Why just the Sangh Parivar, even the Indian Science Congress could

have trotted out the slogan for the more colorful sessions during its an-

nual meet in Mumbai in January 2015!

***

is book is provoked by the constant assault that on our collective in-

telligence from those who are convinced that "जवाब तो हम पहले से जानते

थे." But it is more than mere irritation that has motivated me. I believe

that the constant appropriation of modern scientic concepts and theo-

ries for the glory of "the Vedas" is one, if not the, central plank on which

the myth of Hindu supremacy rests. It is thanks to this myth of "sci-

entic Hinduism" that our preeminent national gures, past and pre-

sent, habitually sneer at the "superstitions" of Abrahamic religions. It is

thanks to this myth that we think of ourselves as a "race" endowed with

a special faculty for science. It is thanks to this myth that we go around

the world thumping our chests as "scientic Indians" without whom the

world science and economy would grind to a halt.

Such myths of national exceptionalism and supremacy are danger-

ous. Nothing but evil follows when such myths manage to take hold of

a nation's imagination.

It is for this reason, this smug, self-adoring myth of the "Vedas" as

having all the answers – even before scientic questions were even pos-

sible to ask! – must be taken seriously. Each one of its claims must be

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

examined with utmost attention, using the best available evidence that

history of science has to oer. Aer we are done laughing at some of

the utterly outlandish claims, we must get down to the serious business

of analyzing what they are saying in the light of what we know of how

science developed in the modern world and how it diers from other

forms of knowing the world. Time has come for intellectuals to step out

of their ivory towers to challenge the distortion of history of science for

ideological ends.2

Such a response has not been forthcoming, or at least, has not been

proportional to the enormity of the challenge. e scientic commu-

nity in India – whose turf is being encroached upon – has oered only

a deafening silence so far (with rare exceptions who can be counted on

the ngers of one hand). What is even more disheartening is the silence

of Indian historians of science against the blatant encroachment of their

turf.3 Indeed, the silence of academic historians of science is more wor-

risome, as it is symptomatic of postmodernist malaise that continues

to aict the humanities and social sciences in India. How can those

who cannot utter the words modern science without putting them under

contemptuous scare-quotes that question the very distinctiveness and

legitimacy of the enterprise of science, be expected to start demarcat-

ing modern science from Vedic or any other "alternative" knowledge

system? How can those who cannot bear to refer to the mainstream,

global history of science without qualifying it as "colonial" and "Euro-

centric" be expected to turn to the same history for evidence to counter

the priority-claims of our nationalist mythmakers?4

2 Romila apar (2015) distinguishes public intellectuals from technical experts

and ordinary academic scholars by two necessary qualities: Public intellectuals

question authority; and they "defend the primacy of reasoned, logical arguments

in explaining the world around us as well as its past." p. 2

3 is refers strictly to those historians who specialize in science. History of science

is a relatively specialized sub-set of political and cultural history. Mainstream

historians, archeologists and other concerned intellectuals, to their credit, have

continued to raise their voices against mixing up of myth and science.

4 See for instance Sundar Sarukkai (2014) for a defense of "alternative rationalities"

and the importance of "cultural ownership" of science by Indians. Sarukkai's insis-

tence that modern conceptions of physics – mass, energy, motion etc. – must be

mapped on to philosophical terms derived from Indian philosophy is no dierent

from the recent intervention by Rajiv Malhotra (2015) to "t modern science into

is book is meant to take on the substantive claims of those who

would saronize modern science. It oers a detailed and through ex-

amination of the priority-claims on behalf of ancient Indian mathema-

ticians and physicians regarding landmark scientic discoveries (the

Pythagorean eorem, zero, genetics and surgery). Such claims have

been a xture of Indian public discourse for a long time, and have been

given a fresh impetus at a variety of high-visibility gatherings over the

last year of so.

e goal of the book is to save the ancient Indian geometers, math-

ematicians, physicians and the unknown artisans-crasmen/women

from both the glorication at the hands of the Hindu Right and the con-

descension at the hands of rationalist fundamentalists who see no value

whatsoever in anything that predates the Scientic Revolution. is can

be done, I believe, by placing their achievements in their own times,

and alongside the achievements of their peers in sister civilizations. A

comparative history, devoid of presentist biases, can bring the true ac-

complishments of our ancestors into a sharper focus – something that

this book tries to do.

***

Claims to the eect that "it is all in the Vedas" –where "all" includes all

known facts and artifacts of modern science and technology (yes, the

airplanes, too) are not new. Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, the founder

of Arya Samaj, had already proclaimed that as far back as around the

mid-19th century.5 Likewise, claims of there being "perfect harmony"

between the teachings of Hindu shastras and modern science can be

Vedic framework." Malhotra is a much admired gure in the Hindu Right circles

and has received glowing accolades from Narendra Modi himself. Skepticism

toward the universal metanarrative of science has been declared (Prakash, 1994,

p.1483) a necessary precondition for recovering the voices of the subaltern. I have

defended the universality and objectivity of modern science form its de-construc-

tors in Nanda (2004).

5 e basic idea that motivated Swami Dayananda was this: Because the Vedas are

divinely-inspired "books of true knowledge," they must contain the basic prin-

ciples of all sciences, and accordingly, every scientic discovery and technological

development of modern times must nd an expression in them. is amounts to

scientization of the Vedas by at. See Arvind Sharma (1989).

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

traced back to the New Dispensation of Keshub Chandra Sen in the late

1800s, and to his more famous protégé, Swami Vivekananda. In his fa-

mous address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893,

Vivekananda proudly proclaimed the latest discoveries of modern sci-

ence to be mere "echoes" of Vedanta philosophy.6

us, the current craze for nding modern science in ancient re-

ligious texts is part and parcel of the history of modernity in India. It

has been the dominant trope for accommodating modern science with

the Hindu belief-system. In the hundred plus years that separate Swami

Dayananda and Swami Vivekananda from us in the 21st century, this

style of accommodating science and Hindu beliefs has become a part

of the common sense of most Indians. It is not considered particularly

right-wing or le-wing, as elements of it can be found among people

and parties of all political persuasions.

While it cuts across political aliations, the eagerness for scientic

legitimation of Hindu dharma is more actively and self-consciously fos-

tered by Hindu nationalists and their allies. Attribution of great scien-

tic discoveries to ancient Hindu rishi-munis has been an integral part

of the indoctrination of swayamsevaks since the very beginnings of the

organized Hindu Right in the early decades of the 20th century.

is explains why every time the Hindu nationalists come to pow-

er, the rst thing they do is to start revising history, with a special place

reserved for the history of science.

During their rst stint from 1998 to 2004, the BJP-led NDA pushed

for introducing degree-courses in astrology, karma-kanda (rituals) and

"consciousness studies" of Advaitic variety in colleges and universities.7

6 We explore Swami Vivekananda's views on science and yoga in the last chapter of

this book.

7 e prestigious Birla Institute of Technology and Science, in collaboration with

Bhaktivedanta Institute now oers M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in "consciousness

studies." is program sells itself as an "equivalent of a graduate program in 'cog-

nitive studies' in any Western university." But it is hard to imagine any respectable

cognitive studies school in the West accepting the fundamental premise that this

program operates with: that consciousness is a pre-existing constituent of matter.

is is simply Advaita by another name. Bhaktivedanta Institute is the "research"

wing of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, aka "Hare Krishnas."

See http://www.bvinst.edu/gradstudies.

anks to the policies put in place by NDA 1.0, any aspiring astrologer

or priest can get a diploma from public or private institutions that have

been given the status of universities.8

Now that the BJP-led alliance is back in power, revising history

of science is once again on the top of the list of educational "reforms."

NDA 2.0 has lost no time in extending its campaign rhetoric of "In-

dia First" to history of science. Claims of India's priority in everything

from mathematics, medicine and surgery – to say nothing of nuclear

weapons, spaceships and other Star Trek-style technologies – have been

made by prominent people at prestigious, national-level gatherings.

e ball was set rolling by none other than the Prime Minister in his

inaugural address at Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital in Mumbai

in October 2014. is was followed by events at the 102nd annual Indian

Science Congress in Mumbai in early January, 2015. Other relatively

high-visibility events where a seamless continuity between modern sci-

ence and ancient sciences and myths was on the agenda include the ex-

hibition in Lalit Kala Academy in New Delhi titled "Cultural Continuity

from Rigveda to Robotics," and a seminar on Vedic chronology organ-

ized by the Sanskrit department in Delhi University, both in September,

2015. Behind all these high-prole events, there are any numbers of

"Shiksha Bachao " ("save our Education") activists who want this "his-

tory" to become a part of school curricula.

Roughly four kinds of appropriations of modern science for the

glory of Hindu sages-scientists can be discerned:

1. Staking priority-claims for ancient India for landmark discov-

eries in mathematics and medicine. e perennial favorites in

this category are the Pythagorean theorem, algebra and zero in

mathematics. (We will ask "who discovered the Pythagorean

Certicate programs oered by training centers associated with Aurobindo Ash-

ram are recognized by IGNOU, Indira Gandhi National Open University.

8 I have tried to document how educational institutionns set up by prominent

religious gurus and sects include a variety of pseudosciences as a legitimate part

of their curricula. Many of these institutions have been "deemed" as universities.

As "deemed universities" they have been given the authority to set their own cur-

ricula and hand out degrees and diplomas. Many receive state support in the form

of land-grants and tax-breaks. See, Nanda, 2009.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

eorem?" in Chapter 1, while the next chapter will look at the

hallowed Indian invention of zero as a number).

2. Erasure of lines of demarcation between myth and histori-

cal evidence. is was the Prime Minister's chosen rhetorical

device at the inaugural address at the Mumbai hospital men-

tioned above. He invoked the elephant-headed god Ganesh as

evidence for plastic surgery, and Karna, a character from the

Mahabharata as evidence for "genetic science." (We will exam-

ine the history of medicine in chapter 3).

3. Erasure of lines of demarcation between science and certied

pseudosciences like astrology. While this strategy of giving

sheen of respectability to discarded knowledge has not disap-

peared from the public sphere, it has not been openly espoused

from high places lately.

4. A higher kind of pseudoscience that is generated by graing

spiritual concepts like prana (or breath), prakriti or akasha (the

"subtle" material substrate of nature) on to physicists' concepts

of "energy" and "ether"; karmically determined birth and re-

birth on theories of evolution of species; chakras with actual

neural structures, so on and so forth. (Swami Vivekananda

was the pioneer of this kind of scientization and we will exam-

ine how he re-wrote Patanjali's Yoga Sutras in a scientistic vein

in the nal chapter of this book).

***

Why such mental gymnastics? Why this national itch to be crowned

"First"?9

What look like obvious, and even laughable, contortions begin to

make perfect sense when we understand what our saronizers are re-

9 Very similar in spirit to the great eagerness of Indians to have their names

recorded, for most bizarre feats, in the Guinness Book of Records. According to

Vinay Lal, nearly one-tenth of the mail that the Guinness headquarters in London

receives is from Indians. Where else but in India will you nd a " World Record

Holder Club" whose president has "changed his name from Harparkash Rishi to

Guinness Rishi"? see https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/Independ-

ent/guiness.html

ally up to. What is it that they seek to accomplish by their constant and

desperate attempts to claim the stamp of "science" for the worldview

they want to propagate?

We have to understand that the Hindu nationalists are not in the

business of history-writing, even though they may use historical evi-

dence if and when it suits them. No, what they are doing is fabricating

a heritage that we are supposed to kneel before in awe and wonder and

feel special about. While no history is completely free of biases and er-

rors, historians at least try to correct their narratives in the light of bet-

ter evidence. Heritage-makers, on the other hand, thrive on errors and

biases. e torturous logic, the ights of fancy, the mental gyrations are

no circus: ey are the tools of the trade needed to create the myth of

the "scientic Indian," the bearer of the ancient Hindu heritage which

was scientic – in the sense of Science as We Know it Today, or SaWKiT)

– even before SaWKiT was even born.

e distinction between history and heritage brought out by David

Lowenthal in his well-known book, e Heritage Crusade and the Spoils

of History, is relevant to the Indian situation:

Heritage is not "bad" history. In fact, heritage is not history at all; while it bor-

rows from and enlivens historical study, heritage is not an inquiry into the past,

but a celebration of it; not an eort to know what actually happened, but a pro-

fession of faith in the past tailored to present day purposes…. 10

Again

Heritage is not a testable or even a reasonably plausible account of some past,

but a declaration of faith in that past…. Heritage is not history, even when it

mimics history. It uses historical traces and tells historical tales, but these tales

and traces are stitched into fables that are open neither to critical analysis nor

to comparative scrutiny….. 11

And again:

Heritage is immune to critical reappraisal because it is not erudition but cat-

echism; what counts is not checkable fact but credulous allegiance. Commit-

ment and bonding demand uncritical endorsement and preclude dissenting

voices. …. Prejudiced pride in the past is not a sorry consequence of heritage; it

is its essential purpose. 12

10 Lowenthal, 1998, p. X. emphasis added.

11 Lowenthal, 1998, p. 121. Emphasis added.

12 Lowenthal, 1998, p. 121-122, Emphasis added.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

e "scientic Vedas" rightfully belong to the "Incredible India!"

campaign which sells Indian heritage primarily to foreign tourists, with

the dierence that the "heritage sites" for the former are not physical

but textual, and the target audience includes Indians rst and foreign-

ers only secondarily. e way the "scientic heritage" is constructed and

sold, however, is turning Indians into tourists to their own history. e

very idea of such a narrative being taught to school children as history

of science is frightening indeed.

It is clear that this enterprise is aimed not at educating but, to use

Lowenthal's apt words, at creating a "prejudiced pride" in India's past

through "celebration" and "declaration of faith" in it. Indeed, this is ex-

actly what the heritage-fabricators openly profess.

A case in point: When the Prime Minister Modi invoked Ganesh

from mythology, and Karna from the Mahabharata as "evidence" that

plastic surgery and genetic science existed in ancient India, he explained

his motive for this foray into mythology in the following words:13

We have our own skills. Now, we are not new to medial science…. We can take

pride in the world of medicine. Our nation was great one time. … What I mean

to say is that ours is a country that once had these abilities [for advanced medi-

cine]. We can regain these abilities.

e PM is hardly alone. Indian Firsters routinely claim that by

highlighting the scientic accomplishments of ancient Hindus, they are

actually trying to promote a culture of science and scientic temper.

is is how the argument unfolds: Indians are heirs to a great civili-

zation which promoted reasoned inquiry, which then led to scientic

ideas which are only now being "rediscovered" by modern science. As

the beneciaries of this great civilization, we ought to be inspired by

it, reclaim its scientic spirit and produce world-class science again.

While they would not put it so starkly, even some secular historians of

13 ßgekjk viuk ;s dkS'kY; gS] vc esfMdy lkbal esa ge u, ugha gSaA … esfMdy lkbal dh nqfu;k esa

ge xoZ dj ldrs gSa] gekjk ns'k fdlh le; D;k FkkA… dgus dk rkRi;Z ;g gS fd ;g oks ns'k gS]

ftlds ikl ;s lkeF;Z jgk FkkA bldks ge fQj dSls nksckjk regain djsaAÞ e complete ad-

dress is available at the PMO website http://pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/

text-of-the-prime-minister-shri-narendra-modis-address-at-the-ceremony-

held-to-rededicate-sir-h-n-reliance-foundation-hospital-and-research-centre-in-

mumbai/?comment=disable. Translation is mine.

science have bought into this business of promoting "cultural owner-

ship" for the goal of doing good science. 14

Once we see the "science in the Vedas" discourse for what it is – a

fabrication of heritage – three questions arise, which will be examined

in the rest of the Introduction. e rst question has to do with the

relationship between the glorious past and the present state of aairs.

Here we will ask if it is really the case that because we were, presum-

ably, great in sciences once, we will be great again. e other two ques-

tions have to do with how the "scientic" heritage is put together and

made to appear reasonable. Here we will examine two favorite ploys of

heritage-makers, namely, presentism and parochialism. Let us look at

these issues seriatim.

***

Let us start with the promise of becoming great "again."

We seem to think that by glorifying our ancient knowledge-tradi-

tions, we are providing cultural self-condence to the present and fu-

ture generations of scientists. We seem to think that if we can establish

continuity between ancient and modern modes of inquiry, we will gain

condence in our presumably "innate" acumen to do science.

But the notion of continuity between the science of the antiquity –

not just the sciences of Indian antiquity, but of any ancient civilization

14 is group largely includes those scholars who have accepted multiculturalist and

relativist view of science wherein modern "Western" science is seen as only one

form of science at par with other cultural constructions. is view has become

quite pervasive, especially among feminist and postcolonial scholars of science.

See Harding 2011, for a recent overview.

Multiculturalism in science assumes that all standards of evaluation of evidence

and judgement as to the soundness of a belief are internal to the culture, gender,

social class/caste one is born in, and therefore, when students are exposed to mod-

ern science they are being asked to embrace culturally alien denitions of nature

and standards of judgments. If the students were exposed to science using "their

own" cultural vocabulary, they will become better learners and better scientists.

Sundar Sarukkai (2014) oers a well-articulated statement of this position.

Based upon my experience rst as a young woman trained in microbiology in

India, and now as someone who teaches history of science to science students in

the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Mohali, India, I believe

that the cultural relativity of standards of evidence and judgment is overstated.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

in the world – and modern science is unwarranted and unproductive. It

is unwarranted because it does not acknowledge the break from the tra-

dition that happened with modern science. e science that emerged

aer the Scientic Revolution through the 16th to 18th centuries was a

very dierent enterprise from all earlier attempts to understand nature.

Most historians of science 15 agree on the following revolutionary trans-

formations that marked the birth of modern science:

1. Mathematization of nature, i.e. a growing attempt to describe

natural things and events in mathematical terms which could

be quantied, using increasingly precise tools of measurement

(clocks, compasses, thermometers, barometers and such).

2. Fact-nding experiments in addition to direct observations. In

the hands of early modern scientists (represented by the para-

digmatic gure of Galileo), mathematization of nature was

brought together with controlled experimentation.

3. Development of a mechanistic world picture which tried to

explain the workings of the natural world in nothing but cor-

puscles of matter in motion.

4. An uncommon appreciation of manual work, which led to the

relative lowering of barriers between university-trained natu-

ral philosophers and artisans and crasmen. 16

Undoubtedly, this revolution was made possible by a conuence of

a multitude of earlier achievements of many civilizations – the ancient

Greeks, Christianity, Islam, and through Islam, the contributions of an-

cient and classical India and China. But the new science that emerged

aer the Scientic Revolution was most unlike any of the nature-knowl-

edge traditions that went to into it, including the Greco-Roman, and

Judeo-Christian tradition, that are the direct ancestors of the Western

civilization. While it took on board some elements of mathematical and

observational stock of knowledge from earlier civilizations, modern

science – the SaWKiT – turned the ancient cosmos and ancient meth-

ods of speculative reason upside down, and produced a new concep-

15 At least those historians of science who have not written-o the very idea of a

scientic "revolution" as a Western ploy to project its superiority over all others.

16 In two magisterial books, H. Floris Cohen, a Dutch historian of science, has ex-

plored the emergence of distinctively modern science. See Cohen, 1994 and 2010.

tion of the cosmos and the humanity's place in it. So revolutionary and

sweeping have the changes been that it is oxymoronic to say that any pre-

modern knowledge tradition – be it Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Jewish,

Buddhist, Taoist, animistic – had the answer to the questions asked by

modern scientists. Of course the nature of the natural world (its compo-

sition, the fundamental laws governing its operations) has not changed,

but the conceptual categories, methodological criteria and the aims of

inquiry have undergone such a radical transformation that it is safe

to say with omas Kuhn that the ancients and the modern scientists

practically live in dierent worlds. 17

If one accepts this picture of the birth of modern science, then

the very idea of ancients having the answers that have emerged only

in the last 500 years or so makes no sense. Of course, there are nug-

gets of useful empirical knowledge – the knowledge of useful medic-

inal plants, or organic methods of farming, for example – that can be

incorporated into the modern corpus provided they pass the strin-

gent tests that all empirical claims must go through to be deemed

"scientic." But beyond that, it is simply vainglorious to claim that

modern science is only repeating what the ancients already knew. 18

Not only is the insistence of continuity between ancient and mod-

ern sciences unwarranted, it is entirely unproductive. e conviction

that we have always-already known everything that is worth knowing,

and that everything we knew is only conrmed – never rejected – by

science, has prevented us from developing an ethos of honest inquiry.

e compulsion to establish harmony with the core of the Vedic world-

view has held back the progress of science in the past, and will continue

to hold us back if we continue to go down this path.

Admitting to being an ignoramus – Latin for "we don't know" – is

the rst step toward acquiring knowledge. is point has been well-

articulated by Yuval Harari in his inuential book, Sapiens:

17 omas Kuhn's 1962 masterpiece, e Structure of the Scientic Revolutions has

revolutionized the study of history of science.

18 e classical Indian statement of this sentiment comes from Swami Vivekananda

who in his famous Chicago address insisted that that the discoveries of modern

science are only restating "in a more forcible language…what the Hindu has been

cherishing in his bosom for ages."

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

e Scientic Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been

above all a revolution of ignorance. e great discovery that launched the Sci-

entic Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to

their most important questions…. Even more critically, modern science ac-

cepts that the things we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowl-

edge. No concept, idea or theory is beyond challenge. 19

Acknowledging that we do not have all the answers, and the an-

swers we do have could well turn out to be all wrong, is what allowed

modern science to emerge and ourish in Europe in the early modern

era, from the 16th to the 18th century. It was not a matter of some spe-

cial "Faustian Spirit" that existed only in the West, but rather a coming

together of theological justications for empiricism, political and mer-

cantile interests, technological breakthroughs, along with a regard for

manual labor that set the stage for the Scientic Revolution.

is process was by no means smooth. ere was resistance from

the Church and the Aristotelian professors who controlled the medieval

universities. Yet eventually, an awareness emerged that the conclusions

of the Greek philosophers (the earth-centered universe, the humoral

theory of disease, Aristotle's theory of falling objects) and the Bible

(the seven-day Creation, the Great Flood) were incorrect, as they failed

to adequately explain the evidence obtained through systematic and

increasingly precise observations and controlled experiments. Even

though all the pioneers – Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo, Newton and

later, Darwin – were devout Christians working from within the tra-

ditional medieval view of the world derived from parts of Greek phi-

losophy and the Bible, they managed to set a process in motion which

ended up overturning the inherited framework.

What is even more important is that despite religious resistance,

the scientic revolutionaries were not so compelled by the forces of tra-

dition that they felt forced to "harmonize" their theories and methods

with those prescribed by Aristotle and the Bible: Had that been the case,

the new science would have died in its cradle. e Copernican theory

of sun-centered universe was not absorbed back into the ancient earth-

centered universe of Ptolemy, nor was Darwin's theory of natural selec-

tion contorted to make it appear as if it was in harmony with the Bible.

19 Yuval Noah Harari, 2011, p. 250-251.

Despite initial condemnation on the part of religious forces, it was the

bastions of tradition that had to capitulate to the force of evidence. (Yes,

there are creationists among fundamentalist Christians who still believe

in the literal truth of the creation story, but they are opposed by the

mainstream of Christianity.) e metaphysical speculations of the early

natural philosophers eventually had to give way to the experimental

method, which involved precise measurement and quantication.

In India, on the other hand, the forces of tradition have managed

to overpower and tame any idea that threatened to challenge the es-

sential Vedic outlook of the primacy of consciousness, or spirit. History

of Indian science abounds in examples of self-censorship by otherwise

ne minds; whenever they perceived a contradiction between the Pura-

nas and the mathematical astronomy of the Siddhantas, for example,

some of our well-known astronomers allowed the Puranas to overrule

the Siddhantas. Disheartening examples include Brahmagupta in the

7th century opposing Aryabhata's theory of eclipses in favor of Rahu

and Ketu, as well as Yajñ̃eśvara Rode in the 17th century "crushing the

contradictions" that the Copernican astronomy posed to the Puranic

worldview.20 When confronted with conicting arguments, our learned

men did not stand up for what they knew to true and backed by bet-

ter evidence. For the most part, they chose to kneel before the Eternal

Truths of Vedas and Puranas. e forces of conservatism and conformi-

ty have been so deeply entrenched in the system of rituals, social habits,

and beliefs that govern our society, that our learned men did not have

to be hauled up before an Inquisition (as Galileo was) to force them to

renounce what they knew to be true – they did that willingly, on their

own volition.

e same compulsion to let the Vedas and Puranas have the last

word is evident in how the torch-bearers of the Indian Renaissance

co-opted scientic theories of physics and biology. e current crop of

heritage-makers, including the Prime Minister and the academics who

made the Science Congress so memorable are travelling down the road

carved out by two of the most illustrious leader of Indian Renaissance,

Swami Dayananda and Swami Vivekananda. Like the two swamis, they

20 See Christopher Minkowski, 2001; Robert Fox Young, 2003.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

too are intent on picking out those modern scientic ideas and methods

that they can then fuse with the Vedas and the Puranas.

If history is any guide, the rhetorical illusion of "harmony" be-

tween modern science and traditional views has only served the cause

of the orthodoxy in India. Far from being a source of critical thinking

that accepts that our holy books, our ancestors, and our traditions could

be wrong; far from accepting that the old ways must be given up if they

don't measure up to best available evidence, this celebration of "har-

mony" has only co-opted science into religious dogmas. is road leads

not to science, but to pseudoscience – whitewashing pet ideas to make

them look as if they are scientic.

***

Fabrication of heritage is, thus,s a process of domesticating the past,

turning it into stories that serve our purposes today.

Presentism, or anachronism, is how the past is domesticated and

history turned into heritage.

Presentism means simply this: to see the past through the lens of

the present. It has been called the "fallacy of nunc pro tunc" which is

Latin for "now for then."21 In history of science (and intellectual his-

tory more generally), presentism works by simply introducing contem-

porary conceptual categories and aims into the depictions of what the

"scientists" of earlier epochs were trying to do.

Professional historians are taught to recognize this fallacy of pre-

sentism and are trained to avoid it with all their might. "e past is a

foreign country: they do things dierently there" is the mantra of pro-

fessional historians. 22 e objective of history then become to study the

past ideas and practices within their own social-cultural milieu.

21 David Hackett Fischer, 1970, who goes on to add: [the substitution of now for

then is the] "mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the

dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have

grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world." P. 135.

22 is is the opening line of e Go-Between, a novel by L. P. Hartley, published in

1953. It is also the title of a well-known book by David Lowenthal, the well-known

historian whose work on heritage we have already referred to.

While historians shun presentism as best as they can, those who

peddle heritage nd it indispensable. e whole purpose of fabricating

a heritage is to infuse the past with present meanings. is requires that

the present be projected back into the past. For our purpose at hand – to

understand how history of science is saronized – we have to under-

stand how conceptual categories available to modern science (genetic

science, quantum physics, nuclear energy and such) are read back into

the minds of our ancestors. In this book, especially in the nal chapter,

we will examine the use of resemblances and parallelisms that are de-

ployed to make such projections look reasonable and plausible.

Presentist history is not just bad history; it is dangerous history as

well. I agree with Eric Hobsbawm's observation that "the most usual

ideological abuse of history is based on anachronism rather than lies."

is kind of history, again quoting Hobsbawm:

is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as

poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction. e past is an essential ele-

ment, perhaps the essential element in these ideologies. If there is no suitable

past, it can always be invented….the past legitimizes. e past gives a more

glorious background to a present that does not have much to celebrate. 23

***

e other major tool for fabricating a suitable heritage is to cordon o

your own past from the rest of the world. I believe there is an absence of

a serious and honest comparative perspective in the Hindu nationalist

history of science. Or rather, to put a ner point on this statement, the

comparative perspective is not entirely absent from their analysis, but

it is deeply colored by what can only be called a "jagat-guru complex":

invariably, India appears as the giver of science, but never a taker.

While this kind of history might be tonic for the Indian ego, it hap-

pens to be bad history. It is bad history for the same reason not stepping

outside the boundary of your village limits what you can see and expe-

rience. It is bad history because it does not allow you to ask new and

interesting questions about social and cultural dierences that might

23 Eric Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 7, 5.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

have made a dierence in the trajectories that science and technology

followed in dierent societies.

What I nd even more distorting about this kind of Indo-centric

historiography is that it fails to see and acknowledge how ideas cross

national and cultural boundaries: circulation of ideas did not have to

wait for the World Wide Web; it has been a part of human history from

the very beginning. I share Joseph Needham's call for taking what he

calls an ecumenical view of the world:

e dierent civilizations did have scientic interchanges of great importance.

It is surely quite clear by now that in the history of science and technology, the

Old World must thought of as a whole. 24

Once we see the Old World as an interconnected whole, we have no

choice but to see our civilization as one among others bound to them

by mutual exchange of goods, people and ideas. Ideas were not always

radiating from India to the rest of the world, but also coming into India

from the rest of the world. Like every other sister civilization, we were

givers and we were takers, with no monopoly on giving.

As the reader will discover in the rst three chapters, once we get

over our Jagatguru complex and see India as one in the network of civi-

lizations, a newer, more complex appreciation of India's achievements

begins to take shape.

***

Before I conclude this introduction, I would like to share with the read-

ers the story of how I came to write this book.

Sometime in January 2015, immediately following the Science

Congress in Mumbai, I received a call from a national weekly magazine

(that shall remain unnamed) to write a piece analyzing the historical

claims that were made at that venue.

As this was an issue that was on my mind anyway, I immediately got

to work. Within a week or so, I sent the magazine not one, but two es-

says – one on Pythagoras and the other on plastic surgery, genetics etc.

For reasons that were never explained, the magazine sat on its hands for

three weeks. Naturally, I withdrew the essays from consideration.

24 Joseph Needham, 1969, p. 16.

If the editor of the magazine is reading these words, please know I

am sincerely grateful to you for not publishing those essays!

I realized I had much more to say on these matters than the mere

two thousand words that I was limited to for the magazine. I decided

to expand my mission and to present an exhaustive analysis of these

issues. I proposed the idea to my friend, Asad Zaidi, the publisher of

ree Essay Collective. He gave me the green light and I went to work

on this book.

e product of my labors is now in your hands.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

Cha pt er 1

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem?

1. Introduction

Poor Pythagoras! at gentle vegetarian1 mystic-mathematician would

have never imagined that over 2,500 years aer his time, hearing his

name would have the same eect on some Indians as showing a red rag

has on a bull!

At the Indian Science Congress earlier this year, Pythagoras and

his theorem were mentioned by many very important persons who

went out of their way to make him look like an imposter basking in

the lime-light that rightfully belongs to us, the brainy Indians. It is not

that Pythagoras doesn't need to be taken down a notch or two, for the

evidence that he was the original discoverer of the theorem named aer

him is simply not there. But that does not by itself mean that the vacated

pedestal now belongs exclusively to our own Baudhāyana and his fellow

priest-artisans who used ropes to build geometrically complex Vedic

altars. And yet, this is exactly what was clearly and repeatedly asserted

at the Science Congress.

Here is what the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Harsh

Vardhan had to say on the matter:

1 For reasons that continue to puzzle historians, Pythagoras, who abstained from

meat-eating, hated beans. e "Pythagorean diet" was bean-free, as well as meat

and sh free. His followers had to swear to follow this diet.

Our scientists discovered the Pythagoras theorem, but we gave its credit to the

Greeks. We all know that we knew bijaganit much before the Arabs, but seless-

ly we allowed it to be called Algebra. …whether related to solar system, medi-

cine, chemistry or earth sciences, we have shared all our knowledge selessly…

e Minister was backed by Dr. Gauri Mahulikar, a Sanskrit scholar

from Mumbai University:

In the Śulvasutras, written in 800 BCE, Baudhāyana wrote the geometric for-

mula now known as Pythagoras theorem. It was written by Baudhāyana 300

years before Pythagoras.…"2

Between the two of them, the Minister and the Professor proved

a theorem dear to the Indian heart, namely: we are not just brainy, but

big-hearted as well. We are so big-hearted that we let the likes of Py-

thagoras to claim priority for what our own Baudhāyana accomplished.

We are so big-hearted that we selessly give away our intellectual rich-

es – from the geometry of Śulvasūtras to advanced mathematical and

medical concepts – to the rest of the world. Giving is in what we do.

Compared to the rest of the howlers at the Science Congress – the

ancient interplanetary ying machines, the alchemist cows turning

grass into gold, for example3 – the priority-claim for Baudhāyana has at

least one virtue: it is not entirely insane. ere is a substantial nugget of

truth hidden in an Everest of hype.

ere is no doubt that our śulvakaras had indeed mastered the Py-

thagorean conjecture thoroughly and used it in ingenious ways to create

Vedic altars of dierent areas, while conserving the shapes. ey were

the rst to state it unambiguously . But they were neither alone, nor the

rst in having this understanding. e rst recorded evidence for this

conjecture dates back to some 1800 years BCE and it comes from Meso-

2 See http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/science-congress-lauds-feats-

of-ancient-india/article6754106.ece. e priority of ancient priest-crasmen

who composed the Śulvasūtras over Pythagoras has a long history. As early as

1906, Har Bilas Sarda was cheering for Baudhāyana over Pythagoras in his book,

Hindu Superiority, pp. 286-287. More recently, Subhash Kak has claimed that the

geometry of the Vedic altars contains – in a coded form – advanced astrophysi-

cal knowledge such as the exact length of the tropical year and the lunar year, the

distance between the sun and the earth, the distance between the moon and the

earth in lunar diameters. See Kak, 2005.

3 India Today has very helpfully listed these howlers. See http://indiatoday.intoday.

in/story/5-howlers-from-the-indian-science-congress/1/411468.html.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

potamia, the present day Iraq. e rst proof comes from the Chinese,

preempting the Euclidean proof by a couple of centuries, and the Indian

proof by at least 1000 years. Even though Pythagoras was not the rst to

discover and prove this theorem, it does not diminish his achievement.

He remains an extremely inuential gure not just for history of mathe-

matics, but history of science as well. Pythagoras and his followers were

the "rst theorists to have attempted deliberately to give the knowledge

of nature a quantitative, mathematical foundation".4 Giants of the Scien-

tic Revolution, including Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei walked

in the footsteps of Pythagoras.

In this chapter, we will start with a quick refresher on the Pythago-

rean eorem. We will follow this with a straightforward narrative of

the dierent formulations and uses of this theorem, starting with an-

cient Egypt and Mesopotamia, followed by ancient Greece, India and

China. e order is not chronological, and nor does it represent a chain

of transmission. While we have evidence of the Greeks getting their

start in geometry from the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, it is quite

likely that this conjecture was independently discovered in India and

China.

e idea of following the trail of the Pythagorean eorem from

Mesopotamia to China is simply to place ancient India as one among

other sister civilizations. It is only through a comparative history of the

idea behind this famous conjecture that we will be in a position to judi-

ciously assess India's contribution.

2. What is the Pythagorean eorem?

Before proceeding any further, let us be clear on what the Pythagorean

eorem is all about. Most of us learnt it in middle or high school, but

it is a good idea to quickly review it.

e theorem simply states that in a right-angle triangle, the square

on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the two sides.

(A hypotenuse, to joggle your memory, dear reader, is the longest side

of a right-angle triangle which also happens to be the side opposite the

right angle).

4 G.E.R. Lloyd, 1970, p. 26.

In gure 1, c is the hypotenuse, while a and b are short and long

sides of the right angle triangle, respectively.

So the theorem simply states the following

c2 = a2 + b2, a relationship that is represented in gure 2.

is theorem seems simple and intuitive. at is why it has been

nominated as a calling-card for the human species to be beamed into

Figure 1

Figure 2

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

the outer space.5 e idea is that any intelligent beings, anywhere in

the universe, would recognize its logic – and even perhaps be moved

by its beauty. Eli Maor reports that in a 2004 "beauty contest" organ-

ized by the journal Physics World, the top winners were Euler's formula,

Maxwell's four electromagnetic eld equations, Newton's second law,

followed by the Pythagorean equation. Not bad for an equation that has

been around for more than 3000 years.6

It is also one of the most frequently used theorems in all of math-

ematics. Algebra and trigonometry make use of the equation. Its most

obvious and practical use is in the building trade, where it is used for

constructing walls perpendicular to the ground, or for constructing

perfect squares or rectangles.

is use follows from the fact that the theorem is reversible which

means that its converse is also true. e converse states that a triangle

whose sides satisfy a² + b² = c² is necessarily right angled. Euclid was the

rst (1.48) to mention and prove this fact. So if we use lengths which

satisfy the relationship, we can be sure that the angle between the short

and the long side of a triangle will have to be right angle.

Any three whole numbers that satisfy the Pythagorean relationship

and yield a right angled triangle are called Pythagorean triples. e most

obvious and the easiest example of these triples is 3, 4, 5. at is to say:

32 + 42 = 52 or

9+16 = 25.

at means that any triangle with sides 3, 4 and 5 will be a right-

angle triangle. As we will see in the rest of this chapter, this method for

building right-angle structures was known to all ancient civilizations,

not just India. is method is still used by carpenters and architects to

get a perfect perpendicular or a perfect square.7

5 In his classic work of science ction, From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Jules Verne

mentions a German mathematician who suggested that a team of scientists go to

Siberia and on its vast plains, set up an enormous, illuminated diagram of Pythago-

rean theorem so that inhabitants of the Moon would see that we are trying to get

in touch. Verne's un-named mathematician has been identied as Carl Friedrich

Gauss. See Eli Maor, p. 203.

6 Maor, p. xii.

7 If you want to construct a perfect square and you don't have anything but a tape

measure and a marker try this: draw a straight line roughly 3 units long where you

While all right-angle triangles will bear the relationship described

by c2 = a2 +b2 , not all a and b lengths can be expressed as whole numbers

or as ratios of whole numbers. You can see it for yourself: try calculat-

ing c for a=4 and b=5, or a=7, b= 9. In both cases, you will see that the

c cannot be expressed as a whole number. Actually there are only 16

set of whole numbers below 100 that t into the Pythagorean equation.

ere is one particular number for a and for b that puzzled all an-

cient civilizations that we have records from. at number is one. Imag-

ine a square with side measuring one unit. Now draw a diagonal cutting

the square into two right angle triangles.

e simple question is this: how long is the diagonal?

Let us see:

For a right angle triangle, we know that

c2 = a2 +b 2

want to locate the corner of the square. On the other side of the corner, draw a line

4 units long, roughly vertical to the rst line. Now use the tape to make sure that

the edges of the two lengths are exactly 5 units apart. e angle between the two

corner lines will be exactly 90 degrees.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

In this case,

c2 = 12 + 12

c2 = 2, therefore c=

If you recall your middle-school mathematics, the symbol

stands for square root. Square root of a number is simply a value which,

when multiplied by itself, gives that number.

In the above case, in order to nd how long the hypotenuse is, we

have to nd out square root of two, or in other words, nd out that

number which, when multiplied with itself will produce the number 2.

Try guring out the square root of number 2. You will notice some-

thing strange: you simply cannot express the number as a fraction of

two whole numbers. What you nd is that the decimal fractions of the

number that will give you 2 when multiplied by itself simply go on and

on, without ending and without repeating themselves. For practical

purposes, square root of 2 is taken to be 1.4142136 but the number can

go on forever.

Numbers such as these were given the name "alogon" by the Greeks

which means "unsayable or inexpressible". We call them irrational num-

bers.

Irrational numbers were known to all the ancient civilizations that

are examined in this chapter. All of them tried to represent these num-

bers by using rough approximations. Only among the Greeks, however,

it led to a crisis of spiritual dimensions. We will shortly explain why, and

what they did about it. But we have to start our story from the begin-

ning in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

3. Egypt and Mesopotamia

If anyone can take credit for being the rst to gure out the Pythagorean

eorem, they have to be the unknown and unnamed builders, land-

surveyors, accountants and scribes of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

(the land we know as Iraq today) sometime between 2000 to 1700 BCE.

Just as ancient India had its śulvakaras who used a length of rope

to map out altar designs, ancient Egypt had its harpedonaptai, the "rope

stretchers". If Herodotus, the Greek historian who lived in the h cen-

tury BCE is to be trusted, these rope-stretchers were surveyors sent out

by the pharaohs to measure the farm land for tax purposes every time

the river Nile would ood and change the existing boundaries. ey are

rightly considered the true fathers of geometry, which literally means

measurement (metery) of earth (geo): they were the land surveyors sent

out by the pharaohs to measure the land for taxation purposes every-

time the river Nile would ood and change the existing boundaries.

One would think that a civilization that built the Great Pyramids8

would have mastered the right-angle rule and much-much more. In-

deed, it has been claimed by Martin Bernal in his well-known book, e

Black Athena, that the Greeks learned their sciences and mathematics

from Egypt, with its roots in Black Africa. is is not the right forum

to resolve this huge controversy, but Bernal's claims regarding the ad-

vanced state of mathematics and astronomy in Egypt have been chal-

lenged, and are no longer held to be credible by most historians.9

e two main mathematical papyri – the Ahmes Papyrus (also

called the Rhind Papyrus) that dates back to 1650 BCE and the so-called

Moscow Mathematical Papyrus that contains text written some 1850

BCE – don't make any reference to this theorem. While both these pa-

pyri contain geometrical problems like calculating the areas of squares,

volume of cylinders (for the jars they stored grain in), circumference

and areas of circles, the familiar Pythagorean relation is not there. Yet

it is hard to imagine how the pyramid makers could have laid the foun-

dations of the square base of pyramid without the familiar 3, 4, 5 rule

described in the previous section.

A more recent nd has thrown new light on this issue: the so-called

Cairo Mathematical Papyrus, which was unearthed in 1938 and con-

tains materials dating back to 300 BCE shows that the Egyptians of this,

much later era, did know that a triangle with sides 3,4,5 is right-angled,

8 e best known of them, the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, built around 2600 BCE was

the largest building of the ancient world. It rose 481 feet above the ground, with

four sides inclined at an angle of 51 degrees with the ground. Its base was a perfect

square with an area of 13 acres – equal to the combined base areas of all the major

cathedrals in all of Europe. Some 400,000 workers labored on it for 30 years. Bur-

ton, 2011, p. 58.

9 See the important paper by Robert Palter (1993) titled, 'Black Athena, Afro-cen-

trism and the History of Science'.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

as are triangles with sides 5, 12, 13 and 20,21,29. is papyrus contains

40 problems of mathematical nature, out of which 9 deal with the Py-

thagorean relationship between the three sides of a right triangle.10

We may never get the complete story of Egyptian mathematics, as

the ancient Egyptians wrote their texts on scrolls made out of at strips

of pith of the papyrus reeds that grew abundantly in the marshes and

wetlands of the region. e problem with papyrus is that it is perishable.

But the Mesopotamian civilization that grew not too far away from

Egypt on the fertile land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in

modern-day Iraq is a whole dierent story in so far historical records

go. e clever Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians who successively

ruled this land have le us a huge library of their literary and mathe-

matical works chiseled on clay tablets which were dried in the sun (and

oen baked in accidental res) and are practically indestructible.

As in Egypt, the Mesopotamian mathematics and geometry grew

out of administrative needs of the highly centralized state. Temples of

local gods and goddesses also needed to keep accounts of the gis and

donations. is led to the ourishing of many scribe-training schools

where men (they seem to be all men) learned how to write and do ele-

mentary arithmetic. Fortunately for historians, the Mesopotamian peo-

ple chose a non-degradable material – wet clay that their rivers brought

in plenty – to write upon. ey used a reed with an edge – quite like our

kalam – that could make wedge-shaped marks on the clay. ese tablets

were then dried in the sun which made them practically indestructi-

ble.11 Literally thousands of these clay tablets have been recovered and

deciphered, including the famous Flood Tablet which tells the story of

a great ood, very similar to the Biblical story of the ood and Noah's

Ark.

A small fraction of the tablets recovered from schools for scribes

contain numerical symbols which were painstakingly deciphered by

Professor Otto Neugebauer at Brown University, USA in the 1930s. It is

now well-established that the Babylonian people had developed a pretty

10 Burton, 2011, p. 78.

11 Clay tablets were also recyclable: if a scribe made an error, he could simply knead

his tablet into a ball and make a fresh tablet out of it.

ingenious system that allowed them to use just two symbols – a wedge

for the number one and a hook-shaped symbol for the number ten – to

represent and manipulate any number, however large. ey could do

that because they had gured out what is called place value, in which the

value of a number changes with the position it occupies. What is more,

they also started using a symbol indicating empty space – a forerunner

of zero. (Place-value and zero will be examined in the next chapter).

But what is of special interest to us are two tablets which have an

iconic status in history of mathematics, namely, Plimpton 322 and a

tablet called YBC7289 housed in Columbia and Yale universities, re-

spectively. ese tablets reveal that the Mesopotamians knew how to

gure out Pythagorean triples, and could also calculate square roots.

Some historians conjecture that Plimpton might even be the rst record

of trigonometry anywhere in the world.12

Wikipedia provides a very good description of Plimpton 322:

Plimpton 322 is partly broken clay tablet, approximately 13cm wide, 9cm tall,

and 2cm thick. New York publisher George Arthur Plimpton purchased the

tablet from an archaeological dealer, Edgar J. Banks, in about 1922, and be-

queathed it with the rest of his collection to Columbia University in the mid-

1930s. e tablet came from Senkereh, a site in southern Iraq corresponding

to the ancient city of Larsa. e tablet is believed to have been written about

1800 BC, based in part on the style of handwriting used for its cuneiform script.

A line-drawing of Plimpton 322 (Figure 4a) and a transcript of cu-

neiform numerals into modern numbers (Figure 4b) are given below.

What is written on it that makes it so important? It has four columns of

numbers and it appears that there was a h column on the le which

broken o. e rst column from the right is simply a column of serial

numbers, from 1-15, while the other three columns contain 15 numbers

written in Cuneiform script.

What do these columns of numbers mean? is tablet was rst de-

ciphered by Otto Neugebauer and his colleague Alfred Sachs in 1945.

Without going into details which can now be found in any standard

text book of history of mathematics, they concluded that "the num-

bers b and d in the second and third columns (from right to le) are

12 "If the missing part of the tablet shows up in the future…. Plimpton 322 will go

down as history's rst trigonometric table." Eli Maor, 2007, p. 11.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

Width Diagonal

1:59:00:15 1:59 2:49 1

1:56:56:58:14:50:06:15 56:07 1:20:25 2

1:55:07:41:15:33:45 1:16:41 1:50:49 3

1:53:10:29:32:52:16 3:31:49 5:09:01 4

1:48:54:01:40 1:05 1:37 5

1:47:06:41:40 5:19 8:01 6

1:43:11:56:28:26:40 38:11 59:01 7

1:41:33:45:14:03:45 13:19 20:49 8

1:38:33:36:36 8:01 12:49 9

1:35:10:02:28:27:24:26 1:22:41 2:16:01 10

1:33:45 45 1:15 11

1:29:21:54:02:15 27:59 48:49 12

1:27:00:03:45 2:41 4:49 13

1:25:48:51:35:06:40 29:31 53:49 14

1:23:13:46:40 56 1:46 15

Figure 4a. Line drawing of Plimpton 322. Source: Eleanor Robson

at http://www.dma.ulpgc.es/profesores/pacheco/Robson.pdf

Figure 4b. Transcription of the Plimpton 322 tablet using modern digits. Source

Clark University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science http://

aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/mathhist/plimpnote.html¬)

Pythagorean numbers, this means that they are integer solutions to

d2 =b2+l2 where d and b stand for the diagonal and the leg of the triangle

respectively."13 To use modern terminology, the numbers tabulated in

Plimpton 322 are Pythagorean triples, which as dened in section 2, are

whole numbers that fulll the Pythagorean relation, a2 +b2=c2 .

In other words, Plimpton 322 is the work of some unknown Bab-

ylonian mathematician, or a teacher or a scribe trying to nd sets of

whole numbers which will automatically generate a right angle. What is

most striking is that some of the triples listed in the tablet are simply too

large for a random, hit-and-trial discovery.14 ere are many guesses as

to how they managed to get these values, but nothing denite can be

said about their method.

e second tablet that has received great amount of scrutiny is

called YBC 7289, making it the tablet number 7289 in the Yale Babylo-

nian Collection. e tablet dates from the old Babylonian period of the

Hammurabi dynasty, roughly 1800-1600 BCE.

is celebrated tablet shows a tilted square with two diagonals,

with some marks engraved along one side and under the horizontal

diagonal. A line-drawing of the tablet and a sketch in which the cunei-

form numerals are written in modern numbers is given below (Figures

5a and 5b on the next page):

e number on the top of the horizontal diagonal when translated

from the base-60 of Mesopotamians to our modern 10-based numerals,

gives us this number: 1.414213, which is none other than square root

of 2, accurate to the nearest one hundred thousandth. e number be-

low the horizontal diagonal is what we get on multiplying the 1.414213

with the length of the side (30) which, in modern numbers comes to

42.426389. is tablet is interpreted as showing that the Mesopotami-

ans knew how to calculate the square root of a number to a remarkable

accuracy.

ese two tablets are the rst evidence we have of the knowledge of

what we today call Pythagorean eorem.

13 Otto Neugebauer, p. 37.

14 For example, row 4 has the following triples 12,709 (the short side), 18,541 the

hypotenuse, and 13,500 the third side of a right angle triangle. See Katz, p. 20.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

Figure 5b. YBC 7289 transcribed into modern numerals. Source: McTutor History of

Mathematics Archives at http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.html

Figure 5a. Line-drawing of the Yale tablet, YBC 7289.

Source: Mathematical Association of America.

4. Pythagoras, the Pythagoreans and Euclid

Pythagoras (about 569 BC-about 475 BC) is perhaps the most misun-

derstood of all gures that have come down through history. We all

know him as the man who gave us the theorem that – rightly or wrongly

– bears his name. But for Pythagoras and his followers, this theorem

was not a formula for doubling the square or building precise perpen-

diculars, as it was for all other civilizations of that time. It is a safe bet

that neither Pythagoras nor his followers ever lied a length of rope,

got down on their knees to measure and build anything, for that kind of

work was seen t only for the slaves.

e real – and path-breaking – contribution of Pythagoras was the

fundamental idea that nature can be understood through mathematics.

He was the rst to imagine the cosmos as an ordered and harmonious

whole, whose laws could be understood by understanding the ratios

and proportions between the constituents. It was this tradition that was

embraced by Plato, and through Plato became a part of Western Chris-

tianity, and later became a fundamental belief of the Scientic Revolu-

tion expressed eloquently by Galileo: "e Book of Nature is written in

the language of mathematics."

It is well-recognized that Pythagoras himself was not the original

discoverer of the relationship between three sides of a right-angled tri-

angle. Greek accounts written by his contemporaries are very clear that

Pythagoras got the idea from the Mesopotamians and perhaps Egyp-

tians, among whom he spent many years as a young man. e words

of Sir omas Heath, the well-known historian of Greek mathematics,

written as long ago as 1921, are apt:

ough this is the proposition universally associated by tradition with the

name of Pythagoras, no really trustworthy evidence exists that it was actually

discovered by him.15

15 Heath, 1921, p. 144. Our esteemed Minister and the Professor were really tilting

at windmills. Greeks have always admitted that they learned their geometry from

Egyptians and Mesopotamians. All serious historians of mathematics would agree

with Sir Heath's words.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

Neither is there any clear-cut evidence that Pythagoras or his fol-

lowers oered a proof of the theorem. ose who attribute the proof to

Pythagoras cite as evidence stories about him sacricing a number of

oxen when he proved the theorem. Apparently the story about oxen be-

ing sacriced comes from a writer by the name of Apollodorus. But as

omas Heath has argued, the passage from Apollodorus does mention

the sacrice without mentioning which theorem was being celebrated.

e sacrice story has been challenged on the grounds of the Pythago-

reans' strictures against animal sacrices and meat-eating.16

e rst Greek proof of the theorem appears in Euclid's classic of

geometry called Elements, which was written at least three centuries af-

ter Pythagoras. Euclid (around 365 BCE-275 BCE) provides not one,

but two proofs of this theorem – theorem 42 in Book I, and theorem 31

of the Book VI. Nowhere does Euclid attribute the proofs to Pythago-

ras.17

Why then did this theorem get Pythagoras' name? No one knows

for sure. It is possible that Greeks were following a tradition of attribut-

ing new ideas to well-recognized sages – a practice that is very common

in Indian scientic and spiritual literature as well. Pythagoras, aer all,

was no ordinary man: he had a semi-divine status among his followers.

While he did not discover it or prove it, this equation played a most

dramatic – one can say, catastrophic – role in Pythagoras' condence in

mathematics and numbers. To understand the catastrophe, one has to

understand the fundamental place numbers and ratios occupied in the

Pythagorean view of the world.

Pythagoras was a mystic-mathematician, a cross between "Einstein

and Mrs. Eddy" to use Bertrand Russell's words.18 Or one can say that he

was a mystic with a mathematical bent of mind. He saw contemplation

of mathematical proportions and ratios as the highest form of medita-

tion that can bring the mind in tune with the Ultimate Reality that he

16 Heath, 1921, pp. 144-145.

17 e rst proof, I:42, is generally attributed to Eudoxus, who was a student of Plato,

while the second proof is attributed to Euclid himself. See Eli Maor, chapter 3.

18 Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy founded a spiritualist movement called Christian Science

in 1879. e quotation is from Russell's well-known History of Western Philosophy,

p. 31.

believed existed independently of material stu. What is more, he be-

lieved that mathematical knowledge can purify the soul and free it from

the cycles of rebirth. (Yes, his spiritual beliefs overlapped with the belief

system prevalent in India. More on this below).

Pythagoras was born in 571 BCE (which makes him a rough con-

temporary of Gautam Buddha in India and Confucius in China) on the

island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, just o the coast of modern-day

Turkey. He spent many years of his youth in Egypt and later in Mesopo-

tamia. In both places, he immersed himself in the spiritual and math-

ematical traditions of the host cultures. ere is no evidence that he

travelled as far east as India, but there is a strong possibility that he

picked up the belief in immortality of the soul and its reincarnation

from Hindu teachers who were probably present in the courts of Per-

sian kings before Alexander opened a direct line between India and

Greece when he came as far as the Indus river in 326 BCE. It was his

belief in reincarnation that led him to oppose eating meat and stick to

a bean-free vegetarian diet – a dietary practice which is as un-Greek

today, as it was then. Like the Hindus, he believed in purication of the

soul through contemplation of the Ultimate Reality in order to break

the chain of rebirth – except that for him, mathematics was the form

that the contemplation of the Ultimate took.19

Could he not have picked up the geometry of Baudhāyana and oth-

er śulvakara s as well who are estimated to have lived anywhere between

800-300 BCE? It is entirely possible, although the Greek historians of

that time have le no record of it. e same historians, on the other

hand, have le meticulous records of what he learned from Mesopota-

mians and Egyptians.

But wherever Pythagoras learned this theorem from, it played a

unique role in his philosophy. It led to the discovery of irrational num-

19 For pre-Alexandrian contacts between Indians and Greeks, see McEvilley, 2002,

ch. 1. e possibility of Pythagoras learning his beliefs in immortality and rebirth

of the soul from Indian philosophers is accepted by many scholars. See Kahn

2001 and McEvilley,2002 for example. One of the many stories that are told about

Pythagoras is that he once stopped a man from beating a dog by telling him that

he recognized the dog as an old friend, reincarnated. His followers believed that

Pythagoras could recall many of his earlier births and that was one reason they

treated him as a divine man.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

bers (see section 2) which led to a great spiritual crisis for himself and

his followers. To understand why a mathematical result would lead to a

spiritual crisis, some background is needed.

While we don't have any evidence for Pythagoras discovering

the Pythagorean eorem, his role in discovering the laws of musical

sounds is well-attested. It appears that one day as he was walking past

a blacksmith's workshop, he was intrigued by the sounds coming from

within. So he went in to investigate and found that the longer the sheets

of metal that were being hit by the blacksmith's hammer, the lower was

the pitch of the sound. When he came back home, he experimented

with bells and water-lled jars and observed the same relationship: the

more massive an object that is being struck or plucked, the lower the

pitch of the sound it produces. He experimented with strings and ob-

served that the pitch of the sound is inversely proportional to the length

of the string that is vibrating. He gured out that if a string is plucked

at a ratio of 2:1 it produces an octave, 3:2 produces a h, 4:3 a fourth.

is was a pivotal discovery – of far greater importance to Pythag-

oras than the famous theorem he is known for. It made him realize that

human experience of something as subjective as music could be under-

stood in terms of numerical ratios: the quality of what pleases the ear

was determined by the ratios of the lengths that were vibrating. is

was the rst successful reduction of quality to quantity, and the rst step

towards mathematization of human experience.20

e realization that what produces music are certain numerical ra-

tios led Pythagoras to derive a general law: that the ultimate stu out of

which all things are made are numbers. Understand the numbers and

their ratios and you have understood the Ultimate Reality that lies be-

hind all phenomena, which you can only see in your mind, not through

your senses. If all is number – and numbers rule all – then obviously,

we should be able to express that number either as whole numbers (in-

tegers like 2, 6, 144 etc.) or as fractions of whole numbers (for example,

half can be written as one divided by two).

Given how central numbers and numerical ratios were to Pythag-

oras's view of the unseen reality which humans could access through

20 is interpretation is from Arthur Koestler's well-known book, e Sleepwalkers.

mathematics, one can understand that the discovery that square root of

two cannot be expressed as either a whole number or a fraction of two

whole numbers would lead to an unprecedented crisis.

is discovery was a direct result of the Pythagorean eorem.

Here is what happened: having understood the right-angled triangle

relationship (i.e., a2 +b2=c2 ) either Pythagoras himself or one of his stu-

dents tried use it to calculate the diagonal of a square whose side is one

unit. ey discovered that they simply can't get to a denite number

that would terminate somewhere. In other words, they realized that

some lengths cannot be expressed as a number. is shattered their fun-

damental belief that all is number and the ratio of numbers can explain

the order of the cosmos.

e legend has it that Pythagoras swore his followers to complete

secrecy regarding this awful discovery: they were never to disclose the

existence of irrational numbers to anyone. One unfortunate follower by

the name of Hippasus who broke the vow of secrecy was pushed to his

death from a boat into the Mediterranean Sea – so the story goes.

e crisis led to further developments in Greek mathematics. To

begin with, it led to a split between geometry and arithmetic. For Py-

thagoras, all numbers had shapes. But irrational numbers could not be

expressed in shapes. e existence of irrationality was proven later by

Aristotle and Euclid.

To conclude this section: yes, Pythagoras was not the original dis-

cover of this theorem. But he put it to a dierent use than it was any-

where else. e truly important discovery of Pythagoras was not the

famous theorem, but the laws of music and the existence of irrational

numbers.

5. Śulvasūtras

We now come to the central theme inspired by the Minister and the

Professor mentioned earlier. To recapitulate, they asserted that what

the world knows as the Pythagorean eorem should be renamed aer

Baudhāyana who discovered it in 800 BCE, which is nearly 200 years

before Pythagoras was even born.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

As we have already seen, this claim is factually incorrect: there is

a great amount of evidence chiseled into the Mesopotamian clay that

proves that Pythagoras was already outdone before even Baudhāyana

was born! But if we let go of this madness for who came rst, we will

see that Baudhāyana and his colleagues who lived and worked some-

where between 800 to 500 BCE (or between 600-200 BCE, according to

some estimates21 ) were extremely creative artisans-geometers in their

own right. eir accomplishments don't need to be judged from the Py-

thagorean or the Greek lens.

What are these Śulvasūtras that we keep hearing about? Who com-

posed them? When? Why? ese are some of the questions we will try

to answer in this section.

As mentioned earlier, śulva means a cord or string, while sutras are

short, poetic sentences that are easy to memorize. ese "sutras of the

cord" are a part of the kalpa-texts that make up one of the six Vedan-

gas, or limbs of the Vedas, each dealing with a specialized topic ranging

from grammar to astronomy. e kalpa literature specializes in ritual

matters, including building of re altars, or vedis, some of them very

intricate in shapes and sizes.

e most succinct denition is provided by George ibaut, the

German philologist who rst translated these sutras:

e class of writings, commonly called Śulvasūtras means the "sutras of the

cord". Śulvasūtras is the name given to those portions or supplements of the

Kalpasūtras which treat of the measurement and construction of dierent ve-

dis, or altars, the word śulva referring to the cords which were employed for

those measurements. I may remark at once that the sutras themselves don't

make use of the word śulva; a cord is regularly called by them rajju (rope). 22

Out of four extant texts, the two most important are those by

Baudhāyana and Āpastamba. Next to nothing is known about these

men, but "most likely they were not just scribes but also priest-cras-

men, performing a multitude of tasks, including construction of the

21 Agathe Keller (2012) dates Baudhāyana to 600 BCE.

22 ibaut 1992[1875], p. 417. George ibaut is an interesting gure in Indology.

He was born in Germany in 1848 and later moved to England to work with Max

Muller. In 1875 he became a professor of Sanskrit at Benares Sanskrit College.

It was here that he produced his studies on the Śulvasūtras. But his real claim to

fame was his work on mimamsa texts. See Keller, 2012, pp. 261-262.

vedis, maintaining agni and instructing worshippers on appropriate

choice of sacrices and altars."23

If it was the need for repeated measurements of land in the ood-

zones of rivers that gave birth to geometry in Egypt and Mesopotamia,

it was the need for precision in Vedic rituals that gave birth to geometry

in India. In order for the Vedic yagnas to bear fruit, they had to be car-

ried out precisely according to the guidelines laid out in the Brahmana

texts of Yajurveda: the mantras had to be recited just so, the sacricial

animal quartered exactly at specic vertebra, the altar (vedi) for the sac-

rice had to be constructed exactly following the prescribed shapes and

sizes. us, ritual has been recognized as the source of sciences and in-

deed, by some, of all civilization.24 Let us see how the need for exactness

in ritual led to advances in geometry in ancient India.

To begin with, the shape of the altar was decided by the goal of the

yagna. For example those who desired to go to heaven were required to

construct a falcon (syena in Sanskrit)-shaped vedi because as Taittirīya

Sahitā explained: "the falcon is the best yer among the birds; and

thus he (the sacricer) having become a falcon himself ies up to the

heavenly world."25 For those seeking food, the altar should be in the

shape of a trough (called drona-cit), while those seeking victory over the

enemy were to build an altar in the shape of a rathachakra or a wheel.

What is geometrically challenging about these requirements is this:

• To use ibaut's words: "every one of these altars had to be

constructed out of ve layers of bricks… every layer was to

consist of 200 bricks [arranged in such a manner] that in all

ve layers, one brick was never lying upon another brick of the

same size and form."

• If this wasn't challenging enough, the area of every altar, what-

ever its shape – falcon with curved wings, wheel, tortoise,

23 George G. Joseph, p. 327.

24 A. Seidenberg, 1962, proposes that civilization itself has its origin in rituals. We

will discuss the contribution of the ritual horse sacrice (Ashvamedha yagna) in

understanding equine anatomy in ancient India in chapter 3.

25 ibaut, p. 419.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

trough etc. – had to be equal to 71/2 square purusha, where a

purusha is the height of a man with uplied arms.26

• ere was yet another challenge: every-time the sacrice was

carried out aer the rst construction and consecration, the

area had to be increased by one square purusha , until one

comes to the one-hundred-and-a-half-fold altar. As Seiden-

berg explains, "the sacricer is [symbolically] climbing a lad-

der, his sacricial rank being determined by, or determining,

the area."27

• Here comes the most daunting challenge of all: while the area

had to be increased by one square purusha at each subsequent

construction, the relative proportions of the single parts had to

remain unchanged. In other words, area was to be increased

while preserving the shape of the altar.

• ere is another twist to altar-making which shows the deep

roots of the varna order: If the yajman, or the host of the yag-

na, was a Brahmin, he was required to set up the sacred re at

eight units east of the household re, if a prince, eleven and the

Vaisya twelve.28

Clearly, constructing such altars was no mere "carpentry problem",

to use Seidenberg's words, that could be solved with a few "carpenter's

rules".29 e technical problems were not trivial, for as ibaut puts it:

Squares had to be found which would be equal to two or more given squares,

or equal to the dierence of two given squares; oblongs had to be turned into

squares and squares into oblongs; triangles had to be constructed equal to given

squares and oblongs and so on….[Even for the most ordinary of vedis] care had

to be taken that the sides really stood at right angles, for would the āhavaniya

re have carried up the oerings of the sacricer to the gods if its hearth had

26 It is not entirely clear how this man of one-purusha height is chosen. Is he any

average sized man, or the yajman hosting the yagna?

27 Seidenberg, 1962, p. 491.

28 Kim Ploer, p. 24. Ploer calls these units "double-paces where a pace equals 15

angulas". An angula or digit is said to be equal to 14 grains of millet.

29 Seidenberg is right in poking fun at those Hellenophiles who treat any tradition

of geometry that does not justify itself through a Euclidean deduction as merely

"carpentry".

not the shape of a perfect square?... [there were also occasions when] a square

had to be turned into a circle of the same area.30

e most important arsenal in the mental tool-kit of the altar-mak-

ers was what we call Pythagorean eorem.

Baudhāyana gave a very close approximation to this theorem,

even though he used four-sided right-angled structures rather than the

right-angled triangle that we are familiar with. Here are three sutras

(1.9-1.13) from Baudhāyana Śulvasūtras which capture the essence of

this theorem, one for the diagonal of a square and another for the diago-

nal of an oblong or rectangle, followed by Pythagorean triples:

1. "e cord which is stretched across in the diagonal of a square (sama-catu-

rasra) produces an area of double the size."

at is: the square of the diagonal of a square is twice as large as

the area of the square.

2. a. "e cord stretched on the diagonal of an oblong (dirgha chaturasra ) pro-

duces both areas which the cords forming the longer and the shorter side of an

oblong produce separately."

at is: the square of the diagonal of an oblong is equal to the

square on both of its sides. is is an unambiguous statement of

the Pythagorean theorem.

2. b. "is (2a) is seen in those oblongs the sides of which are 3 and 4, 12 and 5,

15 and 8, 7 and 24, 12 and 35, 15 and 36."

Here, Baudhāyana is enumerating ve Pythagorean triangles,

that is, right-angled triangles whose sides will yield a hypot-

enuse, which when squared will yield twice the area of the two

sides which have the dimensions described in 2a. All three sides

of the resulting triangles can be expressed in whole numbers.31

e numbers in 2b are none other than our old friends, the Pythag-

orean triples. We encountered them rst on Plimpton 322 which dates

back at least a thousand years before Baudhāyana. e Pythagoreans

not only knew about the triples, but had actually worked out a formula

30 ibaut, pp. 420-421.

31 ibaut, p. 422-424.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

for nding these triples.32 So we can say that Baudhāyana was no less

than his contemporaries, but he was not ahead of them either.

Once these insights were acquired, it became easy to conduct many

operations required for altar construction. us, doubling the area of a

square became a breeze: all you had to do was to gure out the diagonal

of the existing square and construct a square on it. Or you could easily

triple the size of a square by building an oblong on the diagonal of the

second square obtained by doubling the rst square.

We also nd these principles at work in the construction of a vedi

for the soma ritual described by Āpastamba. If one follows Āpastamba's

instructions described by ibaut, it becomes obvious that the altar-

makers were using cords and pegs in the ratio of what we would call

Pythagorean triples (5, 12, 13) to construct the east and west side of the

vedi at right angles on the axis of the vedi running through the center.33

ere is lot more to these sutras than just the rst enunciation of

Pythagoras theorem. Of special interest is the discovery of a procedure

for calculating the square roots. e need for calculating the square

roots emerged for the same "irrationality" that so bothered the Pythag-

oreans. e problem is that the diagonal of any square is incommensu-

rable with the length of the sides. is creates a problem for someone

who is trying to calculate the diagonal of a square, knowing its sides.

We nd in Baudhāyana an approximate method of nding square roots,

and using this method we get a fairly accurate square root of two to the

h decimal place.34 Here again, our śulvakaras were in good company:

the Yale tablet shows the Babylonians knew how to solve the square root

of 2 problem, and the Greeks nearly had a mental breakdown over it!

We now come to the controversial matter of proof. For a long time,

the mathematical traditions of ancient India and China have been put

down as merely "carpenter's rules" which lack proof, while the only

32 e Pythagoreans gured out formulas for calculating triples for an odd number

and an even number. ese formulas were later given a proof by Euclid. See Katz,

p. 38-39 for details.

33 ibaut, pp. 424-426.

34 See ibaut, pp. 430-431 and Joseph, pp. 334 -336 for details. ibaut provides

useful explanations of how śulvakaras could square a circle, build a falcon shaped

altar and other complex altars.

valid model of proof that is admitted is that modeled on Euclid that

proceeds through deductions from rst principles. It is true that the au-

thors of Śulvasūtras only meant to convey, in short memorable sutras,

how to construct the altars. As a result, they did not try to explain how

they arrived at their methods. But that does not mean that the later In-

dian commentators on these sutras did not feel the need to "remove

confusion and doubts regarding the validity of their results and proce-

dures; and to obtain consent of the community of mathematicians."35

e Greeks were not the only ones to feel the itch to justify their theo-

rems, albeit the deductive method of proof was unique to them.

Even though Baudhāyana and other śulvakaras don't provide a

proof, later texts do. e rst Indian proof of the insights regarding

right angle and diagonals was provided by Bhaskara who lived in the

12th century.

6. "Was Pythagoras Chinese?": the Kou-Ku theorem

Sometime in the 6th century BCE when Pythagoras and his followers

were working out their number-based cosmology in islands around the

Aegean Sea, when Śulvasūtras were being composed in India, the Chi-

nese, too, had gured out the Pythagorean theorem. Not only that, they

had also given an elegant proof for it. Later they would call it kou-ku

theorem, which is sometimes also referred to as gou-gu theorem.

e rst reference and proof of this theorem appears in the oldest

mathematical text known in China. It is called Chou Pei Suan Ching

which translates into e Arithmetical Classic of the Gnomon and the

Circular Paths of Heaven. Just as in the case of Śulvasūtras, the exact

date of this text is not known. To quote from Frank Swetz and T.I.Kao,

authors of Was Pythagoras Chinese:

While the exact date of its origin is controversial, with estimates ranging as far

back as 1100 BCE, it can generally be accepted on the basis of astronomical

evidence that much of the material in the book was from the time of Confucius,

the sixth century BCE and its contents would reect the mathematical knowl-

edge accumulated in China until that time.36

35 Srinivas 2008, p. 1833.

36 Swetz and Kao, 1977, p. 14.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

Chou Pei is largely devoted to using the gnomon to measure the

length of the shadow of the sun.37 But the rst part is devoted to the

properties of right-angle triangles. is part consists of a dialogue be-

tween Chou Kung (the ruler of Chou) and a wise man by the name of

Shang Kao who "knows the art of numbering". Chou Kung wants to

know how the astronomers could have "established the degrees of the

celestial spheres?" He is puzzled because as he says, "there are no steps

by which one may ascent to heavens, and the earth is not measurable by

a footrule. I should like to ask you what is the origin of these numbers?"

Shang Kao explains that the art of numbering originates from "the

circle and the square. e circle is derived from the square and square

from a rectangle." What follows is a statement of what would later be

given the name of kou-ku theorem:

let us cut a rectangle diagonally and make the width (kou) 3 units, and the

length (ku) 4 units. e diagonal (ching) between the two corners will then be

5 units long.38

is statement is immediately followed with a proof:

aer drawing a square on this diagonal, circumscribe it by half-rectangles like

that which has been le outside, so as to form a square plate. us the four

outer half-rectangles of width 3, length 4 and diagonal 5, together make two

rectangles (of area 24); then, when this is subtracted from the square plate of

area 49, the remainder is of area 25. is process is called piling up the rectan-

gles (chi chu).

e methods used by Yu the Great39 in governing the world were derived from

these numbers.

Chou Kung exclaimed "great indeed is the art of numbering. I would like to ask

about the Tao of the use of right-angle triangle."

37 Gnomon is a primitive form of a sun-dial. Mesopotamians are known to have

used it, the Greeks are known to have borrowed it from Mesopotamians. Indian

astronomers knew it as shanku.

38 Notice the familiar triples 3, 4, 5.

39 According to Needham (1959, p. 23), "the legendary Yu was the patron saint of

hydraulic engineers and all those concerned with water-control, irrigation and

conservancy. Epigraphic evidence from the later Han, when the Chou Pei had

taken its present form, shows us, in reliefs on the walls of the Wu Liang tomb-

shrines the legendary culture-heroes Fu-Hsi and Nu-Kua holding squares and

compasses. e reference to Yu here undoubtedly indicates the ancient need for

mensuration and applied mathematics."

Aer Shang Kao explains the "Tao of the use of right-angle

triangle",40 the dialogue ends with Kao declaring:

40 Which is nothing more than rules for using a T-square.

Figure 6. Hsuan-u is considered the earliest proof of Pythagoras eorem, dat-

ing back to around 600 BCE.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

He who understands the earth is a wise man and he who understands the heav-

ens is a sage. Knowledge is derived from a straight line. e straight line is

derived from the right angle. And the combination of the right angle with num-

bers is what guides and rules ten thousand things.

Chou Kung exclaimed: "Excellent indeed."41

is dialogue is accompanied by a diagram (gure 6 on page 44).

is is what is called hsuan-thu and is considered one of the earliest

and most elegant proofs of the hundreds of proofs of the Pythagorean

theorem that exist today.42

is proof is relevant to the Indian story. As mentioned in the pre-

vious section, Śulvasūtras did not provide any proof of the theorem and

the rst Indian proof appears in the work of Bhaskara in the 12th cen-

tury.

Some historians believe that Bhaskara's proof is inuenced by this

ancient Chinese proof. is was rst pointed out by Joseph Needham

who writes:

Liu Hui [see below] called this gure 'the diagram giving the relations between

the hypotenuse and the sum and dierence of the other two sides, whereby one

can nd the unknown from the known.' In the time of Liu and Chao, it was

colored, the small central square being yellow and the surrounding rectangles

red. e same proof is given by the Indian Bhaskara in the +12th century.

e Hsuan thu proof of the Pythagoras theorem given in the +3rd century

commentary of Chao Chun-Ching on the Chou Pei is reproduced exactly by

Bhaskara in +12the century. It does not occur anywhere else.43

is proof is oen confused with Pythagorean proof. But this proof

shows an arithmetical-algebraic style of the Chinese which was totally

alien to the Greek geometry which abstracted ideal forms from num-

bers. As Needham puts it, the classic passage from Chou Pei quoted

above:

…shows the Chinese arithmetical-algebraic mind at work from the earliest

times, apparently not concerned with abstract geometry independent of con-

41 e complete dialogue can be found in Swetz and Kao, pp.14-16, and also in

Needham.

42 For a simple explanation of this proof that even those without much mathemati-

cal aptitude (including myself) can understand, see http://www.mathisfun.com/

geometry/pthagorean-theorem-proof.html

43 Needham and Wang Ling, 1959, p. 96 and p. 147. is position is supported by

Swetz and Kao, p.40, and also nds support from Victor Katz, pp. 240-241.

crete numbers, and consisting of theorems and propositions capable of proof,

given only certain fundamental postulates at the outset. Numbers might be un-

known, or they might not be any particular numbers, but numbers there had

to be. In the Chinese approach, geometrical gures acted as a means for trans-

mutation whereby numerical relations were generalized into algebraic forms.44

is theorem shows up again in the 9th chapter of the most well-

known ancient classics of mathematics in China, called Chiu Chang

Suan Shu, which translates as Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art.

is work was composed in the Han dynasty (3rd C. BCE). e version

that survives to the present is a commentary by Liu Hui in 250 CE. Liu

Hui has the same iconic stature in China as Aryabhata has in India.

e ninth chapter of the book is titled "Kou-ku" which is an elabo-

ration, in algebraic terms, of the properties of right-angle triangles rst

described in Chou Pei.

Why kou-ku or gou-gu? To cite Swetz and Kao, in a right angle, the

short side adjacent to the right angle is called kou or gou (or "leg"). e

longer side adjacent to the right angle is called ku or gu (or "thigh").

e side opposite to the right angle (the hypotenuse) is called hsien (or

"bowstring)".45

is chapter contains some kou-ku problems that are famous

around the world for their elegance and the delicately drawn sketches

that accompany them. ese include the so-called "broken bamboo

problem" and "the reed in the pond problem". Both of these problems, it

is claimed, found their way into medieval Indian and European math-

ematics texts. e "reed in the pond" problem appears in Bhaskara and

the "broken bamboo" in the 9th century Sanskrit classic Ganit Sara by

Mahavira.46

One thing that the Chinese and the Indian geometers shared – and

what set them apart from the Greeks – was that geometry never got

44 Needham and Wang Ling, 1959, pp. 23-24.

45 Swetz and Kao, pp. 26-28.

46 Swetz and Kao, pp. 32-33 for the "reed in the pond" problem, pp. 44-45 for the

"broken bamboo" problem. See also Needham, p. 147.

Not having training in mathematics, I am not in a position to render my inde-

pendent judgement. But there are striking similarities between Li Hui's (250 CE)

reed problem and Bhaskara's (12th century) Lotus problem. See Swetz and Kao for

detailed statement of the problem in both cases.

Who Discovered the Pythagorean eorem? c

linked to spiritual and/or philosophical questions, as it did in Greece.

It remained more of an art used for practical matters. But that does not

mean that their ideas were not supported by arguments and spatial ma-

nipulation (as in the Hsuan-thu proof). Just because these proofs did

not follow Euclid's axiomatic-deductive methods, does not make them

any less persuasive.

7. Conclusion

is chapter has followed the trail of the so-called Pythagoras eo-

rem through centuries, crisscrossing the islands on the Aegean Sea,

and traveling through the river valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and the

Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges, and the Yellow River. We have

looked at the archeological evidence le behind on Mesopotamian clay

tablets and on Egyptian and Chinese scrolls. We have examined the

writings of the Greeks and the sutras of our own altar-makers. We have

wondered at the achievements of the ancient land-surveyors, builders

and mathematicians.

Having undertaken this journey, we are in a better position to an-

swer the question: "Who discovered the Pythagorean eorem?" e

answer is: the geometric relationship described by this theorem was

discovered independently in many ancient civilizations. e likely ex-

planation is that the knowledge of the relationship between sides of a

right-angle triangle emerged out of practical problems that all civiliza-

tions necessarily face, namely, land measurement and construction of

buildings – buildings as intricate as the Vedic re altars, as grand as the

Pyramids, as functional as the Chinese dams and bridges, or as humble

as simple dwellings with walls perpendicular to the oor.

Where is India in this picture? Indian śulvakaras were one among

the many in the ancient world who hit upon the central insight con-

tained in the Pythagorean eorem: they were neither the leaders,

nor laggards, but simply one among their peers in other ancient civi-

lizations. Our Baudhāyana need not displace their Pythagoras, as they

were not running a race. ey were simply going about their business,

Baudhāyana and his colleagues concentrating on the sacred geometry

of re altars, Pythagoras and his followers worrying about the ratios and

proportions that underlie the cosmos.

It is merely an accident of history, undoubtedly fed by the Euro-

centric and Hellenophilic biases of Western historians, that the insight

contained in the theorem got associated with the name of Pythagoras.

Apart from shoring up pride in our civilization, nothing much is to be

gained by insisting on a name change. e correct response to Euro-

centrism is not Indo-centrism of the kind that was on full display at the

Mumbai Science Congress. e correct response is to stop playing the

game of one-upmanship altogether.

e itch to be e First is unproductive for many reasons. For one,

it turns evolution of science into a competitive sport, history of science

into a matter of score- keeping and the historians of science into ref-

erees and judges who hand out trophies to the winner. e far greater

damage, however, is inicted on the integrity of ancient sciences and

their practitioners whose own priorities and methods get squeezed into

the narrow connes of the Greek achievements.

If we really want to honor Baudhāyana and other śulvakaras,

a far more sincere and meaningful tribute would be to understand

their achievements in the totality of their own context, including the

ingenious methods they employed for solving complex architectural

problems. Viewing ancient Indian geometry purely, or even primarily,

through the lens of Pythagoras actually does a disservice to Baudhāyana,

for there is lot more to Śulvasūtras than this one theorem.

It is high time we freed ourselves from our xation on Pythagoras.

Let him Rest in Peace.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

Cha pt er 2

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps1

जब ज̣ीरो िदया मेरे भारत ने,

भारत ने, मेरे भारत ने,

दुिनया को तब िगनती आई।

तारो ं की भाषा भारत ने,

दुिनया को पहले िसखलाई।

देता ना दशमलव भारत तो,

यूँ चाँद पे जाना मुिकल था।

धरती और चाँद की दूरी का,

अंदाज़ लगाना मुिकल था।2

1. e question

Indians of a certain age grew up humming this ditty from the 1970

Hindi lm, Purab aur Paschim. Judging by the hits it gets on YouTube, it

seems as if the song continues to tug at Indian heartstrings even today,

almost half-a-century aer it was composed.

e lyrics resonate because they arm what is already imprinted

in our national psyche. It is drilled into our heads by school teachers,

religious teachers, family elders, Bollywood lms, and politicians, that

1 e title of this chapter is inspired by books by Robert Kaplan (1999) and Lam

Lay-Yong (2004).

2 e movie's title, Purab aur Paschim translates into "East and West." Here is a

rough translation of the lyrics: Only aer my Bharat (India) gave zero, could the

rest of the world learn how to count; my Bharat rst taught the world the language

of the stars. Had Bharat not given the decimal system to the world, it would have

been dicult to reach the moon, or even to calculate the distance between the

earth and the moon.

zero and the decimal system are India's unique and revolutionary con-

tributions to world mathematics and science. Countless books and es-

says are written by Indian mathematicians and historians that declare

zero to be an "entirely Hindu" contribution to world mathematics.3 e

sentiment expressed in the song – that if it were not for the genius of an-

cient Bharat, the world wouldn't have known how to count – is widely

shared. If there is one "fact" in history of science that is assumed to be

true beyond any reasonable doubt, it is the Indian origin of zero.

But is this really true? Is it really irrefutably established that ancient

India was the original source of the number zero and the decimal num-

bering system that is the foundation of modern mathematics?

is is the question that this chapter seeks to answer.

2. Two principles and a hypothesis

Two principles will guide this chapter.

e rst is a commitment to comparative history. Comparative

history simply means studying ideas, institutions, and historical pro-

cesses across dierent socio-cultural systems separated by space and/or

time. Histories that can be compared can exist within the same nation

(the structure of family in Kerala and Punjab, for example), across na-

tions (historical trajectories of economic growth in China and India, for

example) or across civilizations (the philosophies of nature in ancient

Greece and India at a comparable time period, for example). Compara-

tive history can produce valuable insights for identifying events/pro-

cesses/institutions that could have set a society on a certain trajectory

3 e classic in this genre is Bibhutibhusan Datta and Avadesh Singh's History

of Hindu Mathematics published in 1938. is strain of "out of India" writing

continues in academic circles, including elite science and engineering institu-

tions, see Datta, 2002, for example. Prestigious scientic institutions routinely host

ideologues with scientic credentials who make hyperbolic claims about Hindu

origins of zero (and just about every landmark in history of science) backed by

nothing more than Sanskrit shlokas, randomly selected and idiosyncratically

interpreted. For a recent example, see the lecture by Dr. N. Gopalakrishnan, the

founder-director the Indian Institute of Scientic Heritage at IIT-Madras recently.

(e lecture can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv41pJT7500).

Books like Dr. Priyadarshi's Zero is not the Only Story continue to gain traction in

the public sphere, including places like IIT-Kanpur.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

which may dier from other societies in direction or in pace. Only by

comparison can historians get to understand whether the develop-

ments in question are unique to a society, or are part of a much broader

movement.4

Cross-civilizational comparisons are of special relevance in history

of science, especially when scientic achievements are appropriated for

nationalistic purposes and cast in the following form: " the civilization

Y was the rst to come up with the idea X." Replace Y with "ancient

Indian mathematicians/scientists-sages" and X with zero and decimal

system, or with any other notable scientic discovery, and we get exact-

ly the kind of history of science that is being propagated in India today.

e very idea of being "the rst" is an inherently comparative idea:

unless there are others engaged in a similar project, how can there be

a "rst"? Can there be a winner in a marathon without there being a

marathon? To crown any civilization Y the "rst" to come up with X,

requires us to see what Y's sister-civilizations A, B, or C were doing in

the domain of X.

It is true that there has been a long tradition of history-writing that

simply assumed that the European civilization – with its birth in ancient

Greece and its coming of age in Christianity – gave birth to everything

of value. is kind of history suers from a serious bout of Hellenophil-

4 According to Karl Marx, "Events strikingly similar but occurring in a dierent

historical milieu, lead to completely dierent results. By studying each of these

evolutions separately, and then comparing them, it is easier to nd the key to

the understanding of this phenomenon; but it is never possible to arrive at this un-

derstanding by using the passe-partout [ master-key] of some universal-historical

theory whose great virtue is to stand above history." Quoted from Raymond Grew,

1980, p. 766. Marc Bloch, another master of comparative history, has emphasized

the importance of the comparative method as a means of systematically gather-

ing evidence to test the validity of explanations of historical changes. As William

Sewell (1967,p.208-209) writes in his exposition of Bloch's work, "if an historian

attributes the appearance of phenomenon A in one society to the existence of con-

dition B, he can check this hypothesis by trying to nd other societies where A oc-

curs without B, or vice versa. If he nds no case which contradict his hypothesis,

his condence in its validity will increase…. If he nds contradictory evidence, he

will either reject the hypothesis outright or reformulate and rene it so as to take

into account the contradictory evidence and then subject it again to comparative

testing." Clearly, historical comparisons serve a function that is very similar the

role of experiments in natural sciences.

ia, which David Pingree has described as "a kind of madness" caused by

the delusion that the only real sciences are those that began in Greece

and then spread to the rest of the world. On this account, Europe is the

sole Giver, while the rest of the world is merely a passive Receiver.5

Eurocentric history is deeply awed and condescending to the rest

of the world. Yet, an uncritical and self-celebratory Indo-centric history

is nothing but a mirror image of uncritical and self-celebratory Euro-

centrism: Both are equally illogical and equally chauvinistic. What we

instead need is an appreciation that independent mathematical and sci-

entic developments can cross cultural barriers, take root and blossom

in many dierent kinds of soils.6

e second principle that will guide this chapter is that history of

even as abstract a subject as mathematics cannot be understood without

paying close attention to the "counter-culture" of mathematics, that is,

the practical manipulation of numbers using movable counters, be they

clay tokens, pebbles, sticks, or beads on an abacus. Most histories of

mathematics tend to focus exclusively on the written number-records

while completely ignoring number-manipulations using counters.

Moreover, most histories of mathematics are histories of "pure" math-

ematics which, in the ancient world, was invariably intertwined with

the quest for the divine (the Pythagorean number mysticism, construc-

tion of altars and temples for ritual purposes, for example. See Chapter

1). What these standard histories overlook is the history of practices

– counting, computing, measuring, weighing – that ordinary people in

5 David Pingree, 1992, p. 555. See also George G. Joseph's important book, Crest of

the Peacock, for a critique of what he calls "classical Eurocentrism" in history of

mathematics.

While Eurocentrism is obviously problematic, anti-Eurocentric histories oen

have the feel of ogging a dying horse. anks to the sustained post-colonial

critiques and equally sustained self-critiques by European and North-American

scholars, history of science has moved away from an uncritical Hellenophilia of

the earlier generations, and has made signicant strides toward a more inclusive

and context-sensitive historiography. Even a cursory glance at the educational

curricula in the US schools and universities will show that Europe is by no means

treated as the center of the known universe. Today, it is not Eurocentrism, but

romantic multiculturalism that poses a greater danger to the study of history of

science because of its potential to foster ethnocentrism and nativism.

6 is formulation is from Joseph, 2011, p. 12

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

all cultures developed for taking care of their ordinary material needs.

Simple practices like keeping track of sheep in a herd, trading, collect-

ing taxes, and building houses, bridges, dams, temples etc. all required

some methods for manipulating numbers. Once we pay attention to

such practices, a whole another dimension is added to the historical

search for the origin of zero.7

Once these two principles are applied to available evidence, two

new ways of understanding the evolution of zero, and India's role in it,

begin to emerge:

a. When the Indian evidence is placed alongside the evidence from

other civilizations of comparable development, it becomes clear that

the Indian contributions were neither unique, nor without precedent.

Evidence presented in this chapter will show that the Hindu-Arabic sys-

tem of numeration involves no principle that was not already familiar

to India's sister civilizations. All the elements that went into the crea-

tion of zero – counting by powers of ten, decimal place-value, and the

concept of empty space in the decimal ranking – were well-known for

many centuries in many diverse cultures before they all came together

in India in the form that we use today.8 Indian mathematicians further

developed zero as a number like any other number which could be used

in arithmetical operations. All of these are substantial contributions for

which India is justly admired. But the claims of India being the one and

only civilization to arrive at zero as a mathematical concept are simply

not substantiated by the historical evidence taken in its totality.

7 e idea of "counter-culture" and the distinction between "number manipulation"

and "number recording" are from the important work of Reviel Netz (2002). Netz

makes a powerful case for writing history of numeracy and even literacy from

the perspective of computational practices: "e rule is that across cultures, and

especially in early cultures, the record and manipulation of numerical symbols

precede and predominate over the record and manipulation of verbal symbols….

In other words, in early cultures, numeracy drives literacy, rather than the other way

around," p. 323. A similar point has been argued by Sal Restivo (1992). Both see

the practices of counting and manipulating numbers as more fundamental than the

practices of recording numbers in texts.

8 ere is a substantial literature on Tamil and Sinhalese numerals. See Georges

Ifrah, 2000, for details. We will, however, focus only on the Brahmi-Nagari nu-

merals, as they are the ancestors of the modern Hindu-Arabic numerals.

b. secondly, when the sources of evidence are widened beyond

metaphysical speculations to include every-day, practical counting and

computing practices of ordinary people, a new window opens up which

faces East of India, to China and South-East Asia. e window- opener

is the renowned historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham (aptly

described as "the man who loved China") who, along with his Chinese

colleagues produced the monumental multi-volume work Science and

Civilization in China which is considered a landmark in comparative

history of science. In the third volume of this massive work, Needham

and his co-author, Wang Ling, propose a Chinese origin of zero as a

number, which they say travelled from China, through Southeast Asia

to India where it acquired the familiar form that the whole world uses

today. In their own words:

… the written symbol for nil value, emptiness, sunya, i.e., the zero, is an Indian

garland thrown around the nothingness of the vacant space on the Han count-

ing boards.9

A very similar thesis has been put forward in recent years by Lam

Lay Yong, a renowned historian of mathematics based in National Uni-

versity of Singapore. In her various writings which culminated in her

book titled Fleeting Footsteps, Lam has argued that "the Hindu-Arabic

numeral system had its origin in the Chinese rod-numeral system."10

Lam supports Needham's thesis that it is through Southeast Asia, "where

the eastern zone of Hindu culture met the southern zone of the culture

of the Chinese" that the practice of using empty space in the process of

counting and doing basic arithmetic crossed over from China into In-

dia where it acquired the shape that the whole world is familiar with.11

9 Needham and Wang Ling, 1959, p. 148. Simon Winchester's recent biography of

Needham is titled e Man who Loved China.

Joseph Needham (1900-1995) was a British biochemist who became fascinated

with the Chinese language which he learnt from his Chinese students at Cam-

bridge University. (He would marry one of these students much later in life aer

his rst wife passed away). He spent extended periods of time in China, travelling

and studying.

10 Lam Lay Yong and Ang Tian Se, 2004: 170. Professor Lam was the recipient in

2002 of the Kenneth O. May medal, the highest honor in history of mathematics.

11 Needham and Wang Ling, 1959, p. 148.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

e Needham-Lam thesis will be examined in greater details in this

chapter. By bringing China into the story of zero, my intention is not to

start another Indo-Chinese race. Instead, my motivation is to de-na-

tionalize the way we write history of science in India. Needham's well-

known work on Chinese mathematics has been around since the 1960s,

while Lam Lay Yong has been publishing her work since the 1990s

to great acclaim by professional historians. While this thesis is gain-

ing wide acceptance and is making its way into well-known textbooks,

we in India have remained oblivious to it.12 Most Indian historians of

mathematics (with the exception of George Joseph's Crest of the Pea-

cock) that do touch upon India-China cultural exchanges start with the

assumption that India was the Giver and China was the grateful Receiv-

er of not just Buddhism, but of everything else of value in mathematics

and sciences.13 Does this assumption of unilateral ow of mathematical

ideas from India to China, Southeast Asia and later, through the Arab

mathematicians, to the rest of the world hold up against the best avail-

able historical evidence? e chapter will try to answer this question.

Before we get into the historical details, some clarity about the

mathematical concepts of decimal base, place value and zero is called

for.

3. e preliminaries: numbers, decimal, place-value and zero

It is quite common in Indocentric histories to nd zero indiscrimi-

nately grouped with decimal counting and decimal place value – and

all three given an Indian birth-certicate. e problem is that the three

concepts did not evolve together: presence of decimal counting systems

don't necessarily imply the knowledge of decimal place value, albeit the

knowledge of place value was a pre-requisite for the evolution of zero.

12 See Victor Katz's (2009) well-known text book on history of mathematics.

13 For example, R. C. Gupta's (2011) paper on Indian contributions to Chinese math-

ematics starts with this totally unhistorical statement: "the countries in East Asia

received with Buddhism not only their religion but practically the whole of their

civilization and culture." p. 33, emphasis added. Such a stance clearly devalues

centuries of pre-Buddhist achievements of ancient China.

Unless we un-bundle them and understand each on its own terms, we

simply can't understand their evolution.

To begin with, the word "number" is more complicated than we

give it credit for. Numbers obviously count things, but they are not the

things themselves; you can pick up two cups, or two of anything, but

you can't pick up the number "two". "Two" is an abstraction, an idea in

our heads. It does not exist by itself.14

ere are two ways all cultures seem to have for expressing num-

bers. e rst is through "number words" which can be spoken or writ-

ten in the local language. For example, a Sanskrit speaker would use the

word शतम् ( shatam ) to mean 100, an Arabic speaker would call it ةئم/

ةئام (mia) while a Greek would call it Hekaton.

e other way to represent numbers is through the use of symbols.

e symbols can be of two kinds. e rst kind are what are called "nu-

merals" which are simply marks representing numbers. Our own Hin-

du-Arabic 1,2,3… 9 and 0 are the most obvious example of numerals.

But the markings that are used for representing numbers have var-

ied through history and cultures. For example, ancient Babylonians

represented the number one hundred using Cuneiform symbols, while

Greeks would write the Greek letter ϱ (" rho") to write their

number-word Hekaton. We don't know what numeral the com-

posers of the Vedas would have used to represent shatam or any other

Sanskrit number-word, because we don't have any written records of

Sanskrit numerals.15 e rst numerals we nd in India are written in

Kharosthi and Brahmi and date back only to 300 BCE. In the modern

world, however, peoples of all countries throughout the world under-

stand and use the Hindu-Arabic number-symbols, or numerals – the

familiar 1,2,3…. Even though dierent cultures continue to use number

words in their own local language ( ek, do, teen in Devanagari; ena, dio ,

tria in Greek), the Hindu-Arabic numerals are now universally under-

stood and used. (We will look at the evolution of Hindu numerals from

Brahmi later).

14 See Ian Stewart, 2007, p. 9.

15 e numerals used in Sanskrit today are Devanagari numerals which date back to

the Gupta period (200-550 CE).

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

e second kind of symbols use words which symbolize number

words. Referred to as Bhūta-sankhyā in medieval Sanskrit mathemati-

cal texts, this way of representing numbers is also called "object num-

bers" or "concrete numbers". Rather than use number word or numer-

als, this system makes it possible to express any number by the name

of whatever object – real or mythical – that routinely occurs in that

number. us, the number two can be represented by all the Sanskrit

words for "eyes" because eyes naturally come in pairs. e symbols can

also come from religious texts and ritual practices: thus the word "agni"

can stand for number three, as there are three ritual res; "anga" can

stand for the number six, as there are six limbs of the Vedas. Alberuni,

writing around the turn of the rst 1000 years aer the Common Era,

describes this system thus:

… [for] each number, Hindu astronomers have appropriated quite a great

quantity of words. Hence if one word does not suit the metre, you may easily

exchange for a synonym which suits. Brahmagupta says: 'if you want to write

one, express it by everything that is unique, as the earth, the moon; two, by

everything that is double e.g., black and white; three by everything which is

threefold; the naught by heaven, the twelve by the names of the Sun.16

is unique way of recording numbers arose out of the compul-

sion to write mathematical and astronomical ideas in verse so that they

could be easily memorized. Our mathematically-minded poets faced a

problem; it wasn't easy to use number-words in verse all the time. ey

needed synonyms which would sound better and be easy to remember.

ese terse sutras were committed to memory, while the guru directly

explained the full meaning to the students. Commentaries in prose were

written to expound on the meaning of the symbols and the sutras.17

e point is this: you can record, versify, and memorize number-

words and concrete symbols, but you cannot compute with them. (Try

16 Alberuni in Sachau 1971, p. 177.

17 ere is a vast literature on the preference for orality and the inuence it had on

development of sciences in India. For mathematics, see Yano, 2006, Ploer, 2009,

Filliozat, 2004. Ifrah believes that this system is unique to India (p. 409) and also

provides an extensive list of number symbols (p. 499).

adding "chakshu-akaash-agni" to "ashvin-anga-pitamaha, or, even

better, try multiplication or division!).18

Let us turn to the

term "decimal". According to the Oxford Eng-

lish Dictionary, the word decimal simply means: "a system of numbers

and arithmetic based on the number ten, tenth parts, and powers of

ten." is simply means counting by power of tens, or bundling

by tens.

Counting by tens is the result of the fact that human beings have

ten ngers. Earliest records show that numbers beyond one and two

evolved by addition – three by adding two and one; four as two and

two, and so on. As commerce and cras developed, the need for larger

numbers grew. is led to the bundling of numbers rst in ves as in

, and later the base 10. With 10 as the base, larger numbers could be

constructed by addition or subtraction (12 is 10 plus 2, 20 is 10 plus 10,

and 19 as 20 minus 1 etc.) and by multiplication (20 is 2 times 10 etc.).

Some civilizations (the ancient Mayans) used 20 as the base (ngers

and toes), while for reasons that are not clear, ancient Mesopotamians

used 60 as the base. As we will see in the next section, base 10 or deci-

mal system of counting, did not originate in India: it is simply the most

common method of counting and cuts across civilizations.

You can have a decimal system of counting without a zero, but you

cannot have decimal place value without having a symbol for an empty

place or what we today call zero. In other words, the existence of deci-

mal counting itself does not constitute evidence for zero; but a decimal

place value does. While 10-based or decimal counting is almost univer-

sal and has been around from the very beginnings of civilization, deci-

mal place value is another story altogether.

What is place value? Place value, also called positional notation,

has been described as "one of the most fertile inventions of humanity,

comparable to the invention of the alphabet which replaced thousands

of picture-signs."19 In the place-value method of writing numbers, the

position of a number symbol determines its value. Consider the num-

ber 211 written in our modern decimal notation: the numeral 1 has the

18 Hint: the numbers are 302, and 162, as the number symbols are read from right to

le.

19 Otto Neugebauer, 1962, p. 5.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

value of one if it occupies the rst place from the right, but the same 1

stands for a ten as it moves one place to the le. Similarly, 2 is not simply

the sum of one and one, but has the value of two-hundred. If the order

changes, the value changes; for example, 112 is a very dierent number

from 211.

Consider a larger number: 4567. If we stop to think about it, this

number is actually made up of the following: 4x1000 + 5x100 + 6x10 +

7x1. In other words, every position from right to le is a multiple of 10

(unit, 1 is one tenth of 10, tens (10x1), hundred (10x10, or 102 ), thou-

sand (100x10, or 103 ) and so on to millions, billions, trillions, etc. If we

accept this rule, then instead of explicitly spelling out the powers – four

thousand, ve hundred, sixty seven, we simple assume that in this case,

4 is to be multiplied by 103 , 5 by 102 and so on.

e beauty of place value – and the reason it is considered revo-

lutionary – is that it allows you to write any number, however large or

small, with just a few numerals. Using the modern decimal system, nine

digits (1 to 9) and a zero are sucient to write any number without

having to invent new symbols for each digit of a number, or for each

multiple of the base 10.

If the place value notation did not exist, separate symbols would be

required for writing 10, 20,30, … 90 and for 200, 300 … 900. Let us take

an example. We know from the existing evidence (which will be exam-

ined in more details in later sections), that in India place-value nota-

tions rst made their appearance around the time of Asoka around 300

BCE, while the ancient Greeks never developed it at all. us, someone

living before the Asokan era in India would write the number 456 (for

example) in Brahmi by using a symbol for 400, followed by a separate

symbol for 50, followed by a symbol for six. Similarly, his Greek coun-

terpart would write the same number as υνϛ, where these letters from

the Greek alphabet stand for 400, 50 and 6 respectively. To contrast, in

a positional value notation (in our example 456), the numeral 4 would

stand for 400 (4 units at the 100th position), ve would stand for 50

(ve units at 10th position) and six for 6 units. In other words, the order

in which the numerals are written or spoken would automatically indi-

cate whether they represented a thousand, hundred etc. In this system,

the work of "power words" – special words or signs indicating numeri-

cal rank (thousand, hundred, tens etc.) – is simply transferred to the

places any of the rst 9 numerals occupy.

We can now understand fully what Neugebauer meant when he

said that the invention of place value notation is analogous to the crea-

tion of the alphabet. Inventing place value meant that the thousands

of separate symbols that were needed to represent individual numbers

became obsolete, just as the alphabet rendered hieroglyphics obsolete.

Instead of memorizing large number of symbols, just the nine digits

(1 to 9) plus a sign for empty space – the familiar, somewhat oval-ish

empty circle we call zero – are enough to write any number however

big or small.

What does place value notation have to do with zero?

e answer: Zero was born out of place value notation. To be more

precise, place value is necessary for the evolution of zero as a numeral,

but it is not sucient, for you can have place value without a zero if

you have number words that are larger than the base. For example, you

could write or say 2004 as "two thousand and four", without using a

zero. But if you are writing in numerals, you cannot write 2004 without

indicating that there is nothing under tens and hundreds – and zero is

what indicates the absence of any number, or the presence of nothing.

Without some way of indicating nothing, the numerals 2 and 4 could

well mean 24 or 204. As Georges Ifrah put it in his well-known book,

e Universal History of Numbers:

In any numeral system using the rule of position, there comes a point where a

special sign is needed to represent units that are missing from the number to

be represented… It became clear in the long run that nothing had to be rep-

resented by something. e something that means nothing, or rather the sign

that signies the absence of units in a given order of magnitude is …[ what we

call zero.]20

As the above example shows, the philosophers and scribes who

used number words could get by without having a special numeral that

indicated nothing. But it is also important to note that the need for zero

was not obvious to those who practiced everyday mathematics in their

daily lives either. As Alfred North Whitehead put it, "the point about

20 Georges Ifrah, 2000, pp. 149-150. Emphasis in the original.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No

one goes to buy zero sh." Charles Seife, whose book this quote is taken

from, goes on to add, "you never need to keep track of zero sheep or

tally your zero children. Instead of 'we have zero bananas,' the grocer

says, "we have no bananas. We dont have to have a number to express

the lack of something." 21

It is only when numbers are written as numerals or as number-

symbols in a positional order, does the need for a zero emerge. In other

words, when 10-based numerals began to be arranged according to

their rank, the symbol for zero became necessary.

4. e evidence

In popular discourse, the Indian origin of zero has become an article of

faith: it has acquired the status of an established fact which is beyond

any doubt. For professional historians of mathematics, however, the In-

dian origin story remains a puzzle, with many unsolved elements. As

Kim Ploer, the author of the well-received Mathematics in India puts

it:

e Indian development of place value decimal system … is such a famous

achievement that it would be very gratifying to have a detailed record of it. …

Exactly how and when the Indian decimal place value system rst developed,

and how and when a zero symbol was incorporated into it, remains mysteri-

ous.22

In this section, we will examine in details the evidence that is of-

fered for India's priority-claims on zero. As explained in the previous

section, history of zero cannot be understood without understanding

the history of decimal place value. Our examination of the Indian case

will start with decimals and decimal place values, and gradually move

towards the emergence of zero. We will, as promised, juxtapose the

21 Charles Seife, 2000, p. 8. Emphasis added.

22 Ploer, 2009, pp. 44, 47. Even Datta and Singh, one of the earliest advocates of

the exclusively Hindu origin of zero and place value admit that there are holes in

the evidence: "between the nds of Mohenjodaro and the inscription of Asoka,

there is a gap of 2,700 years of more," p. 20. ey also acknowledge that answers to

questions regarding who? Where? when? of the invention of place value are "not

known," p. 49.

Indian evidence against evidence from sister Euro-Asian civilizations,

and we will pay attention to everyday methods of counting and com-

puting, in addition to Sanskrit texts.

4.1 Antiquity of the decimal system in India

It is oen implied that the decimal system is an Indian invention. Oen

the credit for this achievement is ascribed to the inherently scientic

nature of Sanskrit language. Statements like these from an eminent his-

torian of Indian science, B.A. Subbrayappa, that "Indians' invention of

the decimal system, especially zero, has paved the way for today's IT

revolution",are the stu of everyday discourse in India.23 As we shall see,

ancient Indians were in no way the rst, or the only, creators of the decimal

system of counting.

ere is, of course, no doubt that as far back as we can go, Indians

have used a decimal or a 10-based counting method. e g Veda and

Yajurveda provide ample evidence that by the early Vedic times, a regu-

larized decimal system of number counting was well established. Kim

Ploer has usefully provided English translations of shlokas from the

Vedic corpus which give a good idea of how the power of ten was used.

Two representative examples are quoted below.

You Agni, are the lord of all [oerings], you are the distributor of thousands,

hundreds, tens [of good things]. g Veda, 2.1.8

Come Indra, with twenty, thirty, forty horses; come with y horses yoked to

your chariot, with sixty, seventy to drink the soma; Come carried by eighty,

ninety and a hundred horses. g Veda, 2.18:5-6

By the middle-Vedic period, one nds number words for much

larger powers of ten. A verse from Yajurveda (7.2.20) for example, oers

praise to numbers which range from one, two … to ayuta (ten thou-

sand), niyuta (hundred thousand), prayata (one million), arbuda (ten

million), nyarbuda (hundred million), samudra (billion) madhya (ten

billion), anta (hundred billion) parardha (trillion).24

23 'India invented decimal system' e Hindu, Feb. 17, 2007. Available at http://www.

thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/india-invented-decimal-

system/article1798199.ece

24 Ploer, 2009, p. 13-16. is penchant for large numbers is a hallmark of Indian

mathematical texts and we will return to this issue below.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

All of this is well-established and beyond any doubt. However,

counting in bundles of tens was so widely practiced, it could almost

be considered universal. For example, of the 307 number systems of

Native American peoples investigated in an anthropological study car-

ried out in the early decades of the 20th century, 146 were found to be

decimal and 106 of them used the base 5 or 20.25 Moreover, as Georges

Ifrah points out, counting by tens is shared by all members of the family

of Indo-European languages. e rule in the Indo-European language-

family is this: "the numbers from 1 to 9 and each of the powers of ten

(100, 1000, 10,000 etc.) has a separate name, while all other numbers

being expressed analytical combinations of these names."26 Given the

near universal use of decimal counting, it would have been surprising if

ancient Indians had been innocent of it.

While the Indian case for ten-based numeration rests upon textual

evidence, archeological evidence from Greece and China clearly shows

decimal system being used for practical purposes.

e Greek evidence is found engraved on the walls of a tunnel in

the island of Samos, which was constructed around 550 BCE to bring

water from a spring outside the capital city. Modern archaeological ex-

cavation has revealed that the tunnel was dug by two teams who started

from the opposite side and met in the middle. e numbers engraved

on the walls read "10, 20, 30…. 200" from the south entrance and

"10,20, 30… 300" from the north entrance, and were used to keep track

of the distance dug.27

As far as China is concerned, Joseph Needham's judgment that

"there was never a time when the Chinese did not have a decimal place

value" is only partially correct.28 e Chinese number system as written

was based on powers of ten, but it was not place value. However, the

Chinese performed their computations using counting rods, which was

25 Dirk Struik, 1987, p. 10.

26 Georges Ifrah, 2000, p. 31.

27 Victor Katz, pp. 34-35.

28 Needham, pp. 12-13. While the antiquity of decimal is uncontested, Needham

exaggerates the antiquity of place value in Chinese numerals, which when written

down, used special characters for powers of ten, hundred etc. In a true positional

system, the position of the number itself will show if it is a multiple of thousand,

hundred etc. without using any special characters for ten, hundred …etc.

a decimal place value system, conceptually identical with the modern

"Hindu Arabic" numerals which we use today. (We will look at the issue

of place value in the next section).

e earliest evidence of Chinese number-system comes from the

so-called "oracle bones" inscribed with royal records of divinations

written on bones and tortoise shells dating back to 1500 BCE (See Fig-

ure 1) ese bones contain numerical records of tribute received, ani-

mals hunted, number of animals sacriced, counts of days, months, and

other miscellaneous quantities related to divination.29

e oracle bones are mathematically important because they show

an advanced numeral system, which allowed any number, however

large, to be expressed by the use of nine unit signs, along with a select-

ed number of "power-signs" for representing powers of tens, twenties,

29 Farmers found these bones in their elds in Henan Province at the end of the 19th

century. Initially, they were thought to be "dragon" bones with medicinal value.

Fortunately, they were rescued before they could be powdered and sold as medi-

cine. Many more bones carrying similar inscriptions have been found through the

last century.

Figure 1. Oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty in China (c. 1800-1200 BCE)

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

hundreds, thousands etc. e standard number system used today in

China is a direct descendant of the ancient Shang system.30

In light of this evidence, claims about the Indian invention of the

decimal system must be re-evaluated.

4.2 Antiquity of decimal place value in India

As discussed above, the invention of place value is a necessary stage of

mathematical development that needs to take place if an empty space

in the order of numbers is to make an appearance. It is therefore under-

standable why Indo-centric histories lay priority claim to it nding it in

Sanskrit texts written as early as 200 CE, becoming fully operational in

Aryabhata's work, around 500 CE.31

e historical evidence is complicated by the fact that we have two

distinct number systems evolving at the same time – Brahmi numer-

als which lack place value, and the Sanskrit number-symbols, or bhūta-

sankhyā, which do show place-value from early centuries of the Com-

mon Era. Let us examine the evidence, starting with Brahmi numerals.

e oldest written script from the Indian subcontinent is that

found on the yet un-deciphered Harrapan seals, but the oldest deci-

phered script is Brahmi that dates back to around 4th century BCE.

30 is description of the oracle bones is from Joseph, 2011, pp. 199-200, and Chri-

somalis, 2010, pp. 260-261.

31 For a non-specialist take on this issue, see http://www.sanskritimagazine.com/

vedic_science/place-value-not-zero-is-the-most-important-invention/

Figure 2. Brahmi Numerals

e general consensus is that the Brahmi script was formalized at about

the time of the Mauryan emperor, Ashoka. It was devised to give writ-

ten expression to the spoken language of the region, called Prakrit. e

earliest inscriptions in Brahmi can be found on the rock edicts installed

by Ashoka, around the middle of the third century BCE. It is in these

rock edicts we get the rst glimpse of how numbers were written in

Brahmi. Numerals 1,4 and 6 are found in various Ashokan inscriptions,

while numbers 2, 4, 6, 7 and 9 in the Nana Ghat inscriptions about a

century later; and the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 in the Nasik caves of the 1st

or 2nd century. Figure 2 (at page 65) is a composite of Brahmi numerals

obtained from sites all over the subcontinent, including Nepal.

e familiar Nagari numerals descended from Brahmi numerals

sometime in the Gupta period, and gradually evolved into the "Hindu-

Arabic" numerals the whole world uses today (Fig. 3).32

32 See Ifrah for an exhaustive treatment of Brahmi numerals, including speculations

about their origin, pp. 367-399.

Figure 3. Evolution of modern numerals from Brahmi

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

ere is a consensus among historians that Brahmi numerals did

not have a concept of place value and did not have a symbol for zero. Nu-

merals inscribed into the wall of Nanaghat cave clearly show a number

which has been deciphered as 24,400 (Fig. 4). It is written using special

symbols for 20,000, followed by another symbol for 4000 and 400. If

these numerals had followed place-value notation it would have been

written with only the numerals for 2 and 4 followed by two zeros.33

None of the Brahmi inscriptions with numerals discovered so far

show any sign of place value.34 Place value suddenly begins to make an

appearance sometime around the sixth century, starting with the dates

written on copper land-grants.35 Gradually one begins to see numbers

written without special symbols indicating power or rank; the posi-

33 See Ifrah, p. 399, for how the number 24,000 would appear in Brahmi if Brahmi

were a place-value number system.

34 See Ifrah, pp. 397-398 for a compilation of various Brahmi inscriptions.

35 e authenticity of some of these copper-plates has been challenged. See Datta

and Singh for details.

Figure 4. A Pencil rubbing of Nanaghat Cave Inscription (second century BCE). e num-

ber 24,000 is represented by three marks occupying positions 4, 5, 6 from the le hand

corner on the bottom line. Source: Hindu-Arabic Numerals, by David Eugene Smith and

Louis Charles Karpinski, 1911. e Project Gutenberg EBook.

tion of numeral itself begins to indicate what power of ten they carried.

Zero, initially a dot, begins to make an appearance around this time, the

rst incontrovertible proof appearing in a Gwalior temple in the year

876. (More on this in section 4.4).

ere is a gap of about 900 years between Brahmi to Nagari place-

value numerals. ere are all kinds of wild guesses about what caused

this crucial transition, but most of them are just that – guesses. Even

those scholars (like Ifrah, to take a prominent example) who rmly and

fervently believe that Indians alone invented zero without any outside

inuence, are unable to oer any clues to how this transition took place,

what could have caused it, and how it spread all over the subcontinent

and beyond to Southeast Asian lands.

Brahmi inscriptions disappoint us in our search for zero. However,

Sanskrit scripts using bhūta-sankhyā (see section 3) indicate a knowl-

edge of place value. We see this method of notation in use from Sanskrit

texts starting around mid-third century CE, to around the 18th century.

e way Sanskrit number-symbols, or bhūta-sankhyā, were used

is exemplied by the Yavana-jataka, or "Greek horoscopy", of Sphujid-

havja, which is a versied form of a translated Greek work on astrology.

is text places the "wise king Sphujidhavja in the year Vishnu/hook-

sign/moon" which translates into numerals one (moon), nine (hook

sign) and one (the deity Vishnu) giving us the year 191 of the Saka era

beginning in 78 CE. (e year corresponds to 269 or 270 CE.) More

mathematical examples can be cited from Surya Siddhanta, an early 6th

century text, and the 14th century writings of Madhava.36

is manner of writing numbers shows one thing; the order in

which the symbols were written or recited determined their value, with

a proviso that the least signicant number came rst, followed by high-

er powers. e order itself indicated power, and there was no need to

use power-words. us Sphujidhavja could write 191 using only three

symbols.

e other textual evidence that is routinely cited to support the

idea that place-value was known to Indians as early as the 5th century

36 For Yavana-jataka, see Ploer 2009, p. 47; for a verse from Surya Siddhanta, see

Ifrah, p. 411 and for Madhava, see Pingree 2003, p. 49.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

CE is a commentary on a verse of Patanjali's Yoga Sūtras [3.13] which

reads as follows:

Just as a line in the hundreds place means a hundred, in the tens place ten, and

one in the ones place, so one and the same woman is called a mother, daughter

and sister.

e author of this commentary, as Ploer rightly points out, clear-

ly expected his audiences to be familiar with the concept of numeri-

cal symbols representing dierent powers of ten depending upon their

position.37

e textual evidence is not in question. Concrete number system

is a place value system. However cumbersome and full of ambiguities it

was, there is no doubt that the order of the symbols alone determined

their value.

What is in question is whether India was the rst to combine dec-

imal powers of ten with place value, as is routinely claimed. e use

of concrete symbols (bhuta) for numbers is denitely unique to India.

But was the practice of reading the value of a number from its position

unique to India? Another important question has to do with the practi-

cal limitations of bhūta-sankhyā method of enumeration. Using sym-

bols to represent numbers was a wonderful device for generating verses

that rhymed and could be easily memorized, but it was most imprac-

tical for actual computations. (Try your hand at adding, subtracting,

multiplying or dividing these two numbers: Vishnu-hook sign-moon

and ashvin-anga-pitamaha, and you will see the problem). e follow-

ing observation by Stephen Chrisomalis, author of a recent book on

comparative history of numerical notations, is right on the mark:

e bhūta-sankhyā system is suggestive of positionality, but does not constitute

a system of graphic numeral signs, nor should its use be taken to imply the

widespread use of decimal positional numerals in Indian manuscripts.38

Beyond its extensive use in recording dates and years in land-deeds,

and for recording the nal results of computations, bhūta-sankhyā sys-

tem did not nd much use. ere is no evidence to indicate that Brahmi

numerals were much in use for practical purposes either. What then,

37 Ploer, 2009, p. 46. Similar analogies are also recorded in the Buddhist literature,

dating back to rst century CE.

38 Chrisomalis, 2010, p. 195.

were the computational practices needed for commerce, account-keep-

ing, tax-collection and myriad other uses of numbers in everyday life?

We do hear of dust-boards used for computations, but we have no clue

what the numerals looked like, what the rules of computation were, or

who used these boards.39

Let us now put the development of place-value in India in a com-

parative perspective.

It is well-documented that as far back as 1800 BCE, the Mesopota-

mian cultures were using a base- 60, or sexagesimal, place-value system

to write any number, however large, using just two symbols (a hook for

1 and a wedge for 10). It is also well-established that the Mayan people

(of what we today call South America) had developed a base-20, or vi-

gesimal, place-value system. But as the modern numerals have followed

a base-10, or decimal system, we will exclude these outliers. at leaves

us with the Greeks and the Chinese. Both civilizations had a decimal

number system that used a hybrid form of place-value. What is more,

both have le us evidence of well-developed technologies of practical

computations – abacus in the case of Greco-Roman civilization, and

counting rods in the case of China.40

It is well known that the Greeks thought of numbers in geometrical

patterns and, consequently, remained largely preoccupied with geom-

etry. It has been well documented elsewhere how the Greeks adapted

Egyptian numbers to their own purposes, and gradually came to adopt

what is called the Ionian system of numeration around sixth century

BCE. is system was alphabetical: the rst nine letters of the Greek

alphabet were associated with numbers 1 to 9, the next nine alphabets

39 e best description that I have come across is from Datta and Singh: "For the

calculations involved in ganita, the use of some writing material was essential. e

calculations were performed on board with a chalk, or on sand (dhuli) spread on

the ground or on a board. us the terms pati-ganita ("science of calculation on

the board") or dhuli-karma ("dust-work") came to be used for higher mathemat-

ics. Later on, the section dealing with algebra was given the name bīja-gaita."

1938, p. 8. ey provide no further details. Robert Kaplan also refers to these

sand-boards and conjectures that zero was the empty space le behind in the

sand when a Greco-Roman style "counter" – most likely a rounded pebble – was

moved.

40 e Chinese abacus, which is still in use, is very dierent from the ancient Greco-

Roman abacus.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

represented multiples of 10 (10, 20….90), while the last batch of alpha-

bets (which included three archaic alphabets) stood for the rst nine

integral multiples of 100 (100, 200, 300…900). To take an example, 654

could be written as χνδ, where χ stands for 600, ν for 50 and δ for four.

e system is not positional. Yet, as Carl Boyer pointed out, "that the

Greeks had such a principle more or less in mind, is evident not only in

the repeated use of symbols from α through ϴ for units and thousands,

but also in the fact that the symbols are arranged in order of magnitude,

from the smallest on the right to the largest on the le."41

If we to turn to the "counter culture" of Greeks and Romans – lit-

erally, counters which could be pebbles to clay shards being moved

around on counting boards – we nd a positional decimal system rm-

ly in place, with spaces le empty, signifying what we today call zero.

Archeologists have recovered actual abacuses and counting tables

going as far back as the third century BCE Greece. Some thirty abacuses

have so far been found in the region around the Aegean Sea, includ-

ing Greece and what is now Turkey. ese counting devices are simple

structures, consisting of a at surface on which lines are marked be-

tween which counters are moved. e most famous abacus is the Table

of Salamis, dating back to 5th BCE (see Figures 5 and 6), and the most

famous image of a money- counter using a counting board is from the

Darius vase, dating back 350 BCE (see gure 7).42

We must include these early calculators for this reason: they oper-

ated on the principle of positional value. In other words, the pebbles/

counters changed value according to the position they occupied. e

basic operation was as follows:43 counters move between lines, based

upon simple equivalences between numbers. Five times ten is y, and

therefore ve counters on the ten-line are equivalent to one counter on

the y line; likewise, two counters on the y line can be replaced with

one counter on the one hundred-line. Suppose you have four counters

on the ten-line and one counter on the y-line. Let us suppose you

want to add ten. You add a single counter on the ten-line. Now that you

41 Merzbach and Boyer, 2011, p. 54.

42 See Ifrah, pp. 200-211, Kaplan, pp. 23-24.

43 From Reviel Netz, p. 326.

Figure 5. e Salamis Tablet, 300 BCE

Source: Ancient Computers, http://ethw.org/Ancient_Computers

Figure 6. Roman hand abacus, mapped on to the Salamis Tablet.

Source: Ancient Computers, http://ethw.org/Ancient_Computers

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

Figure 7. Details of the table abacus from vase painting, "e War Council of Darius" c. 340-

320 BCE. Source: Computer History Museum at http://www.computerhistory.org/

have ve counters on the ten-line, you are allowed to remove all ve and

add one counter to the y-line, and so on.

Did these counters have a zero? ey surely had empty spaces.

As in the example above, the board was a dynamic space, constantly

changing as counters moved from one line to another. But the empty

space was not given a numerical sign, as most of this computation was

done manually and the nal number recorded in words which did not

need a zero.

is procedure for counting simply assumes that the value of the

same counter depends on which line it sits on. is assumption and

the method of counting using the counting boards must be widespread

enough for the Athenian law giver Solon (550 BCE) to have compared

"a tyrant's favorite to a counter whose value depends upon the whim of

the tyrant pushing it from column to column." e same words were

repeated by historian Polybius (200 BCE) with some extra elaboration:

the courtiers who surround the king are exactly like counters on the lines of

a counting board. For depending upon the will of the reckoner, they may be

valued either at no more than an obol, or else at a whole talent.44

is bears striking resemblance in logic – if not in the imagery

– with the 5th century commentary on the Yoga Sūtra cited above. To

remind ourselves: "Just as a line in the hundreds place means a hun-

dred, in the tens place ten, and one in the ones place, so one and the

same woman is called a mother, daughter and sister." e Greek sources

are dated many centuries before the Indian reference. at itself proves

nothing, except that Indians were neither the only ones, nor the rst

ones, to be familiar with the idea that a number can take on dierent

values, depending upon the position.

But we have evidence from much closer home – China – where

decimal place value was already widespread by 400 BCE. As the evi-

dence from oracle bones shows, writing numbers in powers of tens has

very ancient roots in China (just as it has in India). But a distinct use of

decimal place value – where the position of a number decides its value,

complete with empty space indicating absence of any numeral – was

44 Quoted from Kaplan, p. 22. Talent and obol are names of the Greek currency, with

30,000 obols to a talent.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

already a common, everyday practice in China 400 years before the rst

millennium of the Common Era.

Alongside the written number ideograms (which date back to

1500 BCE oracle bones) the Chinese had their "counter-culture" rooted

in practice: their "counters" were counting rods which were moved on

any at surface marked into successive powers of tens. ese rods were

not a mere accounting device (as the Grecian abacuses, above) but were

used for all basic arithmetical operations and eventually also for solving

algebraic equations. If the Chinese had transferred their rod-numerals

and the mathematical operations based upon them into writing, the re-

sult would be identical to our modern numeration and mathematical

operations like multiplication, division, root extraction etc.45

A very brief introduction to counting rods will be useful at this

point. We will use Lam and Ang's Fleeting Footsteps as our guide here.

e rods were in use as far back as 400 BCE (the Warring States

era). e earliest physical rods unearthed by archaeologists go back to

around 170 BCE. Coins and pottery bearing rod-numeral signs have

been dated to around 400 BCE. Records as far back as 202 BCE de-

scribe the rst Han emperor as boasting that he alone knew "how to

plan campaigns with counting rods in his tent."46 ese rods were basi-

cally short sticks about 14cm (5.5 inches) in length, made mostly of

bamboo, but also of wood, bone, horn, iron or even ivory or jade (which

only the very rich could aord). ey were carried (all 271 of them)

in a small hexagonal pouch, much like we carry electronic calculators

or our smart phones today. Bags containing bundles of counting stick

have been found in skeletal remains dating back to the last few centuries

before the Common Era.

Who used them? Practically everybody from traders, travellers,

monks to government ocials, mathematicians and astronomers. In

other words, whenever and wherever computation was required, the

sticks came out of their bags and were spread on a mat, table top, oor

45 is is what Lam Lay-Yong has claimed in her work e Fleeting Footsteps, p. 10

and passim. e Chinese replaced the counting rods with the abacus around 12th

century or so, which Yong believes set them back, as the step-by-step thinking that

rod-numerals required was replaced with rote-learning.

46 Needham and Ling, p. 71.

or any at surface. Evidence shows that during the Tang Dynasty (618-

907), civil and military ocials carried their bags of sticks wherever

they went. e computations carried out with the sticks were written

down on bamboo strips and on paper by the early centuries of the Com-

mon Era.47 Since counting with rods was a practical skill which every-

one was supposed to be familiar with, early mathematical texts (such

as the 3rd century CE Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts, and e

Mathematical Classic of Zhou Gnomon that we referred to in the last

chapter) don't elaborate on how to use them. But a 4th century book

attributed to a Master(Zi) Sun titled Sun zi Suanjing (the Mathemati-

cal Classic of Master Sun), provides details of how computation was to

be carried out with rods. is book was later included in the set of ten

mathematical classics put together during the Tang Dynasty that all as-

piring state ocials had to study in order to pass the entrance exams.

In the early centuries of the Common Era, rod numeral computations

spread to Japan, Korea, Vietnam and other areas in the South-East in-

uenced by both India and China.

How were the rods used? e method is simple and ingenuous.

e rst nine numerals were formed using the rods in the follow-

ing two arrangements: one in which the rods are vertical (zong) and the

other in which the rods are horizontal (heng)

47 Paper was invented by the Chinese around 100 CE, though some archaeological

ndings put the date further back by a century or two.

Figure 8: Counting rods placed vertically, zong, top row; Rods arranged horizontally,

heng, bottom row.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

To write numbers greater than 10, the rods were set up in columns.

e right-most column was for units, the next one for tens, the next for

hundreds, and so on. A blank column meant no rods were to be placed

there, meaning what we mean today when we write a zero. e Chinese

called the empty space in rod-numerals as kong , 空, which means emp-

ty, just as Hindus called an empty space śunya . (More on zero in Chi-

nese numerals in 4.4). To make it easier to read the columns, zongs and

hengs were alternated: vertical arrangement of rods (zong) was used in

the unit column, the hundreds column and ten thousand column and

so on, while the horizontal (heng) arrangement was used in tens, thou-

sand, hundred thousand.48 Here are some illustrative examples:49

e columns could be extended in both directions, with columns to

the right of the units column containing negative numbers which were

represented by rods of a dierent color. e rods were used for addi-

tion, subtraction, multiplication and division, the rules for which are

laid out in Sun Zi's book, translated and explained in Fleeting Footsteps .

In fact, in her lecture when she was awarded the Kenneth May medal

for her distinguished career, Lam Lay Yong took the audience step-by-

step through the steps for multiplication and division that the great 9th

century Muslim mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi uses, to

48 e following formula from Sun zi sums up the arrangement: "the units are

vertical and the tens horizontal, the hundreds stand and the thousands prostrate,

thousands and tens look alike, and so do ten thousand and hundreds." Lam and

Ang, p. 47.

49 All examples are from MacTutor website. http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/

HistTopics/Chinese_numerals.html

1234 would be

45698 would be

60390 would be

show that his method is identical to the method that Sun Zi lays out in

his classic text. 50

What interests us are the following similarities between the Chi-

nese rod-numerals and the modern "Hindu-Arabic" numerals. (ey

could not be more dierent in how they look, but looks are deceptive):

ere is an exact correspondence between rod numerals and the

Hindu-Arabic (i.e. modern) decimal place values numerals – to use

Lam's words "the two are conceptually identical".51 In both systems, only

nine numbers and a sign for an empty space are all that is needed to

write any number, however large or small. In both systems, the numeri-

cal values of the digits are built into their positions, going in ascending

power of ten from right to le. Anyone with just the bare-bones infor-

mation supplied above will have no choice but to read this as 60390.

e rod-numeral system is the rst decimal place-value number

system that we have evidence for. All other ancient place-value nota-

tions known to us (the Babylonian and the Mayan) were not decimal.

Even though Brahmi was decimal, we have already established that

Brahmi numerals, which are almost the exact contemporaries of rod

numerals, did not use place value. For this reason, Lam points out, cor-

rectly it seems, that "Brahmi could not have been the conceptual pre-

cursor of Hindu Arabic system", while fully accepting that the shape of

Hindu-Arabic numerals did evolve from Brahmi via Devanagari.52 (We

will return to the rod-numerals in section 4.4).

50 According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica , Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī

(bornc. 780 – diedc.850),was a Muslim mathematician and astronomer whose

major works introduced Hindu-Arabic numeralsand the concepts ofalgebrainto

European mathematics. Latinized versions of his name and of his most famous

book title live on in the termsalgorithm andalgebra.

51 Lam, pp. 172, 173.

52 Lam, p. 177.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

4.3 Antiquity of large numbers in India

e Hindus, the Buddhists and the Jains are well known for using ex-

travagantly large numbers in their cosmological speculations. A verse

from the Yajurveda that oers prayers to numbers that go up to a tril-

lion has been cited above (section 4.1). e Buddhist text, Lalitavistara

which was written around 300 CE tells the story of Buddha who has

been challenged to recite the names of all powers of ten beyond a koti

(i.e., 10 million), each rank being a hundred times greater than the pre-

vious one. e Buddha successfully recites all the names, going up to

the 421st power of ten – that is, one followed by 421 zeros. Many other

examples of breathtakingly large numbers have been documented.53

No one has been able to explain this strange penchant for immense

numbers. ese numbers were obviously not obtained by any kind of

physical measurements, nor did they refer to what exactly was being

counted. Such ights of imagination were obviously of no use in every-

day mathematics. As Sal Restivo points out:

[immense cosmological numbers of the Hindus]... are means for transcending

experience, used for the purpose of mystication, or to convey the notion that

some thing or being is impressive, they are symbols in a mathematical rhetoric

designed to awe the listener into a religious posture… e social roots of this

distinctive mathematical system lie in the particularly exalted status of Indian

religious specialists.54

We could have let the matters rest there. However, many notable

historians see the Indic penchant for large numbers not as a source of

mystication, but as a source of mathematical genius, which led to the

origin of place value and the invention of zero. Ifrah summarizes this

position thus:

e early passion which Indian civilization had for high numbers was a sig-

nicant factor contributing to the discovery of the place-value system, and not

only oered the Indians the incentive to go beyond the "calculable" physical

world, but also led to an understanding (much earlier than in our [western]

civilization) of the notion of mathematical innity itself.55

In other words, creativity in mathematics is ascribed largely (if

not solely) to experience-transcending speculations. e actual math-

53 Kaplan, pp. 37-40; Ifrah, pp. 421-426.

54 Restivo, 1992, p. 49. Emphasis in the original.

55 Ifrah, p. 421.

ematical practices of the calculable world around us are not taken into

consideration.

But what is the connection between these enormous numbers and

discovery of place value and eventually zero? How are the two related?

For some the connection is obvious and needs no further evidence

or elaboration. Example of this faith-based history comes from the well-

known History of Hindu Mathematics in which the authors, Datta and

Singh, repeatedly inform the reader that "While the Greeks had no ter-

minology for denominations above the myriad (104 ), and the Romans

above the mille (103 ), the ancient Hindus dealt freely with no less than

eighteen denominations. … e numeral language of no other nation

is as scientic and perfect as that of the Hindus." From this they simply

surmise that "even at a remote period, the Hindus must have possessed

a well-developed system of numerical symbols", and again that all these

large numbers "would have been impossible unless arithmetic had at-

tained a considerable degree of progress…"56

More recently, in his well-known work Crest of the Peacock, George

Gheverghese Joseph has made a similar argument. Aer citing large

numbers from Yajurveda and Ramayana, and comparing India favora-

bly against Greeks for stopping at a woefully small 104 , he points out

what is obviously true: that "the Vedic Indians were quite at home with

very large numbers". However, he goes on to conclude, like Datta and

Singh, that this must have led to the development of place value:

e early use of such large numbers eventually led to the adoption of a series

of names for the successive powers of ten. e importance of these number-

names in the evolution of decimal place value notation cannot be exaggerated.

e word-numeral system, later replaced by alphabetic notation, was the logi-

cal outcome of proceeding by the multiples of ten….57

is argument fails to convince. For one, decimal system – that

is, counting by power of tens – does not itself imply place value. As

explained earlier, counting by the powers of tens can happily carry on

without inventing a system in which the same number acquires a dier-

ent value depending upon where it is placed. Yes, there are verses where

56 Datta and Singh, 1939, pp. 9, 20, 36. ey believe that the existence of large num-

bers also "proves" that "Hindus invented the Brahmi number system" (p. 36).

57 Joseph, 2011, pp. 340-341.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

number-symbols (bhutas) are used alone and their value is understood

by the sequence in which they are uttered (see section 2). But bhūta-

sankhyā was used only in the verse portions of mathematical texts. e

prose commentaries that accompanied these verses used number words

to express large numbers which did not need a place value system of

notation. us what we will today write as 3045 would be expressed as

tri (three) sahastra (thousand), and chatvaarimshat (four times ten),

pancha (ve), where sahastra and chatvaarimshat are power-words.58

e second aw in this argument has to do with factually incorrect

historical details. If we place Indian evidence in a comparative perspec-

tive, we can clearly see that it was neither the rst nor the only civiliza-

tion that was comfortable with large numbers. We will again bring in

the Greeks and the Chinese.

To begin with, it is simply incorrect that the Greeks could not han-

dle numbers larger than 10,000. Even a cursory familiarity with Greek

numerals would show that they could write any number, however large,

using their alphabetical numerals. It is true that they did not have spe-

cial names (or alphabets) for numbers larger than a myriad (10,000)

which they represented with the Greek letter M (pronounced mu ).

But that is hardly the end of the story: a myriad was simply the begin-

ning of a new count which they represented by writing the number of

myriads above M. For example, the number 71,750, 000 was written as

αΜ͵ζροε; 2,056,839,184 becomes βΜκʹ, αΜ͵εχπγ, ͵θρπδ and so

on.59

ose who continue to glibly put our ancestors ahead of all others

must pay attention to the well known work by Archimedes (287-212

BCE) called the Sand Reckoner in which the great Greek mathematician

and engineer teaches Gelon, the king of Syracuse, how to nd out how

many grains of sand there are in the universe. He provides names for

increasingly larger orders of a myriad-myriad (that is 108 ) all the way

to 10 to the power of 80,000 million million! Archimedes accomplishes

58 See Filliozat, 2004 for more on the distinction between how numbers are ex-

pressed in verse and commentary.

59 e example of large numbers and their Greek notations are from Katz, p. 34 and

from the Greek Number Convertor available at http://www.russellcottrell.com/

greek/utilities/greeknumberconverter.htm. For more details, consult Boyer, 1944.

this task without the use of a zero, as he uses number-words for the

various orders of 108 . 60

As Robert Kaplan has pointed out, there are striking similarities

between Archimedes' method and the story about Buddha that is told

in Lalitavistara described at the beginning of this section. According to

Kaplan, there are structural similarities between the two accounts, in-

cluding even the mention of poppy seeds. Kaplan admits that "clues are

thin on the ground", but he posits the possibility of Greek inuence on

the evolution of Indian numerals, including the sign of zero which he

believed came from the empty place le behind on Indian sand-boards

when Greek-style pebble-counting spread into India.61 If the clues are

as thin as Kaplan believes them to be, it is better to withhold judgement

and simply admit that question of transmission is perhaps un-answer-

able at this stage.

Turning now to China, we nd that the humble counting rods were

capable of not just expressing any number, however large. ey were ca-

pable of carrying out basic arithmetical manipulations with large num-

bers as well. e following example excerpted here from Lam's work

will suce:

In Sun Zi suanjing is found the following: Multiply 708,588 by 531, 441 to ob-

tain 376,572,715, 308. When this is divided among 354,294 persons, each per-

son gets 1,062, 882.62

Sun Zi suanjing, remember, is a 4th century text that describes

the rules and methods of carrying out mathematical operations us-

ing counting-rods. It goes without saying that the above problem was

solved using counting rods.

Once again, India cannot rightfully claim to be ahead of other civi-

lizations of comparable age and development when it comes to comfort

with very large numbers. What is most important to note is that the

comparative perspective shows that facility with naming large numbers

is neither necessary nor sucient for the development of decimal place

value and zero. If that were the case, Greek mathematicians, especially

Archimedes, would also have hit upon the idea. On the other hand, we

60 Kaplan, 1999, chapter 3.

61 Kaplan, 1999, chapter 4.

62 Lam and Ang, 2004, p. 14.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

have seen that both Greek and Chinese "counter-cultures" – hands-on,

everyday calculations – were literally born with decimal place-value,

without which there was no need to represent an empty space in a non-

metaphysical, computational sense. So perhaps, zero was born in the

streets, far away from the ashrams, academies, or mandarin schools

where learned philosophers thought deep thoughts about the void or

nothingness.

4.4. e emergence of zero

e following facts are well-established about the emergence of zero in

the sub-continent and its cultural sphere in South-East Asia:

• Śunya-bindu as a numeral represented initially by a dot begins

to dierentiate from the metaphysical concept of śunya as void

or nothingness sometime around 600 CE – which is also the

time when Brahmi-derived, non-place value numerals begin

to give way to place value numerals.63

• e earliest surviving and unquestioned evidence of śunya-

bindu as a numeral comes not from India, but from Cam-

bodia. It comes from an inscription from a stone pillar

which in part says "the Chaka era reached year 605 on the

h day of the waning moon." e '0' in 605 is represent-

ed by a dot. As we know that the Chaka era began in the

year 78 A.D., the date of this zero is 683, nearly two centu-

ries before the rst zero shows up in India. (See plate 1)

e Cambodian inscription was documented rst by a

French scholar George Codes in 1931.e site where the pillar

stood was plundered by the Khmer Rouge and no one knew

what became of it. It was re-discovered – in a storage shed near

the great temple of Angkor Wat – in 2013 by Amir Aczel, an

American-Israeli mathematician and a historian of science. 64

e Cambodian zero is not a uke. Similar inscriptions

63 According to Chrisomalis (2010, p. 196) śunya-bindu was rst used in Subhandu's

poetical work, Vasavadatta, written around the 6th century.

64 Aczel has written about this discovery in many forums (apart from a book). See

'How I rediscovered the oldest zero in history', available at e Crux, an online

with a dot for a zero are found in Sumatra and Banka islands

of Indonesia, dated 683 and 686 CE respectively. ere are

many more inscriptions, too numerous to list here, from other

South-East Asian lands, especially the present day Malaysia

and Indonesia.65 e implications of the fact that zero shows

up rst in South-East Asia before it makes its appearance in

India have not been fully absorbed by Indian historians, as we

will see in the next section.

• e rst rock engravings in India that indicate the use of zero

in numbers that use decimal place value date back to the sec-

ond half of the 9th century. e most well known is the in-

scription from the Chaturbhujatemple, a rock temple dedi-

cated to Vishnu, near the city of Gwalior. (see plate 2) Inside

the temple (which is no longer used for worship), next to the

murti of the deity, there is an inscription dated year 933 in the

Vikram calendar (which translates into 876 CE). e inscrip-

tion is about a gi of land, measuring 270 x187 hastas, to the

temple. is land was to be turned into a ower garden, from

which 50 garlands were to be oered to the deity everyday.

What makes this inscription a milestone in the history of

mathematics is that the numbers 933, 270, and 50 are written

in Nagari numerals using place-value and a small empty circle

representing zero. is is the rst undisputed evidence of the

use of zero in a number found in India. (see plate 3)

• Two other pieces of contested e vidence are still cited as evidence

for Indian priority over decimal place value numerals with

zero. e rst piece of evidence is a set of copper plates bear-

ing inscriptions about land-grants dating from 594 to 972 CE,

and they are sometimes oered as evidence that zero and place

value were known to us much before the Gwalior inscription.

However, the authenticity of the plates has been questioned.66

e other piece of evidence is the famous Bakshali manu-

magazine. See also his narrative of the discovery 'e Origin of the Number', at

the website of the Smithsonian.

65 See Needham and Ling, 1959, p. 11. An exhaustive list is provided by Ifrah.

66 See Ifrah, pp. 400-402, Datta and Singh, 1938.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

script found in 1881 in the village called Bakshali in the north-

western region in modern-day Peshawar, Pakistan. e part-

ly-rotted birch-bark manuscript contains problems involving

basic arithmetic, and clearly uses a dot in place-value numer-

als. Augustus F. R. Hoernle, the Indian-born Indologist of Ger-

man descent who rst studied the text, dated the work to the

3rd or the 4 th century CE. But that date has been questioned by

later historians, notably by Takao Hayashi in 1995 who places

the mathematics contained in the text to be as late as 7th cen-

tury. If Hayashi is right – as claimed by a general consensus

among scholars – then the earlier date for zero in decimal

place value is ruled out.67

• Once the Classical or Siddhantic period of astronomy and

mathematics begins, the rest of the story has a clear narra-

tive which has the feel of an o-told-tale. Aryabhata, whose

famous work, Aryabhatiya, was written in 510 CE, created his

own (rather cumbersome) alphabetic numeral system which

nobody followed aer he died. Ifrah succinctly describes what

happened aer Aryabhata:

Varhamihira (c. 575) who in his major work Panchasiddhantika, men-

tioned the use of zero in mathematical operations, as did Bhaskara in 629

in his commentary on Aryabhatiya. In 628 in Brahmaguptasiddhanta,

Brahmagupta dened zero as the result of subtraction between of a num-

ber by itself (a- a=0) and described its properties in the following terms:

'when zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the num-

ber remains unchanged, and a number multiplied by zero becomes zero.'

…. [And thus] modern algebra was born and the mathematician had thus

formulated the basic rules… this brilliant civilization opened the way to…

development of mathematics and exact sciences.68

67 And yet one nds a scholar of the caliber of Joseph who seems unable to let go of

the earlier date for this manuscript. Aer repeatedly endorsing Hayashi, Joseph

continues to use Bakshali as "substantial piece of evidence, aer Jaina mathemat-

ics, to bridge the long gap between the Śulvasūtras of the Vedic period and the

mathematics of the classical period which began around 500 CE." p. 358. Clearly,

if the manuscript is dated aer 7th century, this statement is incorrect.

68 Ifrah, p. 439. Ifrah has an entire chapter titled 'Dictionary of the Numerical Sym-

bolism of Indian Civilization' where he expands upon these ideas. e interested

reader is advised to consult this dictionary.

Aer all this, the standard story-line is simple: India's generous gi

spread to all corners of the world. Arab mathematicians picked up nu-

merals from India and transmitted them to Europe. Buddhist monks

from India took the Hindu numerals, complete with place-value and

the symbol for zero, with them to China. Because the decimal numer-

als with a zero were so much more convenient than any other numeral

system for actually manipulating numbers, the entire world discarded

their old numbers and adopted the Hindu-Arabic numerals. anks to

us, the world learned how to count.

We must now do what we have done throughout this chapter; we

must look at the Indian evidence in a comparative perspective.

Even though there were possibilities inherent in the Greco-Roman

abacuses, place-value and zero did not take root in that culture. But

what happened in China is a dierent matter entirely. In China place-

value and blank spaces on counting-boards indicating that a particular

rank (unit, hundred, thousand…) had no number had become a part of

commonsense What is interesting is that in China the walls that sepa-

rated the "specialists" and the "street" were breached to some extent; the

same method was being used by high and low, by the Mandarins and

the learned monks as well as the illiterate farmer or the trader. Because

the "learned" were not separated by high walls of status (at least in this

practical technique), the method of counting sticks became codied in

texts like those of Sun Zi's and became a part of the scientic tradition.

e Chinese had a name for the empty spaces on their counting

boards: they called them "kong", 空, which is exactly how Indians used

the word "śunya". Later on, the exact date is not known, the notation

for "ling" (玲) meaning "last small raindrops aer a storm" was used

to represent a zero.69 So without a doubt, "a strictly decimal positional

system" with a "kong" for an empty space rst appears in China, at least

four centuries before the Common Era. 70

69 Needham and Ling, p. 16.

70 Quoted from Ifrah, p. 279.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

5. e Chinese origin of zero: Lam-Needham thesis

We come back to the question we started out with: Is it really established

beyond reasonable doubt that ancient India was the original source of

the number zero and the decimal numbering system that is the founda-

tion of modern mathematics?

e answer can only be in the negative.

In light of the fact that a decimal place-value, conceptually identi-

cal with modern Hindu-Arabic numerals, was fully functional in China

around the time when non-place value Brahmi numerals were barely

emerging in India, some skepticism – and some humility – is warrant-

ed. is means that we must pay serious attention to the lines of pos-

sible transmission from China, through South-East Asia to the Indian

sub-continent, that Needham and his Chinese colleagues hypothesized

in 1959, and that Lam has argued for more recently.

So far, Indian historians have simply assumed a one-way transmis-

sion of mathematical ideas from India to China. But if we look close-

ly, the transmission was always two-way, with at least as much com-

ing from China into India as the other way around. Moreover, if we

look past the monks carrying Buddhist wisdom to also include Indian

merchants hazarding the mountain passes through Tibet and sailing

through the Bay of Bengal, past South East Asian islands to reach Chi-

na, it becomes entirely plausible that they could have brought the Chi-

nese way of counting with them. e beauty of this conjecture is that it

can solve two puzzles in the biography of zero:

1. e rst puzzle is the gap of nearly 900 years between Brahmi

non-place decimals, to Nagari place value decimals numerals

complete with a śunya-bindu. (see section 4.2).

2. e other puzzle has to do with why zero appears in Cambo-

dia and Indonesian islands before it shows up in Gwalior? (see

section 4.4).

It is customary to date Indo-Chinese contact when China estab-

lished an embassy in the court of the Guptas.71 But that is not entirely

true. We know from the account le behind by Zhan Qian, who rst

71 Joseph, p. 304.

explored the lands beyond the Western frontier of China in 138 BCE,

that bamboo and cotton from southwestern provinces of China that

were being supplied by Indian caravans were being sold as far west as

Bactria, the land that straddles today's Afghanistan, Pakistan and Ta-

jikistan. China was familiar enough to nd a reference in the Mahab -

harata. Moreover, Indians were not the only travellers: Pre-Islamic Ar-

abs, Greeks, Persians and Central Asians have been travelling the many

"silk routes" since 130 BCE, when the Chinese opened their western

border.72

Likewise, it is not at all clear that South East Asian countries were

purely Hindu kingdoms, as is oen argued to explain away the puzzle

that zero appears in Cambodia and Indonesian islands before it appears

in Gwalior. e fact is that even those parts of South-East Asia that

were under the cultural and political inuence of Hinduism – includ-

ing Cambodia, parts of Vietnam, ailand, Laos and Burma – were in

constant contact with China. To quote Prabodh C. Bagchi, the author of

a book on India-China relations:

For over a thousand years, the entire Indo-Chinese peninsula and the islands

of the Indian archipelago were for all practical purposes a Greater India. In-

dian colonizers had set up ourishing kingdoms. Indian culture permeated the

people of the country. Regular lines of communication by sea connected these

kingdoms with India on the one hand, and with China on the other.73

is bi-cultural nature of Southeast Asia lies at the heart of Need-

ham's conjecture cited earlier (section 2) that the symbol for zero is "an

Indian garland thrown around the nothingness of the vacant space on

the Han counting boards". How Needham elaborates this conjecture de-

serves to be reproduced in full:

We are free to consider the possibility (or even the probability) that the written

zero symbol, the more reliable calculations it permitted really originated in the

eastern zone of Hindu culture where it met the southern zone of the culture of the

Chinese. What ideographic stimulus it could have received at that interface?

Could it have adopted an encircled vacancy from the empty blanks le for zeros

on the Chinese counting boards? e essential point is that the Chinese had

possessed, long before the time of time of Sun Tzu Suan Ching (late +3rd centu-

ry) a fundamentally decimal place-value system. It may be then that the 'empti-

72 Bagchi, p. 7.

73 Bagchi, p. 25.

Nothing at Is: Zero's Fleeting Footsteps c

ness' of Taoist mysticism, no less than the "void" of Indian philosophy, contrib-

uted to the invention of symbol for śunya, the zero. It would seem, indeed, that

the ndings of the rst appearance of zero in dated inscriptions on the borderline

of the Indian and the Chinese culture-areas can hardly be a coincidence.74

is thesis, as we have seen, has received a second wind from the

writings of Lam Lay Yong. Lam endorses Needham's conjecture, and

strongly argues for the Chinese origin of zero, but her evidence comes

more from the conceptual identity between the Chinese and the "Hin-

du-Arabic" mathematical procedures described in three Arabic texts.75

Lam's work opens a fresh line of inquiry, namely, the Arab-Chinese cul-

tural exchanges which go back to pre-Islamic era and were intensied

aer the birth of Islam. (As Prophet Mohammad advised his followers,

"seek knowledge as far as China"). e direct contact between Chinese

and Islamic mathematicians and scientists is too complicated to be dis-

cussed here.

Contemporary historians are split over the relevance of the Chi-

nese evidence for understanding the evolution of Indian mathematical

ideas. Some like Ifrah and Chrisomalis dismiss the very idea of zero as

anything but purely Indian, while others like Joseph and Ploer advise

against such summary dismissal. More balanced is the opinion of Victor

Katz, author of a well-respected textbook on the history of mathemat-

ics, who looks on the invention of zero as a multi-step process by which

India and China built upon each other's ideas. Katz's words deserve to

be quoted at length, because they happen to exactly coincide with the

surmise of this essay:

It has been suggested that the true origins of the system in India come from the

Chinese counting boards. e counting board was a portable object. Certainly

Chinese traders [and Buddhist seekers as well] who visited India carried these

along. In fact, since Southeast Asia is the border between Hindu culture and

Chinese inuence, it may have well been in that area where the interchange

took place. What may have happened is that the Indians were impressed with

the idea of using only nine symbols. But they naturally took for their symbols

the ones they had already been using. ey then improved upon the Chinese

74 Needham and Wang, pp. 11-12, emphasis added. e quote about the "garland"

appears on p. 148.

75 ese texts are: "a Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi's work on arithmetic, al-

Uqlidisi's Kitab al-Fusul  al-Hisab al-Hindi, and Kushyar ibn Labban's Kitab 

usual Hisab al-Hind". Lam, p. 178.

system for counting rods, for using exactly the same symbols for each place

value, rather than alternating two types of symbols [horizontal and vertical].

And because they needed to be able to write numbers in some form, rather than

just have them on the counting board, they were forced to use a symbol, the dot

and later the circle to represent the blank column of the counting board. If this

theory is correct, it is somewhat ironic that the Indian scientists then returned

the favor and brought the new system back to China in the 8th century.76

If Katz is right – as he seems to be, in light of the material we have

discussed at length in these pages – then it should help explain one

more puzzle: why are there no written records in India which men-

tion Chinese way of computation, while there are plenty of translated

"Brahmin" texts in astronomy in China? e answer seems to be that

the counting rods and the methods of using them were not written in

books, but learnt through practice. It will be futile to look for evidence

in learned texts. e evidence lies in the counter-culture of traders, trav-

ellers and even monks who, to use Needham's words, "had exchanged

metaphysics for mathematics".

6. Concluding remarks

is chapter has tried to present the history of zero in a new key. A

comparative, practice-centered perspective is what sets this account

apart from the traditional histories of zero that dominate the historical

scholarship, and saturate the public sphere, in India.

I hope that the evidence provided in this chapter will encourage the

readers to look beyond national or civilizational boundaries to develop

a deeper understanding of how ideas evolve through a give-and-take

between civilizations, and how civilizations build upon ideas and prac-

tices that travel back-and-forth across trade routes, pilgrimage circuits

and political relations.

I hope, moreover, that this chapter succeeds in planting in the

readers' minds a seed of doubt about "purity" of ideas. ere is noth-

ing "pure" about "pure mathematics," for there is a constant interplay

between practices and concepts. Neither is there anything in history

of science that is "purely" Indian, or "purely" European, Chinese, or

76 Katz, p. 235.

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

Islamic. History of science is a wonderful example of history of inter-

civilizational exchange of ideas. Conning it within nationalistic frame-

works can only lead to a tunnel vision, and there is no reason why we

should accept such a limitations on our ability to see the wider vistas

that encompass the whole world.

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders

of Ancient Indian Medicine

1. Introduction

As the title suggests, this chapter is about medical knowledge in ancient

India. But it is more than that. It also proposes a plan for combating

pseudohistory of science – a plan that has the potential to turn the ma-

nia for mythic history into an opportunity for learning.

Even a cursory look at news headlines will show that we are in-

undated these days with myths of our civilization's singular greatness.

A narrative of Indic, or dharmic, exceptionalism is under construction

which celebrates its spiritual and scientic riches. Not unlike American

exceptionalism, Indic exceptionalism seeks to universalize itself, both

at home and around the world.1

e myth of Indic exceptionalism is a myth wrapped in and

around myths taken straight out of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana

and the many Puranas, the traditional storehouses of mythology. e

1 Dharmic civilization is understood as the civilization that is native to the land of

India. It subsumes Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Its distinctive set

of assumptions regarding "divinity, the cosmos and humanity" are seen as oering

"an Indian challenge to Western Universalism," as the subtitle of a recent book by

Rajiv Malhotra (2011) would have it. e point to note is that the Indic/dharmic

tradition by denition excludes those Indian religious traditions with roots in the

Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.

new myth-makers appropriate popular myths from this rich tradition,

evacuate religious or spiritual meanings out of them, and retell them as

if they are literally true accounts of scientic and technological achieve-

ments. e much beloved gods and goddesses that are imprinted in

the collective psyche of Indian people remain – but now they serve the

earthly ambitions of men and women.

A myth, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a tradi-

tional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or

explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving su-

pernatural beings or events: ancient Celtic myths. Myth also means, ac-

cording to OED again, A widely held but false belief or idea."

Both meanings of myth are at work in the public sphere in India

today, with one important dierence: rather than see myths for what

they are – "traditional stories…..involving supernatural beings," or as

"widely held false beliefs" – they are being served up as legitimate evi-

dence of scientic achievements. Like fundamentalists everywhere who

insist upon reading religious texts as literal accounts of the creation and

evolution of the universe, in India too, the miraculous prowess of su-

pernatural beings is being interpreted as if they provide a literally true

account of the achievements of ancient "scientists" and "engineers."

is chapter will oer a creative way we can turn this asco into a

teaching moment. e basic idea is simple: whenever our political lead-

ers dish out myths and call them "science," we should take it upon our-

selves to learn some real history of real science in the specic domain

in question.2 Aer we are done laughing at the absurdity of the tall-

tales we are told, we should get down to the more sober task of educat-

ing ourselves with the actual history of science in India as a part of the

global history of medicine, science and technology. is self-education

requires that we arm ourselves with the best, the most reliable evidence

available and approach it with a critical, or a scientic, spirit – that is,

be willing to rethink our preconceived ideas in the light of compelling evi-

dence.3 is is what this chapter intends to do for history of medicine

2 I think of it as my "lemonade model," inspired by the old proverb, "when world

gives you lemons, make lemonade."

3 Here Garrett Fagan, a critic of pseudo-archeology, is right on the mark: "a basic

characteristic of genuine [as opposed to pseudo-] archeology, of whatever theoret-

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

(as the previous two chapters have tried to do for two landmarks in

mathematics)

Such an exercise, carried out with rigor, honesty and a sturdy re-

spect for historical evidence can yield rich dividends. Its usefulness for

countering ideologically-driven pseudohistory of science is obvious.

Less obvious, but perhaps more important, is how a dose of real his-

tory can save the ancient physicians, crasmen-mathematicians from

becoming civilizational icons (as in the Indocentric discourse), or from

becoming totally invisible (as in the Eurocentric discourse). Under-

standing how the ancients grappled with the natural world armed with

nothing more than their faculty to reason and the evidence of their

senses, can save them from both glorication and condescension at the

hands of their 21st century inheritors.

2. Mythologizing medicine

Scholarly study of myths has come a long way from the 19th centu-

ry understanding of myths as proto-scientic explanations of nature.

roughout the 20th century, as scientic understanding of the natural

world made progress, " the physical world was conceded to [modern]

science," as Robert Segal, a leading theorist of myth put it, and myths

were no longer seen as competing with science as explanations of na-

ture; they were instead reconceived as symbolic narratives about the

place of human beings in the world, their unconscious fears and fan-

tasies, their sense of right or wrong.4 As Sudhir Kakar, the pre-eminent

interpreter of the "inner world" of Indians puts it, "myths… are individ-

ual psychology projected onto the outside world… myths can be read as

a kind of collective historical conscience, instructions from the vener-

able ancestors on 'right' or 'wrong,' which serves to bind the members

of a group to each other."5

ical bent, is the maintenance of conceptual exibility – a willingness to re-examine

favored conclusions in the face of… countervailing evidence, and to change those

conclusions accordingly. It is not unreasonable to brand such an intellectual stance

as broadly scientic insofar as it accepts the capacity of the data to reshape inter-

pretations" (emphasis added), Fagan, 2006, p.25

4 Robert Segal, 2006, pp. 341-342.

5 Sudhir Kakar, 1981, p. 4.

In India of the 21st century we seem to be stuck in the 19th century:

Myths continue to crop up in history of science as if they are literally

true accounts of the physical world, or as literally true descriptions of

technological artifacts. Existence of ancient Vedic-era space-ships ca-

pable of inter-galactic travel, the existence of nuclear weapons in the

time of the Mahabharata and other such fantastic tales continue to be

asserted by learned men and women in academic forums.

It is in this context that when the Prime Minister of India used my-

thology as evidence for the existence of advanced knowledge of genet-

ics and surgery in ancient India, it made news not just in India, but

around the world. One could not but read Mr. Modi's words as giving

ocial blessings to the mythication of science that has been going on

in the country for a long time, but which seems to intensied under his

watch.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony Sir H.N. Reliance Founda-

tion Hospital and Research Center in Mumbai on October 25, 2014,

Modi invoked familiar Hindu myths to exhort the audience to take

pride in the medical achievements of our ancestors. e Hindi text of

his speech is available on the ocial website of the Prime Minister's Of-

ce. Excerpts in English translation are reproduced here.

Karna in the Mahabharata, Modi suggested, could well have been

a medical rst; a baby born in-vitro. is is what he said: "We can feel

proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of

time. We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little

more, we realize that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from

his mother's womb. is means that genetic science was present at that

time. at is why Karna could be born outside his mother's womb."

Next, Modi invoked Lord Ganesh in the context of plastic surgery.

"We worship Lord Ganesh. ere must have been some plastic surgeon

at that time who got an elephant's head on the body of a human being,

and began the practice of plastic surgery."

e PM stopped at Ganesh. But following this line of thinking,

many more medical rsts can be claimed. Aer all, we worship Hanu-

man, and so there must have been biophysicist who could make this

member of higher primates y. We worship gods and goddesses with

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

any number of fully-functional arms and heads and so there must have

been neurosurgeons way back then. So on and so forth. T h e

point is that if we are not going to respect any boundary between myth

and science, then history of science simply collapses into mythology.

Myths interpreted literally come to serve not just as evidence for rudi-

mentary or proto-science, but for the most cutting-edge sciences that

we have today.

No doubt this bit of myth-making at the hospital was done with

best intentions of encouraging pursuit of science. As Modi explained,

"What I mean to say is that we are the country which had these capabili-

ties. We need to regain these."

One could well complain that we are making too much of these

remarks. Aer all, don't all politicians, from the Le and the Right, go

into a grandstanding mode time to time? is is what politicians do.

But Modi, as is well-known, is a product of the shakha culture of

the RSS. Having joined the local shakha when he was barely eight-years

old, the RSS "[has done] the most to shape him and his worldview, and

to advance his political ambitions," to quote from Vinod Jose's bio-

graphical essay on the rise of Narendra Modi.6 Fables about "scientic"

achievements of our Hindu forefathers are as natural in the RSS cul-

ture as water is for sh. With the RSS in an unprecedented position of

power, there is every reason to fear that this mythology will nd a place

in textbooks. is is one very good reason why we must take the PM's

pronouncements seriously.7

6 Vinod Jose, e Caravan, March 2012.

7 All signs are pointing to a massive push for the Saronization of education. Earlier

this year, the Ministry of Human Resource Development began its consulta-

tive process for a New Education Policy. It has invited input from grassroots

movements regarding 33 topics related to school and higher education posted

on its website http://mhrd.gov.in/. e RSS is a major player in the consultative

process. According to the Deccan Herald, " Amid these initiatives and plans of

the government, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's (RSS) education wing is

silently working to assist the government formulate the new policy. A Shiksha Niti

Aayog (education policy commission), set up under the leadership of controver-

sial educationist and former RSS pracharak Dinanath Batra, is holding parallel,

nationwide deliberations to get suggestions from the "right-minded" citizens of

the country. It has plans to hold at least 500 seminars across the country to "make

people aware of the drawbacks of the current education system and get vital

is mythic history of medicine has implications for health policy

as well. Under the Modi government, AYUSH, the government body

that oversees traditional medical systems, has been elevated to a full-

edged ministry with an annual budget of 1,200 crore rupees. Even

though the number of randomized control trials for Ayurveda can be

counted on the "ngers of one hand," and even though homeopathy has

been proven multiple times to be utterly ineective in rigorous double-

blind trials, resources are going to be diverted to these medical tradi-

tions which are more aptly described as alternatives to medicine, rather

than as alternative medicine.8

e situation is ripe to put "the plan" into action, that is, turn every

mystication into an opportunity to educate ourselves in real history of

real science. Following the PM's mystication, the plan calls for look-

ing up our ancient medical to nd out what they actually have to say

regarding "genetic science" and surgery. When we call them "scientic,"

what do we mean? If we really had made such advances in medicine in

the past, why did we stop? Why has Ayurveda not made any real pro-

gress beyond whatever was put down in Charaka and Sushruta samhi-

tas composed in the early centuries of the Common Era?

In this chapter, we will examine these issues in more details. We

will rst look into the question of "genetic science" in Charaka Samhita .

e next section will examine the question of plastic surgery, focusing

on the method of nose reconstruction in Sushruta Samhita. We will fol-

low it up with a comparative history of anatomy where we will address

the question why, despite the promising start in anatomy and surgery,

we fell behind sister civilizations.

But we will start with a brief discussion of the dangers of anach-

ronistic or "presentist" history. Delving into this problem with history

suggestions from them on how to make it relevant for the country." http://www.

deccanherald.com/content/461641/education-policy-good-denitely-not.html

To understand why the leadership of Dinanath Batra should worry us, here is a

gem from his book, Bharatiya Shiksha kaa Swarup : "Charaka explained blood

circulation in 300 BC, while the credit is given to William Harvey." p. 50. Batra

provides no evidence to back this astounding claim.

8 See Rukmini Shrinivasan, "Medicine Wars," e Hindu, April 26, 2015. AYUSH

stands for Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani medicine, Siddha and homeopathy. e phrase

"alternatives to medicine" was suggested by my friend, Vijayan.

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

writing may seem like a digression, but its relevance to the issue at hand

will soon become evident.

3. Why anachronism is bad history of science

One of the rst things all historians are taught to avoid is the "sin" of

writing "Whig history", which consists of giving anachronistic or "pre-

sentist" accounts of the past.9 Anachronistic history is simply reading

the past in the vocabulary derived from our present knowledge, beliefs,

or values. It is "unhistorical history writing" that "studies the past with

one eye to the present", to use Buttereld's famous words. Put another

way, it uses now as the prism through which it views then. Historians

of science are especially wary of presentism for the potential it has to

distort what scientists in the past were trying to achieve. e presentist

distortion in history of science comes when historians "cast a particular

theory, now deemed correct, as proven right from the start," or to put

it another way, when they cast the "scientists" of earlier eras as working

with the same conceptual and methodological framework as scientists

today.10

e opposite of anachronistic history is the diachronic, or contex-

tual, history of ideas in which the historian tries to become an observer

in the past, not just of the past; in which the historian takes a y-on-the-

wall approach to writing history. is requires that the historian must

9 e term "Whig history" was made famous by Herbert Buttereld's 1931 classic

titled e Whig Interpretation of History. By Whig history Buttereld was referring

to the habit of British liberals to read the political history of Britain as one long

continuous and inevitable march toward parliamentary democracy. is way of

history writing worked by reading the contemporary political philosophy of liber-

alism back into the minds of actors in the past, who in reality may have had totally

dierent motives and meanings for their actions.

10 e quotation is from Douglas Allchin, 2004, p. 182. Strictly speaking, there were

no "scientists" before the term was coined by William Whewell in 1834 to describe

the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. By "scientist" he

meant an analogue to "artist", as the term that could provide linguistic unity to

those studying the various branches of the sciences. But, of course, human beings

have been studying the material world from the very beginning of history. e

correct name for pre-modern students of nature is "natural philosophers". See Syd-

ney Ross, 1962. See also https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/the-history-

of-scientist/

100

learn to forget, or at least learn to disregard, what she or he knows today

when interpreting the past.

e reason is obvious: actors in the past did not have access to the

conceptual framework that is available to actors living today. is is

nowhere made clearer than in the work of omas Kuhn, the author

of e Structure of Scientic Revolutions, a book that radically changed

how we think of progress in science. According to Kuhn, "scientists"

in the past lived in a dierent world: they were not talking of the same

things we do today, even when they were investigating the same object

in the material world. is creates problems:

Scientists-historians and those who follow their lead impose contemporary sci-

entic categories, concepts and standards on the past. Sometimes a specialty

which they traced from antiquity had not existed as a recognized subject of

study until a generation before they wrote. Nevertheless, knowing [from their

current state of knowledge] what belonged to it, they [manage to] retrieve the

current contents of the specialty from past texts, not noticing that the tradition

they had constructed in the process had never existed. In addition, they usually

treat concepts and theories of the past as imperfect approximations to those

in current use, thus disguising the structure and integrity of the past scientic

traditions. Inevitably, histories written in this way reinforce the impression that

history of science is the triumph of sound method over error and superstition.11

e problem with this way of reading the past is that it turns his-

tory into a "hall of mirrors", where all we can see is an image of our own

present.12 is is a special problem of science as it turns the sciences of

previous eras into a precursor of, or an anticipation of, what we already

know today. In the process, it continuously updates – or "modernizes" –

the achievements of the past. is is how presentism becomes a tool for

constructing a glorious past of the nation whose "science" was always

"modern".

A couple of examples will help illustrate the problem.

History of science in the West has its share of anachronisms. ere

is a kind of Hellenophilia among Western historians who think of mod-

ern science as a direct descendant of the natural philosophy of Aristo-

tle and Plato. For example, by expressing Aristotle's law of motion in a

mathematical equation, it is possible to make Aristotle look like the pre-

11 omas Kuhn, 1977, p. 149.

12 Carlos Spoerhase, 2008.

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Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

101

cursor of the modern laws of motion described by Newton's three laws,

while in reality Newtonian physics could only emerge aer Aristotle's

natural philosophy was discarded root-and-branch.

For an Indian example, consider P.C. Ray's well-known history of

"Hindu chemistry". Looking for some evidence that "the Hindus had a

very large hand in the cultivation of experimental science", Ray turns

to rasayana (alchemy) involving the use of mercury and mica that de-

veloped sometime between 13th and 14th centuries as part of a tantric

practice, the intention of which was to achieve bodily immortality. Ray

repeatedly uses "alchemy" and "chemistry" as synonyms, and does not

distinguish between the mercury, sulphur and/or mica of the alche-

mists (who saw these elements as the "seeds" of Shiva and Parvathi re-

spectively), from the modern conception of these elements.13

ere is no doubt that alchemy involved hands-on work and laid

the basis for laboratory techniques like distillation and sublimation that

are still used in modern chemistry. But hands-on work by itself does

not count as "science". ere is no doubt that alchemy was the chem-

istry of middle ages, it was rational and empirical within its theoretical

framework. However, that theoretical framework had to be completely

overturned for chemistry as we know it to emerge.14 e transition from

alchemy to chemistry had already taken place by the close of the 18th

century and yet, this break is hard to discern in Ray's work. Presentism

allows Ray to celebrate the alchemists as the fathers of chemistry in me-

dieval India, when they were anything but.

P.C. Ray is only the tip of the iceberg; presentism is practically the

operating philosophy of modern Ayurveda. e examples are endless:

the mysterious ojas are transformed into immunity and virility, prāa

becomes "oxygen" and also "energy", while the lotus-like heart that

13 Ray, 1918/1992. For a similar critique of Ray, see Pratik Chakraborty, 2000.

14 e paradigm shi did not happen overnight and pioneers of chemistry like Rob-

ert Boyle and even the great Isaac Newton continued to practice alchemy. How-

ever, these admirers of Francis Bacon were doing alchemy in a scientic spirit,

applying the Baconian method of experimentalism to alchemy, and unwittingly

began the long process of questioning the idea that elements can be transmuted.

Initial continuities gave way to discontinuities between alchemy and chemistry.

Just as it is bad history of science to ignore the continuities between chemistry and

alchemy, it is equally bad history to ignore the eventual discontinuities.

102

sleeps at night and wakes up in the morning become diastole and sys-

tole, and so on and so forth. e end result is a schizophrenic mindset

which accepts fundamentally contradictory theories about the same

subject matter at the same time.15

Whereas professional historians of science try their best to avoid

presentism, nationalist historians in India have embraced it with a

vengeance. Simply reading back whatever we know and value today –

which, more oen than not, has roots in the post-Enlightenment West

– back into ancient times has been the hallmark of Hindu nationalist

history. Straight lines of descent from "the Vedas" for everything from

science and technology, secularism, democracy, ecological sensibility,

etc., abound in this genre of history writing.

4. "Genetic science" in the time of Mahabharata

Mr. Modi's claim that "genetic science was present at that time of Ma-

habharata" is a textbook example of anachronistic history. e very

idea of "genetic science" in the early centuries of the Common Era

when the Mahabharata was put together makes no sense outside of the

anachronistic history-writing described above.

e concept of a "gene" as a discrete unit of heredity was not known

until the beginnings of the 20th century when the work of Gregor Men-

del (1822-1884), a Christian monk who lived in what is now Czechoslo-

vakia, was rediscovered. Even the great Charles Darwin (1809-1882), a

somewhat older contemporary of Mendel, thought that traits are inher-

ited through the blending of "gemmules" – tiny particles that are shed

into the blood by all the cells in the body, which are then "blended" and

eventually passed on to the progeny. For example, a tall and a short cou-

ple will have children with average height. A parent with blue eyes and a

parent with hazel eyes will have children with greyish eyes. Mendel dis-

proved this "blending" theory by meticulously crossing pea plants and

15 Wujastyk (2009) cites an interesting example of this schizophrenia. He reproduces

a set of model papers from 1990s for the exam required for a degree in Ayurveda.

One question is about the variety of "winds" that supposedly move in the blood

vessels, while the very next question is about red blood cell counts; question about

food getting cooked by agni in the stomach is followed by questions having to do

with metabolic hormones.

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Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

103

observing how traits (such as color and texture) were passed down to

the next generations. It was his tireless and patient work that taught us

that genes are passed on as discrete units and do not blend. at these

units of heredity sit on the chromosome; that the chromosome is made

up of DNA, which has a double-helical structure – these are all later 20th

century discoveries.16

Strictly speaking, there was no "genetic science" anywhere be-

fore the concept of genes was invented. at, of course, does not mean

that people did not puzzle over heredity before they knew what genes

were. Indeed, everywhere, in all civilizations that we know of, people

have tried to understand the process through which some traits run in

families; why children resemble their parents and siblings; etc. Just like

every other people, ancient Indians pondered the mystery of heredity

as well. eir most "scientic" theory – by the standards of that era – is

recorded in Caraka Sahitā (henceforth, CS), the foundational text of

Ayurveda.

According to Caraka, the birth of any living being involves not two,

but three partners: the mother, the father, and the soul (the atman ) at-

tached to its subtle body (sukshma sharira), which is looking for a new

body aer death. Biological parents are necessary but not sucient, as

they only provide the material out of which a body is constructed. e

individual soul is a particle of Brahman, the Cosmic Consciousness,

which the parents cannot provide. e embryo is a "spirit-matter com-

posite" and therefore ensouled from the moment of its conception.17

is is how S.N. Dasgupta, the preeminent author of the multi-volume

History of Indian Philosophy describes the process by which a fetus is

formed:

When a man dies, his soul, together with the subtle body (sukshama sharira )

composed of the four elements (air, re, water and earth) in a subtle state, and

manas, passes invisibly into a particular womb on account of its karma, and

16 See James Schwartz (2008) for an interesting history of genetics.

17 As Julius Lipner (1989) correctly points out, because the embryo is considered

ensouled from the moment of conception, abortion even at the earliest stages of

pregnancy is seen as murder ("hatya") and condemned as a heinous crime at par

with killing a Brahmin in the canonical Hindu literature. It is true that women

have the right to abortion in modern India, but this law exists in contravention of

Hindu ethics.

104

then, when it comes in contact with the combined semen and blood of the

father and the mother, the fetus begins to develop. e semen and the blood

operate as causes …..only when they come in connection with the subtle body

transferred from the body of a dying being.18

Now, this three-party arrangement is perfectly rational and even

necessary within the classical Vedantic understanding of a human per-

son and what happens at the time of death. In the Vedantic worldview,

which Caraka Sahitā does not question, a human person is made up of

gross body (sthula sharira ), subtle body (sukshama sharira) and atman-

Brahman.19 e gross body disintegrates at the time of death. e subtle

body, which carries all the imprints of deeds and thoughts of the previ-

ous life, does not die; it clings to the atman of the person who is dying,

and together they exit from the gross body. e subtle body continues

to live until salvation is achieved, and the atman merges with Brahman.

Until that happens, it has to nd a new body aer every death.

is, then, is how the physicians who composed the Caraka Sam-

hita understood the process of birth, and the passage of traits from the

biological parents, plus the invisible and ethereal subtle body, riding the

coat-tails of the eternal atman on its quest for the Brahman.

ough this explanation of conception and birth is coherent within

the Vedantic worldview, can it be called "scientic" even within its own

context, to say nothing of being scientic in the modern sense of the

word? Can we, by any stretch of imagination, claim that "genetic sci-

ence," or even the idea of heredity, was known to our ancestors?

e answer to both these questions has to be in the negative.

ere is no doubt that the Ayurvedic physicians shared the am-

bitions and the goals of anyone who can be legitimately called a "sci-

entist," insofar as they sought to understand and explain the state of

health and disease. Like their modern counterparts they, too, sought to

predict and control the course of disease. It is also true that CS encour-

18 Dasgupta, Volume II, p. 303. Dasgupta also provides a good description of what

happens to the human person at the time of death.

19 e earlier generation of rationalists, notably Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya, were

too eager to nd signs of hard empiricism in Ayurveda and claimed that all the

Vedic elements (rebirth, e.g.) were later additions to originally materialistic texts.

is view is no longer considered valid, as the Vedic elements are knitted into the

fundamentals of Ayurvedic writings. See Engler (2003) for one of best critiques of

a naïvely rationalist-materialist interpretation.

105

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

105

ages the physicians to use all their sensory faculties to make a proper

diagnosis. Yet, empirical observations were made to arrive at conclu-

sions that were untestable, even in theory. In the case of how conception

takes place, empirical observations regarding the coming together of

father's "seed" (shukra, or semen) and the mother's "eld" (sonita, or

blood) were of course made, but were used to simply illustrate the truth

of a higher-level concept (the subtle body in search for an "appropriate"

womb, for example). e higher-level concept, in turn, was deduced

from a divinely sanctioned web of concepts which are seen as "eternally

true" and therefore beyond reason and evidence. Independent evidence

that may verify or falsify the higher-level concept was neither sought,

nor considered proper to seek.20

Secondly, CS's argument that the subtle body is a necessary compo-

nent of conception fails to explain what it sets out of explain – namely,

heredity. Any model of heredity must explain how physical and men-

tal traits are transmitted from biological parents to ospring.21 But ac-

cording to the long discussion of the process of conception and fetal

development found in CS, "the self causes itself to be born by means of

itself as an embryo" where self is the eternal soul, the atman. All higher

functions which make us human – consciousness, self-knowledge, in-

telligence, memory, personal identity – are due to the atman that de-

scends into the womb (parents only providing the stu that the body is

20 It has become fashionable these days to argue that science is no dierent from any

local tradition, or from religion and myth, because scientists also operate within a

paradigm that they cannot question if they have to do any science at all. It is true

that in modern science individual scientists or even communities of scientists at

any given time do not challenge the matrix of theories, methods and metaphysi-

cal assumptions underlying the science they do; they merely solve puzzles for

which they need to accept the assumptions and methods of their paradigm. But

the reward structure in modern science has evolved in such a manner that a col-

lective skepticism is encouraged so that the basic assumptions of any paradigm

have been tested by the previous generation of scientists. So in science, paradigms

do undergo revolutions; there is no guarantee that today's most cherished truths

may not join the heap of rejected ideas in the future. Ayurveda on the other hand,

"eternalizes" even those empirically tested claims by putting them in the mouth

of gods, who passed on this knowledge to human sages, who passed it on to the

vaidyas, and so on.

21 Oxford English Dictionary denes heredity as "e passing on of physical or

mental characteristics genetically from one generation to another."

106

made of). e nature of the "mental faculty" of the embryo – whether

it is sattvic , rajasic or tamsic – is determined not by biological parents,

but by whichever of these traits was dominant in the previous life of

the transmigrating soul.22 It is thus safe to say that CS lacks a complete

theory of heredity, as the term is universally understood.

Finally, while the transmigrating soul is a necessary component of

ancient "science" of "heredity," it is entirely unnecessary to a modern

understanding of genetics. In other words, the soul-stu can be easily

shaved o by Occam's razor with no eect whatsoever on the actual

theory and practice on the science of genetics.

Occam's (or Ockhham's) razor is a form of reasoning attributed to

William of Ockham, a 14th century Franciscan monk. It simply entreats

us to "not multiply entities unnecessarily," where entities are our theo-

retical assumptions and premises. e rule of thumb that scientists fol-

low is this: a scientic theory that recruits more assumptions, but can

stand equally well with less, is needlessly complicated. If there are two

theories in the same domain, scientists should accept the simpler one.

e logic behind the preference for simpler theories is as follows:

..if we can remove the trimmings of unnecessary assumptions and premises

without it impacting the quality of the conclusions, then the trimmings are

unlikely to play a part in the explanation. As a consequence, they should be

dropped as they play no part in the reasoning and thus have no consequence

for the conclusion.23

To see how it works, ask any of the thousands of molecular biol-

ogists in India who continue to believe in karma and rebirth in their

personal lives outside work, but do not invoke the soul-stu in their

scientic work. ey may not put it these terms, but they are using Oc-

cam's razor in the lab, but not outside the lab. In other words, they live

22 e mother is said to provide soer tissues like the skin, blood and internal or-

gans, while the contribution of the father is limited to the harder stu like bones,

teeth, hair etc. See Wujastyk, 1998, pp. 95-100. In what amounts to a pathetic

clutching at straws, this has been read as an anticipation of the modern human

genetics in which the mother contributes the X-chromosomes and the father the

Y-chromosomes! See Deb, 2015, p. 84.

23 Quoted from Jason Braithwaite's excellent exposition titled "Occam's Razor: e

Principle of Parsimony, available at https://www.academia.edu/1742741/Occams_

Razor_e_principle_of_Parsimony

107

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

107

compartmentalized lives; they are hard-core materialists and empiri-

cists when they are scientists, yet unquestioningly accept the role that

atman plays in matters of life and death in their everyday lives.24

To sum up this section: Our ancient medicine does contain a par-

tial theory of heredity, but we did not have "genetic science." Our an-

cient theory of heredity is of no relevance to modern genetics. It has

been shaved o using Occam's razor.

5. Plastic surgery in Ancient India

e Prime Minister's more astounding claim about ancient surgeons

doing inter-species head-transplants (as in the case of Lord Ganesh)

belongs to the realm of mythology in the sense of "a story … involving

supernatural beings or events," as dened earlier. Such fables are be-

yond evidence, and for that reason alone should not be used as evidence

for any kind of history. One should let such stories rest in the land of

enchantment and imagination where they belong.

Yet, such statements amount to, in football parlance, self-goals by

India First team, as they prevent us from seeing the promising begin-

nings made by ancient Indian physicians in surgery (this section) and

human anatomy (next section).

Any inquiry into surgery and anatomy will naturally start with Su-

shruta Sahitā (SS) which provides a unique window into the world of

surgeons and their techniques. e exact dates are hard to pin down,

but the scholarly consensus is that the "kernel probably started some

centuries BCE, in the form of a text mainly on surgery, but which was

then heavily revised and added to in the centuries before 500 CE. is

is the form in which we have received the work today."25 e entire

Sahitā is a work of many hands and contains many historical layers.

e text is presented as the teachings of Dhanvantari (identied as the

King of Benaras) to his pupil Sushruta.

When admirers refer to Sushruta as the "world's rst plastic sur-

geon" they are not entirely wrong. Sushruta does describe surgical

24 See the rst of its kind online survey of the worldview of Indian scientists available

at http://commons.trincoll.edu/worldviewsofscientists/report/

25 Wujastyk, 1998, p. 105.

108

procedures for the reconstruction of the ear, nose and lip for defects;

congenital, or acquired. ere were ample chances for acquiring these

defects, as cutting o someone's nose and/or ears was a common form

of humiliation in ancient India, as it was in other ancient societies as

well.26 Apart from reconstructive surgery, there are also descriptions of

"ophthalmic couching (dislodging of the lens of the eye), perineal li-

thotomy (cutting for stone in the bladder), removal of arrows and splin-

ters, suturing, and much besides."27

e procedure for nose reconstruction developed by Sushruta is

one of undisputable genius. It is described in chapter 16 of the rst part

of the Sahitā. e description is short and essentially consists of the

following: e surgeon would take a leaf the same size as the person's

deformed nose, and cut a ap of skin from the cheek which had the

same measurements as the leaf. is ap would be laid on the tip of the

nose, while it is was still attached to the cheek at the other end. Once

the cheek ap was joined to the nose, two pipes (probably reeds) would

be inserted which would serve as openings for nostrils. Once the skin

had "taken" to the nose, its connection with the cheek would be cut. A

similar procedure could be used for reconstruction of lips, according to

SS. Simple and elegant!28

ere is no doubt that this is the rst recorded method for recon-

structive surgery in history. It eventually passed into European hands

where it was developed further and became the basis of modern plastic

surgery of the nose, or rhinoplasty.

But the history of this promising procedure at home in India is

rather dismal. While Sushruta's words continued to be copied faithfully

in later medical texts, translated into Arabic and reached China, there

are no reliable records showing that nose reconstruction or any other

surgical techniques described in SS continued to be practiced in India.

e birth place of Sushruta had become bere of anatomical knowl-

edge and surgical practices, so much so that the French traveller Jean-

26 Remember what Lakshmana did to Surpanakha? is practice was widespread in

ancient Egypt as well.

27 Wujastyk, 1998, p. 106.

28 For a complete description see Wujastyk, 1998, pp. 142-143.

109

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

109

Baptiste Tavernier could write in 1684 that the "natives of this country

understand nothing of Chirurgery".29

All available evidence (or rather the lack of it) indicates a kind of

stagnation which is described by Roy Porter thus:

Sushruta Sahitā maintains that surgery is the oldest and the most useful of

the eight branches of medical knowledge… However, there is little evidence to

conrm that these practices persisted. A description of the couching operation

for cataract exists in the ninth century Kalyāakāraka by Ugraditya, and texts

based upon Sushruta Sahitā copy out the sections on surgery. But medical

texts give no evidence of any continuous development of surgical thinking; no

ancient or even medieval surgical instruments have survived;30 nor is surgery

described in literary or other sources. … the early sophistication of surgical

knowledge seems to have been an isolated development..31

Aer centuries of complete silence, the Indian method of xing

broken noses was reported in a letter to the editor in the October 1794

edition of Gentlemans Magazine, published from London.32 e letter,

signed simply as "B.L." in part says the following:

Mr. Urban,

A friend has transmitted to me, from the East Indies, the following very curi-

ous, and, in Europe, I believe, a known chirurgical operation, which has long

been practiced in India with success; namely, axing a new nose on a man's

face. e person represented in Plate 1 [reproduced below as gure 1] is now

in Bombay.

Cowasjee, a Mahratta of the caste of husbandman, was a bullock-driver with

the English army in the War of 1792, and was made a prisoner of Tipu [Sultan]

who cut o his nose and one of his hands. In the state of the Bombay army near

Seringapatam is now a pensioner of Honorable East India Company. For about

12 months he has remained without a nose when he had a new one put on by

a man of the brickmaker caste, near Puna. is operation is now common in

India, and has been practiced from time memorial. Two medical gentlemen,

Mr. omas Caruso and Mr. James Trindaley of the Bombay Presidency, have

29 From Wujastyk, 1998, p.108. Chirurgery is an archaic name for surgery.

30 e sketches of instruments – the lion, or crocodile face forceps, knives of various

shapes, needles etc. – that abound in modern Ayurvedic books/texts are all artists

reconstructions from the descriptions given in the Saṃhitās, and not copies of

original and still existing instruments.

31 Porter, 1997, pp. 140-141.

32 Gentlemans Magazine started publishing in 1731 and continued to remain in

print for the next 200 years. It was the rst magazine in the modern sense and

has been described as "the 18th century answer to Google". See http://www.otago.

ac.nz/library/exhibitions/gentlemansmagazine/index.html

110

seen it performed as follows…." [ A description of the procedure follows which

is very similar to Sushruta's method described above].33

33 e complete letter and the sketches are available at http://drnichter.com/impact-

indian-methods-total-nasal-reconstruction/

Figure 1. Illustration from the celebrated 1794 "Letter to Editor" responsible

for the western spread of the "Indian Method" for total nasal reconstruction.

(From B. L.: Letter to Editor. Gentlemans Magazine, October 1794).

111

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

111

e gist of the story is this: Tipu Sultan cut o the nose and a hand

of a bullock-cart driver, Cowasjee, as punishment for working for the

British army. He was given a new nose by someone from a "brickmaker"

caste. e operation was observed by two surgeons in the British Army,

omas Caruso and James Trindaley, whose eye-witness account "B.L"

was describing in the letter he wrote with the sketch accompanying it.

In all likelihood, this letter to the editor was read by Joseph Carpue

(1764–1840), an English surgeon at the York Hospital in Chelsea, who

became the rst European to practice the "Indian Method" of nasal re-

construction. Aer that, the method became routine in reconstructive

surgery in the West.

e method had to wait for the British to discover it before any

further advances could be made. In India itself, there are only hearsay

stories of such procedure, but the scientic texts register no improve-

ment over what Sushruta had written many centuries ago.

Why not? Why did medical science come to stagnate aer showing

so much promise in the beginning?

If we take the PM's call for "regaining" our lost capabilities in medi-

cine, surgery and science in general, it is important to understand the

nature of these obstacles to progress of science. Celebrations of ancient

science, however well-meant, will not take us far unless we rst grapple

with what has kept us back all these centuries.

A clue lies in one fact that was noticed by the British observers:

those performing this operation were not trained vaidyas, but arti-

san-crasmen not professionally trained in medicine. In the famous

case of Cowasjee reported above, the surgeon came from a family of

brick-makers; in another case of cataract removal following Sushruta's

method observed in the early 20th century, the surgeon was an illiterate

Muslim.

Here we have a classic case of hand-brain un-coordination: the

brick-maker surgeon and his working-class brethren were ignorant of

what was written in Sanskrit texts, while the Sanskrit-trained vaidya s

had forgotten how to wield a scalpel. Here is how M.S. Valiathan de-

scribes the problem:

112

It is important to note that the procedure in Pune and Coimbatore were not

done by Âyurvedic physicians but by illiterate men who had learnt the tech-

nique from an earlier generation. ey did not understand the anatomical basis

of the technique, nor could they explain the rationale for the sequential steps

of the procedure. It was as if their brain was uncoupled from their hand move-

ments, which ensured that there could never be innovation based on true un-

derstanding.34

We explore this split between book-learning and hands-on prac-

tice in more detail in the next section. We will see that this split, which

largely took place on caste lines, held back progress not just of surgery,

but of anatomy as well.

6. Human dissections and anatomy in ancient India

Like geometry (chapter 1) anatomy, too, had its start in Vedic rituals.

It is well documented that animal sacrice was an integral part of Ve-

dic rituals. According to Kenneth Zysk, who has written extensively

on healing practices of the Vedic and post-Buddhist eras, "the animals

sacriced were usually cows, but bulls, goats, rams and bualoes were

also oered."35 e sacrice of the horse (Ashvamedha), however, was

considered specially signicant and the entire procedure is detailed in

the g Veda (1.162. 18-20). What is important for our purposes is this:

for the ritual to bring about the desired eect, every aspect of it had to

be carried out with extreme precision. Everything – from the construc-

tion of the altar, the recitation of the mantra, from the oblation of exact

number of rice balls, to dismembering the sacricial animal – had to be

34 Valiathan, 2006, p. 17.

35 Zysk, 1986. Charles Malamoud, a well-known French Indologist described the

procedure for animal sacrice thus: "rst, the creature was strangled or suocated;

then the body was washed by the sacrice's wife; a special cake was prepared and

oered up [to whom?], the carver made an incision above the umbilicus and

withdrew the omentum [abdominal membrane]; then he skewered the omentum

and grilled it over re; fragments of gold were inserted into the omentum; the

ociants were given their fees; the victim was divided up and unclean parts were

oered to demons; the heart was grilled; the other pieces were cooked in a pot;

from each joint or portion produced by the division of the body, a small piece was

removed for one of the divinities to whom the sacrice was being oered, and the

remainder was distributed to the participants." Quoted here from Wujastyk, 2009,

pp. 193-194.

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Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

113

done exactly as laid out in the Brahmana texts. A great misfortune was

supposed to befall those involved if the rules were not followed. Even

though it was based on superstitious faith in the power of the ritual,

the demand for precision led to a considerable knowledge of animal

anatomy.36

By the time Sushruta Sahitā appears on the scene, sometime in

early centuries of the Common Era, the science of anatomy and surgery

had undergone a paradigm shi: it had shied from the magical and

religious rituals of the Vedas to rational-empirical investigation of hu-

man body for medical purposes. As M.S. Valiathan put it, in the een

centuries that lapsed between the magico-religious practices of Athar-

vaveda to the classical Sahitās, the "practice of medicine changed

from faith-based to reason-based."37 One crucial sign of this paradigm-

shi is Sushruta Sahitās advice to aspiring physicians to "remove all

doubts by direct observation" and to not rely entirely on the textbooks,

or their guru's teachings. is is the beginning of a rational, evidence-

based approach to medicine.

It is in this context that "dissections" of dead human bodies makes

an appearance in the medical literature.38 Sushruta recommends the

following procedure: the body of a person who died a natural death and

has all limbs intact is to be procured and thoroughly cleansed. It is then

to be wrapped in a layer of grass and:

….placed in a cage or a net in a driving stream in a concealed spot. Aer seven

nights, the completely putrid body should be removed and laid out. ereupon,

one should very gradually scrape o the layers of skin etc. by a whisk made of

grass roots. At the same time, every part of the body, great or small, external or

internal, beginning with the skin should be examined with the eye, one aer the

other, as it is disclosed in the process of scrubbing.39 (Emphasis added)

36 As Zysk, 1986, p. 689 puts it, "then animal was not cut up for the purpose of scien-

tic observation, as was true in ancient Greece. e action was undertaken for a

denite religious goal in mind, but the concern for precision and detail produced

a scientic result: a very prudent knowledge of equine anatomy."

37 Valiathan, 2013, p. 5.

38 e conventional meaning of dissection in medicine is "cutting open a dead body

into separate parts in order to study it." By this standard, ancient Indians did not

dissect, because they did not cut open the bodies they studied.

39 S.S. III.5.50-56. Quoted here from Kutumbiah, 1967, p. 2.

114

e entire process can be summed up as "see, but don't touch". e

eye was to do the examining, while the hand was never to come in di-

rect contact with the decomposed body. A strictly visual examination is

better than no examination at all, but it has serious limitations. Because

the body is not probed adequately, many internal organs not directly

exposed by scrubbing remained unknown to Indian physicians:

• e external and internal structure of the heart and its func-

tion was completely misunderstood. Externally, it was de-

scribed as a "lotus bud" which closes during sleep and opens

when awake. (is is interpreted by some as if Sushruta was

describing the systole and diastole of the heart!). Internally, it

was supposed to have a single cavity, like a tank holding water.

ere was no conception that the heart contracts; the pulsa-

tion in the "ducts" was supposed to be caused by vāyu (or air),

and not by the heart.

• Virtually nothing was known about the brain and the spinal

cord. Both Caraka and Sushruta held that the heart – and not

the brain – was the center of sensation, intelligence and con-

sciousness.

• e distinction between arteries and veins was unknown, as

was the dierence in arterial and venous blood. Since the role

of the lungs and respiration was unknown, blood was supposed

to acquire its red or bluish color becoming colored dierently

by dierent kinds of rasa (nutritive juice obtained from food)

in the liver or the spleen. e various ducts (dhamanīs and

śirās etc.) were dierent only in the relative neness or thick-

ness and they were supposed to originate from the navel, not

from the heart.40

7. Anatomy in a comparative perspective

ose who adulate ancient Indian medicine must explain the complete-

ly erroneous – by the standards of that era – understanding of human

40 Summarized from Kutumbiah, Engler, Wujastyk.

115

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

115

anatomy described above. Here, we are not comparing ancient Indian

knowledge with what we know today, but instead to India's sister civ-

ilizations in the centuries spanning the close of the BCE era and the

beginning of the Common Era. Once Sushruta Sahitā is placed in a

comparative world perspective, it becomes clear that Hindu beliefs in

purity and pollution hampered the advancement of learning in ancient

India.

Let us look at the Greco-Roman biologists, anatomists, and medi-

cal doctors who had no qualms about cutting open and touching the

dead bodies of animals, and for a brief period, human cadavers as well.

We should start with Aristotle himself (384-322 BCE), the student of

Plato (428-348 BCE), the teacher of Alexander the Great (356-323

BCE), and "e Philosopher" of Islamic and Christian theologians and

schoolmen until he was dethroned by the Scientic Revolution in the

16th -18th centuries. Unlike in India where the materialists never got a

fair hearing, Aristotle provided a perfect balance to the ideal of super-

sensory transcendental truths sought by Plato and the Pythagoreans.

Growing up surrounded by the sea and marine life, this son of a physi-

cian began his career as a zoologist. About a h of Aristotle's writings

that have survived describe some 540 zoological species. Based upon

skillful dissections, he described in great detail the inner structure of

species ranging from marine animals (dogsh, octopuses, squids), di-

gestive system of ruminants, the eye structure of bees, for example. He

is said to have observed the progress of chicken embryos by breaking

one egg every day. Early on in the Greek civilization, Aristotle put the

study of the living organisms on solid empirical foundations, although

he never conducted any studies of the human body.41

is tradition of curiosity-driven observations of the natural

world culminated in the great strides made in astronomy, geometry and

medicine at the great Library and Museum in the City of Alexandria in

Egypt. (e city was established by Aristotle's student, Alexander the

Great, while the famous Library and the Museum was built by the later

line of Ptolemy kings). It is in Alexandria that for a brief period of time,

during the third century BCE, dissection of human cadavers was per-

41 See David Lindberg, 2007, chapter 3.

116

mitted. Ancient testimony is unanimous that two medical men, Hero-

philus of Chalcedon (330-260 BCE) and Erasistratus of Chios (330-255

BCE) undertook systematic dissections of human bodies. ey made

signicant contributions to anatomy, many of which are taught to med-

ical students to this day.

Herophilus investigated the anatomy of the brain and the nervous

system – exactly those parts which had remained invisible to our "don't

touch" anatomists. He is credited with identifying brain membranes

(the Dura mater and Pia mater) and tracing the connections between

the nerves, the spinal cord and the brain. His detailed description of

the human eye has survived to the present day. at's not all: he also

identied and described smaller, relatively obscure organs like the pan-

creas, the prostrate, and Fallopian tubes. He was the rst to challenge

earlier ideas about arteries carrying air and showed them to be conduits

of blood, and also demonstrated that arteries have thicker walls than

veins. Erasistratus followed Herophilus, and he is credited with describ-

ing the bicuspid and tricuspid valves of the heart, and the role they play

in determining the one-way ow of blood. By the time Claudius Gale-

nus, better known as Galen of Pergamon (130-200 CE) appeared as the

physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, human dissections

again were banned. While examining the wounds of the gladiators un-

der his care, Galen was given a chance to observe whatever he could

inside the human body. Galen also carried out dissections of animals,

including pigs, apes, and even the heart of an elephant. He made im-

pressive gains in understanding heart and blood vessels, as well as the

respiratory and nervous systems. (He extrapolated his ndings from

animals to humans and thus introduced some errors). ese achieve-

ments remained unmatched until they were challenged over a thousand

years later, rst by the Arabic physician Ibn al-Nas (1213-1288) who

lived in what is now Syria, and later in 1543 when Andreas Vesalius

published his masterpiece, De Humanis Corporis Fabrica (or e Fabric

of the Human Body) based upon public dissections of human bodies in

the University of Padua in Italy.42 (More on him below).

42 David Lindberg 2007, Chapter 6. Also, Roy Porter 1997.

117

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

117

is brief foray into Greco-Roman medicine was undertaken for

two purposes. e rst is simply to set the record straight. As this book

has emphasized repeatedly, when we in India make grandiose priority-

claims, we have no choice but to place these claims in a comparative

world history, otherwise they are mere boasts.

e other aim was to show how Hindu prejudice against pollu-

tion literally tied the hands of Indian doctors. Aer all, why was it that

ancient India failed to produce anatomists of the caliber of their con-

temporaries, Herophilus, Erasistratus, and Galen, whose contributions

have endured to the modern era? It is not as if the Greeks had access

to superior technology, superior stock of medical knowledge, or supe-

rior intelligence. e most important dierence was socio-religious; the

Greco-Roman surgeons were not burdened with the stigma of being

polluted in the sense that their Indian counterparts were. It is not that

the Greco-Roman doctors were considered among the social elite, but

they were not classied as polluted and unworthy of participating in the

religious-cultural life of their society.

roughout history, everywhere in the world, medical practition-

ers have occupied an ambiguous social status; their services were need-

ed and even respected, but they have not always enjoyed high social sta-

tus. In ancient Greece, for example, most medical men came from cra

traditions which were held in low esteem by the social elite. In ancient

India, the g Veda classied them between carpenters and Brahmins;

Taittirīya Sahitā advised that "medicine is not to be practiced by a

Brahman, for he, who is a physician, is impure, unt for the sacrice."

Only aer he had undergone a purication ritual, could a physician be

allowed to participate in the yagna .43

If things were not so great for doctors in the Vedic era, they got pro-

gressively worse as time progressed. By the early centuries of the Com-

43 is injunction comes from the well-known myth of the Asvins who could put

back the head of the sacriced animal. e Asvins are commanded by the gods to

replace the head, but they demand that they be rst given a portion of soma. Since

the gods needed their service, they agreed but only aer rst purifying the Asvins

with Bhaipavamāna Stotra. Following this myth, all physicians were to be puried

before they could join in a yagna. Even though a purication ritual was required

of all those participating in a yagna, the doctors were treated as a special case. See

Zysk, 1998, Chapter 2.

118

mon Era, rules of purity and pollution got codied into dharmaśāstras,

and the stigma of being "impure" kept the medical men out not only

from yagna s, but from everyday activities as well. According to the law

books, dating around the same time as Sushruta Sahitā , the bearer

who carried the corpse to the cremation ground – and by extension

anyone who came in contact with a dead body – was deemed to be pol-

luted for a period of three to ten days.44 Manusmriti, the most inu-

ential of dharmaśāstras, grouped doctors with those whose touch was

polluting, and whose "food was pus".45 e irony was that from this

time onward, "medicine was included among the Hindu sciences and

came under Brahminic religious inuence", and Atharvaveda, the book

most relevant to medicine, was given "full authority as an orthodox

treatise, alongside other sacred texts of the priestly order and its inclu-

sion served to authorize the medical tradition in the Hindu cultural and

religious milieu."46 Myths were reinterpreted and Vedic pedigrees were

invented and superimposed on an already established body of medical

knowledge, which actually contradicted many Vedic taboos (on meat

eating, for example). Evidence for this Brahminic veneer has been well

documented by historians and is now accepted by mainstream scholars

who don't have pre-existing biases.47

e question necessarily arises: why did purity and pollution ac-

quire such exceptional prominence in India? e answer is complex but

not dicult to understand: purity was the new, post-Buddhist legitima-

44 Manusmriti, 5:65. For the exact chapters and verses for other dharmasūtras and

shastras including Gautama, Baudhyāna, Āpastamba, Viu and Pāraskara Ghya

sūtra, see Zysk, 1986, p. 692.

45 "e food of a doctor is pus, the food of a woman who runs aer men is semen,

the food of a money-lender is excrement, the food of an arms-dealer is dirt."

Manusmriti, 4:220. Doctors were classied with those whose food one must not

eat: "hunters, cruel men, one who eats leovers, a woman who has just given birth

and one still within ten days of pollution due to death." Manusmriti, 4:212.

46 Zysk, 1998, p. 26.

47 As Kutumbiah (1969, p. i) says: "ere was really no Veda called Ayurveda. Its

existence is a myth. Sushruta calls it an upāga of Atharvaveda . It was raised to the

level of a Veda and appended to the Atharvaveda to give the science of medicine

the necessary sanctity and authority." e locus classic of unearthing the Hin-

duization of Ayurveda is Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya's 1977 book, Science and

Society in Ancient India.

119

Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

119

tion of Brahminic power. e Vedic religion unapologetically saw both

nature and society as engaged in a perpetual struggle for existence in

which the strong devour the weak: "those that do not move are food

for those who move, those that have no fangs are food for those with

fangs… and cowards are the food of the brave."48 Dominance, not pu-

rity, was their priority.

However, this civilization that openly celebrated might-is-right,

was facing multiple challenges by the beginning of the Common Era:

the ecacy of rituals was beginning to be questioned, heterodox seek-

ers (sramanas) who no longer believed in the Vedas were growing in

numbers. ese seekers included Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas, the Char-

vakas – and also physicians and healers. In response to these challenges

the priestly caste began the slow process of co-opting or Hinduizing

the ideals of ahisā and vegetarianism which were rst articulated by

the world-renouncers as a way to break the chain between karma and

rebirth. It is this process through which, to quote Wendy Doniger and

Brian K. Smith,

'purity'...replaced sacricial skills as the mainstay of the priest's ideological ar-

senal. Vegetarianism and non-violence became the principal signiers of this

'purity' that jostled for power, [and became] the new yardstick for social rank-

ing in the priestly reformation of Vedism.49

Given the codication of rules of purity and pollution that were

to be followed in every aspect of everyday life from the cradle to the

funeral pyre, it was bound to create problems for the vaidyas whose

work by necessity involved contact with sick bodies. Indeed, it is a sign

of their great thirst for knowledge that Indian surgeons did not give up

entirely. Scrubbing-and-seeing was too crude a method to tell us much

about human anatomy, but the fact that it was undertaken at all is a tes-

timony to the ancient surgeons' thirst for knowledge.

All available evidence suggests that it is thanks to the rise of Bud-

dhism that ancient doctors could come even this far. By now, it is well-

established that "the foundations of classical Ayurveda were being

laid at the time of early Buddhism in the Buddhist and other ascetic

48 Manusmriti, 5:29.

49 Doniger and Smith, 1991. 'Introduction' to their translation of Manusmriti, p.

xxxvi.

120

communities."50 e Vedic-age doctors, shunned and denigrated by the

priestly class, found refuge in the heterodox communities of wandering

ascetics – the śramaas – who had ceased to believe in the Vedas and

were searching for a new path to liberation from the endless cycles of

birth, death, and rebirth. One particular śramaic group, the Buddhists,

not only emphasized empirical knowledge, but also made medical care

a central part of their monastic life. e rst hospitals in India, for ex-

ample, were established in Buddhist monasteries. Initially, they were

meant to care for monks who had no family to look aer them. Later,

medical care was extended to the lay public as well.51

Evidence strongly suggests that Sushruta's method of dissection of

human bodies has Buddhist origins. For one, it was a part of Buddhist

ascetic practices to contemplate upon decaying bodies to understand

the impermanence of the world. Dīghanikāya, for example, instructs

monks to "reect upon a putrefying body, dead from one to three days,

becoming bloated and decaying, being devoured by animals, until its

bones became bleached and turned to powder."52 Secondly, Buddhists

had a custom of disposing the dead body by immersing it into ow-

ing waterbodies. is practice is attested to both by the Chinese Bud-

dhist pilgrim Hsuan-tsang (early 7th century) and by Alberuni (11th

century).53 It is entirely possible (and likely) that some śramaa physi-

cians combined this contemplative discipline with an interest in medi-

cal knowledge, leading to the method described in Sushruta Sahitā.

50 Wujastyk, in Flood, p. 397. e Buddhist inuence is accepted by M.S. Valiathan,

the doyen of Ayurveda. "In the een centuries which intervened between Athar -

vaveda and Caraka Sahitā, the stupendous event that transformed India was

the advent of Buddhism. It overturned many old beliefs, eaced ancient customs,

and subverted social institutions, revolutionized philosophy and enthroned a new

species of compassion and brotherhood… Ayurvedic concepts and procedures

ourished in Buddhist India, and Buddhists became their foremost exponents.

e dominance of Buddhist ideas led to the erosion of Vedic charms and rituals

in the management of illness, which became increasingly based on empiricism."

(2013, pp. 5-6).

51 See Zysk's 1998 pioneering work.

52 Cited from Zysk, 1998, p. 35.

53 Zysk, 1998, p. 36.

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Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine c

121

8. e "Ayurvedic Anatomical Man"

Fast forward about a thousand years (give or take a century or two) to

the 16th century. What do we nd? We nd the beginnings of the Scien-

tic Revolution in Europe, while India is in a deep sleep.

Let us rst look at India. e prime exhibit is the "Wellcome Ayur-

vedic Anatomical Man" (Plate 4). It is a work in ink and watercolor,

about 2 by 1.5 feet in size, depicting the inside of the human body. is

painting is literally one of a kind, as ayurvedic texts are not illustrated,

as compared to medical texts from pre-modern China, Japan and Eu-

rope. According to Dominik Wujastyk, who has studied this painting

in great detail:

e Ayurvedic Man is an image painted no earlier than 1700, on which have

been written extracts from the classic ayurvedic work called Bhāvaprakāśa (.

ca. 1650-1690). e extracts are taken from chapter 3 of the work that deals

with anatomy and embryology.54

anks to Wujastyk's research, we know that the Ayurvedic Man

is basically a Nepalese-style diagram of a man, created sometime in the

18th century, with annotations from a 17th century Ayurvedic text called

Bhāvaprakāśa, written by Bhava Mishra, son of Latakana, probably

settled in Varanasi, where he was a renowned physician with 400 stu-

dents.55 We know nothing about who commissioned the painting, who

the artist was, or who copied the text from Bhāvaprakāśa that accompa-

nies the picture. All one can say with any degree of condence is that it

is a co-production between "a rich, perhaps royal patron who initiates

the project; a physician who is also a scholar of Sanskrit and Ayurveda;

one or more painters of the Citrakāra community, and nally a calligra-

pher or scribe." Wujastyk infers from his detailed, frame-by-frame and

54 Wujastyk, 2008, p. 209. e Wellcome library in London bought this painting in

1986 from an art dealer who specialized in Nepalese artifacts.

55 According to Wujastyk, 2008, p. 206, Bhāvaprakāśa "established itself as one of the

more important Sanskrit medical texts ever written. Manuscript copies are abun-

dant … printed editions began to appear from 1855, especially from presses in

Bombay and Calcutta. e editions were oen accompanied with Hindi, Bengali

and Gujarati translations. At least sixteen editions were printed between 1855 and

1998…. is work has remained inuential right up to the present time, when it

forms part of the standard degree syllabus in Ayurvedic colleges across India." p.

206.

122

word-by-word analysis that "the scholar was not a great expert in San-

skrit texts, and the scribe was apparently ignorant of Sanskrit. Between

them, they produced texts that are riddled with errors."56

What does the piece and its annotations tell us about the state of

anatomical knowledge in medieval India?

e answer in one word: stagnation.

e 16th century text used for annotations tells us nothing that Sush-

ruta and Caraka would not have known in their time, at least a thousand

years earlier. Take for example, what it says about the heart. Exactly

what Sushruta Sahitā said in the early centuries of the Common Era,

namely, that the "heart is similar to a lotus, facing downwards. On wak-

ing up, it blooms, on sleeping, it closes up. e heart is the resting place

for the soul. It is the supreme location of consciousness." Lungs? ey

are as mysterious to the 16th century physician as they were in Sush-

ruta's time. e le and the right lung have dierent names and "neither

is involved in breathing". Kidneys? Well, they come from the "essence

of fat and blood. ey are said to provide nourishment for the fat in the

belly." So on and so forth.57

Meanwhile, a revolution was brewing in Europe. In the year 1543

– around the same time when Bhava Mishra was writing his book in

Varanasi – two books were published that would transform our knowl-

edge of the heavens above and life here on earth.58

Nicholas Copernicus, a devout Catholic who managed a Cathedral

in Poland, wrote his De Revolutionibus Orbiusm Coelestium (or "e

Revolutions of Celestial Spheres"), in which he replaced the earth with

the sun as the center of the universe, overthrowing at least two thou-

sand years of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy. Andreas Vesalius, a

medical doctor and professor at the University of Padua in Italy, came

out with his magnicently illustrated De Humani Corporis Fabrica (or

"the Fabric of the Human Body"), correcting many errors of anatomical

knowledge that began in Alexandria and culminated in Galen.

56 Wujastyk, 2008, p. 208.

57 All quotations are from Wujastyk, 2008.

58 ese are among the rst generation of books that were printed, not hand-written.

123

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

De Humani Corporis Fabrica is a detailed, masterfully illustrated,

600-page book, which is a study of every bit of the human body, based

upon dissections of dead bodies which were carried out by Vesalius

himself. As the illustrations (plates 5-7) show, Vesalius minutely ob-

served every part of the body – starting from the outer layers, to the

muscles, the nervous and the arterial system, the internal organs in-

cluding lungs, kidneys, the male and female reproductive organs, down

to the bare bones of the skeleton. Whatever he exposed through dis-

section was sketched by the renowned artist, Jan Stephan van Calcar

(or Kalkar) of the Netherlands, who had studied with Titian, one of the

giants of Renaissance art in Italy. e drawings were carefully etched

onto wooden blocks and copperplates – the name of the crasman who

did the engraving remains unknown. e etchings were transported to

Basel, Switzerland, where one of the best known printers, Joannis Op-

orini, set them in print. As the illustarations (plates 5-7) show, apart

from being a milestone in medical science, the Corporis Fabrica is also

a notable example of science, art, and technology coming together.

Placing Vesalius in the larger story of the Scientic Revolution

would take us too far from the subject at hand: namely, understand-

ing the growth curve of traditional Indian medicine.59 For our purpose,

what is crucial is to understand the breakthrough that Vesalius made

in methodology, which ultimately was made possible because he was

prepared to break long-held social taboos.

Vesalius was not the rst to dissect human cadavers in the early

modern era. e Catholic Church had started allowing autopsies as far

back as the 12th century. By the end of the 13th century, professors of

medicine (notably, Mondino de Luzzi in University of Bologna in Ita-

ly), were using dissections to train medical students. ese dissections

were carried out in public, with religious and state ocials present,

59 ere is plenty of material on the period known as "medical Renaissance" which

included, apart from Vesalius, the important gures of Leonardo da Vinci and

Paracelsus. A good resource for history of medicine is Roy Porter's magisterial

Greatest Benet to Mankind. e website of the British Library oers a wonderful

presentation and explanation of Vesalius's great work in a "virtual book" format,

available at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/vesalius/accessible/introduction.

html

124

along with medical students and members of the general public. e

unclaimed bodies of those dying in hospitals and the bodies of executed

prisoners were used. As is also well documented, Leonardo da Vinci

dissected and drew as many as 30 bodies, including one of a pregnant

woman. As he did not have a license from the Church to do this, he was

forced to work in secrecy (see plate 8).60

Vesalius' genius lay in a methodological innovation that would

change medical science forever. Before Vesalius, standard procedure

was that the learned professor would sit on a raised podium, read from

the works of Galen, the second century Roman surgeon, which had

been rst translated from Greek into Arabic and later into Latin. Down

below him, a lowly surgeon-barber would do the actual cutting and a

tutor would point out the organs that the professor was reading about.

e result was that even though bodies were being observed, they were

being seen through Galen's book, to the point that what the students

"saw" was not actually there.

Vesalius's revolutionary step was simply this: he came down from

the podium, took the knife from the barber, and did the messy work

of cutting open the body himself. Initially, he too saw what Galen had

written – so powerful is the pull of a paradigm – but gradually, he began

to see errors in Galen's anatomy, which he had derived from dissections

of apes and other animals, not of human beings. Vesalius' innovation

changed medicine forever: before Vesalius, medical learning took place

through a book; aer Vesalius, medical learning took place through the

body.61

Sociologically speaking, this was unprecedented. Latin-knowing,

University trained professors never dirtied their hands; that was le to

the lowly surgeons who had the status of barbers. Because he was able

60 Da Vinci was assisting a doctor who had the permission from the Church. e

doctor passed away while the work was still going on. Da Vinci continued to dis-

sect and draw in secrecy. Toby Hu (2011) provides a good description of history

of human dissections in a cross cultural context, including medicine in Islamic

lands and in China.

61 I am grateful to Dr. Charleen Moore from the University of Texas Health Science

Center for this formulation. It is taken from the lecture she delivered in December

2012 at IISER-Mohali titled "Teaching from the Body or from the Book: Vesalius

versus the Establishment".

125

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

to bring the theoretical knowledge he had together with what he was

observing, Vesalius was able to catch the errors of his predecessors, and

in the process revolutionize the study of anatomy. is conrms what is

known as "Zilsel's thesis" in history of science. is thesis, put forward

by Edgar Zilsel, a socialist philosopher of science who was forced to

ee his native Vienna for the United States under the Nazis, argues that

the Scientic Revolution in Europe resulted from the lowering of social

barriers between crasmen and scholars.62

In light of this comparative history, one can condently say that

the cause of the dierence between the growth trajectories of natural

sciences in Europe and India was primarily sociological. In early mod-

ern Europe, the barriers between scholars and crasmen were breached

from both ends; the more literate amongst the crasmen began to write

in vernacular for their own guild members (and thanks to the printing

press, they could do that with relative ease), while the university and

seminary educated scholars began to take an interest in the stock of

knowledge accumulated by the crasmen.

In contrast, the lowering of the barrier between scholar and cras-

man never happened in India – and it still hasn't to any signicant

extent. It was outside the realm of possibility that a learned, Sanskrit

speaking Vaidya – take the above cited Bhava Mishra for example, who

was probably a contemporary of Vesalius – would do what Vesalius did

without losing his caste, being excommunicated, and having to under-

take many rituals of atonement and purication.

Given what we know now, we can only conclude that the ancient

Indians' obsession with pollution and purity killed o the spirit of em-

pirical, evidence-based investigation of the natural world.

9. Conclusions

We do have lessons to learn from our ancient heritage. But these lessons

don't have anything to do with what we actually knew, or how we went

62 See Zilsel (2000) for Edgar Zilsel's historic paper written in 1942. Zilsel's thesis has

played an inuential role in the history of science. It inspired Joseph Needham's

classic history of science in China. It has inspired a host of recent books, including

Cliord Conner's A Peoples History of Science.

126

about knowing what we knew. e real lesson of the history of medicine

in India is negative; it tells us what stied the development of medical

and other empirical sciences in India. e history of medicine (indeed,

history of all natural sciences in India) is less of a source of inspiration

than a cautionary tale regarding the evils of social hierarchy legitimized

by superstitions.

We cannot "regain" the "capabilities" which we never had to begin

with. Yet, history of medicine – the real thing, not the fake one manu-

factured from myth and legend – is worth studying, for it can teach us

what not to do if we are really serious about building real capabilities in

medicine and science in general.

127

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

Cha pt er 4

Yoga Scientized

How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sū tra

ose who have one foot in the scientic and the other in the religious domain risk

losing their foothold in both. Wouter Hanegraa.

1. Introduction

Just over 120 years ago, on September 19, 1893 to be precise, Swami

Vivekananda stood before the World Parliament of Religions in Chica-

go.1 In his much-celebrated Chicago address, he declared Hinduism to

be a religion that is fully validated by modern science: "what the Hindu

has cherished in his bosom for ages", to use his words, "is going to be

taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest

conclusions of science". "Modern science is but an echo of the spiritual

ights of Vedanta philosophy", he declared.2

Aer Chicago, Vivekananda spent time in and around New York

where he gave a series of lectures on Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra. ese lec-

tures, along with Vivekananda's translation and commentary on the

1 e year 2013 marked the 120th anniversary of Vivekananda's famous Chicago

address and the 150th anniversary of his birth. By sheer chance, a much shorter

version of this chapter was read at a conference on modern yoga at the University

of Vienna on September 20, 2013, missing the 120th anniversary by a day.

2 Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, the Mayavati edition in 8 volumes

(Henceforth CW), vol. 1, p. 15. Interestingly, Vivekananda was not the only Asian

invoking science at Chicago. Equally eloquent were Anagarika Dharmapala from

Sri Lanka and Soen Shaku from Japan who declared Buddhism to be the most

scientic of all religions. See McMahan (2010).

128

original text were put together as a book titled Raja Yoga. Published in

1896, Raja Yoga introduced yoga philosophy to Americans, and proved

to be hugely popular. e yoga of Raja Yoga is not the yoga of asana s, or

bodily postures, for which the Swami had nothing but disdain.3 Rather,

by yoga Vivekananda meant the yoga of samadhi , the meditational yoga

taught by Patanjali, circa rst century of the Common Era.

In this book, Vivekananda extended the rhetoric of science to yogic

meditation. In his Chicago address, Vivekananda had argued that the

religion of the Hindus is "scientic" as it does not accept any dogmas

on faith, but accepts only what can be veried by experience – which is

the hallmark of empiricism. "e Hindu religion", Vivekananda had de-

clared, "does not …believe in a certain doctrine or dogma…" and "the

Hindu does not live upon words and theories", but only accepts what he

can "directly see" for himself:

If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, the Hindu must

come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there

is an all merciful universal Soul, he must go to Him direct. He must see Him

and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof that a Hindu sage gives

about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen God." (C W, vol.

1, p. 13, emphases added).

It is through yoga that "the Hindu" comes face-to-face with the

Universal Soul. "e science of Raja Yoga", he told his disciples, "pro-

poses to put before humanity a practical and scientically worked out

method" which will allow everyone to directly see "the ever-lasting soul

within" (CW, vol. 1, p. 128). For Vivekananda, then, Hinduism is a ra-

tional religion, a religion of science, and yoga is its scientic method, its

method of verication.

2. Scientism and Hindu nationalism

If his claims of super-sensuous, yogic "seeing" were limited to spiritual

enlightenment – some form of "scientic religion", or "rational mysti-

cism" that does not require a belief in a supernatural God – there would

be no need for this chapter. But Vivekananda is making a much bigger

3 Haha yoga can make you healthy and live long, but "[T]hat is all… so if a man

lives long, he is only a healthy animal" because this yoga "does not lead to much

spiritual growth." (CW, vol. 1, p. 138).

129

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

claim which boils down to this: Yoga is scientic in a more robust sense

of providing empirically veriable knowledge and control of the material

world through access to the spiritual world that it provides. When mysti-

cism steps into the domain of natural science in such an overt manner,

it is practically begging to be challenged – and this chapter intends to

oblige.

Vivekananda opened the door to a form of scientism which has

served Hindu supremacist ends from the day it was enunciated. Every

exponent of yoga aer Vivekananda – from the erudite philosopher-

statesman, S. Radhakrishnan to yoga gurus like Parmahansa Yoga-

nanda of Self-Realization Fellowship, Swami Sivananda of Divine Life

Society, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of TM (Transcendental Meditation)

and his disciple, Deepak Chopra – has indulged in copious amounts

of science-talk to lend a sheen of authority to their exposition of yoga

philosophy and practice. Yogic meditation, aer Vivekananda, has be-

come a matter of controlling and manipulating the "prāa " or the "vital

energy" of the cosmos – a form of "energy" that is simultaneously a

"spiritual" emanation of the divine, and a physical entity that obeys the

laws of physics. Even though every eort of modern physics and biol-

ogy has failed to detect this divine, self-aware "energy", Vivekananda's

pairing of spirit with energy, and Hinduism with modern science, has

acquired a life of its own.

It is fair to say that scientism – understood here as "adopting the

manners, the trappings, the technical terminology of the sciences, irre-

spective of their real usefulness"4 – has become the dominant episteme

of modern yoga and indeed, of contemporary Hinduism itself. It has

become a part of the common sense of the educated, upwardly mobile

segments of Indian society that there is "no conict" between science

and Hindu beliefs about the natural world, soul, evolution etc., and that

modern science has only rearmed what their Vedic ancestors already

knew. As Agehananda Bharati, the great Austria-born Hindu monk and

anthropologist put it, the mark of the Hindu modern is to argue that "'X

= scientic' – and hence by implication 'modern', where X can be any

trait linked to the Indian tradition."5

4 Susan Haack, 2009.

5 Bharati, 1970, p. 273.

130

ere is a need to deconstruct this illusion of harmony between

any and all "Xs linked with the Indian tradition" with whatever happens

to be the consensus theory in modern science at any given time because

it distorts both: It robs the X of its spiritual-cultural meaning, while

robbing modern science of its distinctive methodology and worldview.

While this illusion may boost our national pride, it can only create a

culture that lacks any core beliefs whatsoever. If we continue down this

path, we will neither retain our distinctive spiritual beliefs, nor develop

habits of critical thought required for doing good science. For, to repeat

Wouter Hanegraa's wise words quoted above, "those who have one

foot in the scientic and the other in the religious domain risk losing

their foothold in both."

Any such deconstruction has to begin with a serious look at Swami

Vivekananda's corpus of writings in which he turns modern science

into a mere "echo" of Vedanta. e Swami is central, for he pioneered

this genre of scientism in modern India. He is also central as he has

been appropriated as their icon by the Sangh Parivar.

e association of the Sangh Parivar with Vivekananda and Ram-

akrishna Mission did not begin with candidate Narendra Modi dress-

ing and posing like the "other Narendra." 6 It is well known that Modi

himself and other leaders of RSS including Guru Golwalker had wanted

to become monks in the Rama Krishna Mission, but found their true

calling in the RSS.7 At a time when Swami's words are quoted as their

6 e following from India Today (Jan 12, 2012) deserves an extended quotation:

"As part of the BJP's election strategy, party members have found a novel method

to promote Narendra Modi as a champion of saron power. On Jan. 12, a ver-

nacular daily carried a quarter page advertisement – issued by one of the district

presidents – which sought to draw a parallel between Modi and his namesake

Swami Vivekananda whose real name was Narendra Dutta. It featured both of

their pictures side by side, with Modi sporting attire similar to Vivekananda's – a

saron turban with a shawl. A message alongside the images, with Modi mirroring

Vivekananda's posture read: 'it is a river of saron color, of which Narendra (Vi-

vekananda) is on one bank and Narendra (Modi) is on the other. Let us all soak in

the great ow of nationalism and commitment to nation building owing between

these two banks.'"

7 As a young man, Narendra Modi wanted to become a monk in the Rama Krishna

Mission but was advised that his calling lay in politics. See http://timesondia.

indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Modi-wanted-to-be-Ramakrishna-monk-rejected-

131

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

guiding light by educationists, policy makers and even Supreme Court

judges, it becomes imperative to read Vivekananda carefully.8

3. Questions before us

In this chapter, I want to take a closer look at the hermeneutics of Vive-

kananda's scientized yoga: How is the language of specic scientic

theories of physics and biology appropriated? How is yogic meditation

made to appear as "just like" scientic empiricism, but only better? How

are the paranormal yogic siddhis (levitation, remote seeing, entering

someone else's body, for instance) defended while claiming "no con-

ict" between yoga and established principles of physics and biology?

How is this alchemy of meaning made convincing enough for the edu-

cated lay audiences in the modern world?

I will examine these questions by a careful reading of Swami Vive-

kananda's Raja Yoga – the founding text of modern yoga. I will argue

that Raja Yoga is made up of layers-upon-layers of "resemblance think-

ing", a style of thinking which is recognized in philosophy of science as

a major source of pseudo science. I will shortly clarify what exactly I

mean by resemblance thinking. For now, we can characterise it as a style

of thinking through analogies or correspondences of a special kind.

is style of thinking is deeply entrenched in the Vedic tradition (as

indeed, it was in the ancient and medieval cosmologies in the Christian

West, before the Scientic Revolution starting in the 16th century utterly

discredited it.)

I will argue that Raja Yoga oers us a complex, multi-layered tap-

estry woven out of resemblance thinking. What we nd in Raja Yoga

thrice/articleshow/19468165.cms. For a brief history of the long-standing rela-

tions between the RSS and Vivekananda and R. K. Mission, see Pralay Kanungo,

2013, and also Jyotirmaya Sharma, 2007.

8 See http://dharmalaw.blogspot.in/2010/01/impact-of-swami-vivekananda-on.

html for a summary of Supreme Court judgements which quote Swami Vive-

kananda. For a look at the inuence of a think-tank associated with Vivekananda

Kendra, see http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/in-the-right-

place-114060601203_1.html. For a overview of what the nation's vice-chancellors

think of Vivekananda's place in education, see http://samvada.org/2013/news/

full-report-national-conference-of-vice-chancellors-by-swami-vivekananda-

150-samiti-in-delhi/

132

are the ancient correspondences (or bandhus) of Vedic provenance

which posit resemblances between the microcosm and the macrocosm,

wrapped up in modern bandhu s that Vivekananda invents between the

Vedic bandhus and modern science. In other words, Vivekananda oers

us the old occult worldview of Yoga Sūtras dressed up in fancy clothes of

science. He accepts and even celebrates the magical associations estab-

lished through yogic practices, but simply overlays upon them a vocab-

ulary of mechanical cause-and-eect derived from Newtonian physics.

He accomplishes this hybridization of yoga and science by drawing

analogies and resemblances between the two – a method which has a

long and unchallenged lineage in all of orthodox Hindu schools of phi-

losophy.

Here is a thematic map of how this thesis will be argued:

First, I will read Vivekananda's scientization of yoga through in-

sights emerging from cognitive science that explain how resemblance-

thinking generates pseudo science. e two cognitive scientists whose

work I will refer to are: Paul agard, a well-respected computational

philosopher of science from Canada, and Daniel Kahneman, a psychol-

ogist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2010.

Secondly, I will place Raja Yoga in the conuence of eosophy

and other spiritualist movements that were popular in the cultic milieu

of the 19th century United States. I will suggest that modern Hinduism

is as much "eosophized", as it is "Semiticized", as has been argued

by Romila apar and others.9 ere is sucient historical evidence to

show that the inspiration for "syndication" or consolidation of Hindu-

ism under one Bible-like book (the Gita), one Vatican-like mandir (the

Ram-mandir in Ayodhya), claims of historicity of Krishna and Rama,

concern with social welfare activities, does come from monotheistic

faiths, especially Christianity. But the actual method or style of reasoning

used to re-interpret the orthodox Hindu worldview – the "neo" in neo-

Vedanta and neo-Yoga – bears all the hallmarks of eosophy.10 One

9 apar, 1991, p. 159.

10 e Oxford English Dictionary denes "theosophy" as "any of a number of phi-

losophies maintaining that a knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual

ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations [with the divine]", http://

www.oxforddictionaries.com/denition/english/theosophy . We will, however,

133

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

tell-tale sign of eosophization is the almost obsessive concern with

"harmonization" of ancient cosmology of Hinduism with Darwinian

evolution and with scientic laws of physics as applied to energy. As we

will see, not only does Vivekananda share the eosophists' impulse to

scientize the Yoga Sūtras, he ends up using similar arguments and simi-

lar analogies as one nds in the eosophical literature of his times.11

Finally, I will argue that the neo-Hindu obsession to connect every

new idea – including (or especially?) modern science – to "the Vedas"

is itself Vedic in inspiration. Holding "the Vedas", broadly dened, as the

archetype of all valid knowledge to which all post-Vedic, non-Vedic, or

indeed, non-Indic truth-claims must be reconciled, has long served as

a "strategy for orthodoxy", to use Brian Smith's words.12 Indeed, Vive-

kananda's writings are a perfect example of this "strategy for ortho-

doxy". I will conclude with some reections on the dangers of the kind

of scientism that Vivekananda made fashionable in India.

4. Postmodernist "cyborgs"

Others before me – most notably Joseph Alter, Brian Hatcher, Anan-

tanand Rambachan, and McKenzie Brown – have noticed the streak

of scientism that runs through the writings of Vivekananda and other

pioneers of modern yoga. But many of these scholars tend to treat the

science-talk of modern yoga with a postmodernist indulgence:13 It is

not the truth-content or the evidential basis, but the politics of Ori-

entalism that they have largely concentrated upon, which follows logi-

use theosophy with a capital "T", referring to the doctrines of the eosophical

Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. ough it

was born in the New York City, the eosophical Society set up its headquarters in

Adyar, Madras (now Chennai) in the early 1880s.

11 e inuence of eosophical Society on the intellectual milieu of the19th c.

Hindu Renaissance has not received the attention it deserves. Kathryn Tidrick

(2006) has made an important beginning by looking at the inuence of eosophy

and esoteric Christianity on Gandhi. De Michelis (2004) has taken the lead in

exploring the inuence of Western esotericism on Vivekananda.

12 Brian Smith, 1998, p. 23.

13 Rambachan and Brown are exceptions. Rambachan is troubled by Vivekananda's

parallelism between spiritual knowledge and science, while Brown is skeptical of

scientism.

134

cally from their stance towards objectivity, truth and evidence as be-

ing socially constructed and therefore relative to the social context.14

For the post-ist critics, the mere fact that Indian thinkers at the cusp

of India's freedom turned to modern "Western science to make sense

of their own cultural inheritance is enough to paint them as having ac-

cepted the colonizer's mental categories, thereby carrying on the project

of colonialism-without-colonizers. But what they fail to see is that the

thinkers of the Indian Renaissance were appropriating so-called "West-

ern" science to bolster their own heritage, despite serious and obvious

contradictions. e vitalist worldview that animates Vedanta and yoga,

to take just one example of the contradictions, was under a serious chal-

lenge in "Western" science at the close of the 19th century (and stands

totally discredited today).15 And yet, Vivekananda and those following

him, accepted it unquestioningly, and tried to bolster it using spurious

arguments based on nothing but analogies. Just because Indian think-

ers turned to "Western" science does not make them colonized by the

West: it is how they understood science and the use they made of it that

matters.

It is not just the postmodernist le has shown undue indulgence

toward neo-Hindu eclecticism, the traditional secular le, too, has

shown undue eagerness to count Swami Vivekananda as one of their

own. For once, I agree with Arun Shourie who challenged the le's new-

found adoration for the Swami in the following words, written in 1993:

e central premise of Swami Vivekananda's entire life was that the essence of

India lay in religion; that the religion of our people was the Hindu dharma; that

this was not just a lever with which India was to be reawakened, the truths that

the Hindu seers had uncovered were the goals to which that reawakened India

14 In Nanda (2004), I have taken an oppositional stance toward social construction

of scientic knowledge. I was associated with Alan Sokal and other scientists and

philosophers of science who opposed the fashionable doctrines of social con-

structivism in the so-called "Science Wars" that consumed the American academy

through the late 1990s.

15 e Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy denes vitalism as a doctrine that "liv-

ing organisms are fundamentally dierent from non-living entities because they

contain some non-physical element or are governed by dierent principles than

inanimate things." Vitalism has zero credibility among professional biologists to-

day, although it continues to live a charmed life in all kinds of New Age techniques

of "pranic healing," "chi", "therapeutic touch," "energy medicine" etc.

135

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

had to be turned, and these truths were that pearl of inestimable value which it

was India's mission to give to the rest of the world. Which red-blooded Com-

munist or secularist will own up to this credo?16

We will not pursue the traditional le's readings of the Swami any

further, as this chapter is mostly about the eclectic style of hybridiz-

ing science and Hinduism that began with Vivekananda and continues

be the dominant style of Hindu nationalist writings on science. In the

context of this essay, the post-modernist legitimation of hybridity is of

greater concern than any ham-handed attempts to appropriate Vive-

kananda for a secular-progressive agenda. A couple of examples will

clarify what I mean by post-modernist legitimation of hybridity.

In his well-known book Yoga in Modern India, Joseph Alter de-

scribes at great length the work of Swami Sivananda and Swami Kuva-

layananda, key gures in modernizing the yoga tradition in the rst half

of the 20th century. He describes how they created equivalences between

yogic science as a technique for realizing ultimate Truth, and modern

science as a precise mode of experimentation to arrive at provisional

but warranted truths. But Alter simply celebrates this conation as a

"cyborg", a symbol of postcolonial hybridity that denies the standard

dualities between, "nature and culture, organic and inorganic, animal

and machine and [last but not the least] truth and ction, science and

pseudo science".17 Likewise, Brian Hatcher, who has written an entire

book on the eclecticism of modern Hinduism, ends up justifying Vive-

kananda's propensity to nd "a likeness of totally unlike things", as the

"right of a colonized people to make their own rules as they go along"

and to "t the facts" to the needs of creating a new national identity.

In Hatcher's narrative, Vivekananda emerges as a master bricoleur who

heroically and fearlessly took whatever he needed, from wherever he

could get it, to build a new "homely home" for Hinduism that prac-

tically radiated science, hard-nosed empiricism, reason, evolutionary

progress, a muscular manliness – in short, all the values that the West

celebrated and found lacking in the East.18

16 Arun Shourie,'Myths about the Swami', available at http://arunshourie.bharatvani.

org/articles/19930131.htm

17 Alter, 2004, p. 41.

18 Hatcher, 1999, p. 157 and passim.

136

Such postcolonial defenses accept the fashionable social construc-

tivist position that all standards of rationality are internal to cultures/

paradigms, and therefore there are no neutral criteria for demarcating

science from pseudo science: all such boundary-work ultimately de-

pends upon socio-political interests and cultural assumptions of those

drawing the line.19 e standard narrative goes as follows: e colonial

powers declared the local knowledge of the colonized peoples as non-

scientic and mythic in order to destroy their knowledge-traditions –

and thereby destroy their self-respect, self-condence and creativity.

Now, it is the turn of postcolonial subjects to turn the tables, disregard

the science-non-science boundary – which was always political any-

ways – and create hybrid worldviews which enable them to live in the

modern world at their own terms.

With due respect, scholars who have looked at modern yoga

through the lens of post-marked theories have cherry-picked what they

want from wider debates in philosophy of science. Social constructiv-

ism is by no means the last word on the nature of science: on the contra-

ry, starting with Alan Sokal's well-known hoax, social constructivism

has come under serious critique.20 e search for a principled, but more

19 Postmodernism goes much beyond the traditional historicist claim that all inquiry

is inuenced by the values and interests of the inquirer. What is distinctive about

the postmodernist/social constructivist turn – and why it is important to reject

it – is the claim that the very criteria demarcating truth and falsity, science from

myth or ideology, empirically veried facts from superstition are constructed dif-

ferently by dierent cultures and there is no rational reason for choosing one over

the other. e only reason science is deemed universal and objective is that it is

backed by the power of the West over the Rest. For a clear and concise statement

of what is wrong with postmodernism, see the essay Paul Boghossian wrote in the

immediate aermath of the "Sokal Aair" in 1996. is essay is re-reproduced

in Noretta Koertge's A House Built on Sand, an anthology of essays in support of

Sokal's demonstration that the postmodern turn in understanding science is an

emperor with no clothes on.

20 In its 1996 Spring/Summer issue, the journal Social Text published a paper by

Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University. Titled 'Transgressing

the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity',

this essay, close to eighty pages in length, went about deriding the "Enlightenment

biases" of "'objective' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the

so-called 'scientic method'" and called for a new "emancipatory" mathematics

that would "liberate" physics and society from the hegemony of patriarchal, capi-

talist, Western "objective" science. is essay, which is actually a hilarious parody

137

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

nuanced line of demarcation between objective science and pseudo sci-

ence than the one proposed by Karl Popper has continued. One such

nuanced prole of pseudo science comes from Paul agard, to which

I turn next.

5. e conceptual prole of pseudo science

Let me very quickly dene my terms:

By science I mean: those bodies of knowledge that we take to be

most solidly grounded in evidence, critical experimentation and obser-

vation, and rigorous reasoning. To paraphrase Alan Sokal, the two most

notable features of scientic methodology are its critical spirit – that

is, a commitment to put your beliefs to stringent tests and revising or

discarding those ideas that fail the test; and falliblism, that is, the under-

standing that all our knowledge is open to revision in the light of better

evidence.21

My understanding of scientism comes closest to Olav Hammer's

denition: Scientism is "an active positioning of one's own claims in

relation to the manifestations of any of the academic scientic disci-

plines, including … the use of scientic terminology, technical devices,

references to theories, mathematical calculations etc… without, how-

ever, actually subjecting your claims to the methods approved within

the scientic community."22 For example, the 1998 "Ig Nobel" prize

winner, Deepak Chopra's "spiritual laws of success" by themselves are

not scientistic, but they become scientistic when they are "actively posi-

tioned" in terms of quantum physics.23 Creation stories from the Vedas

of the postmodern style of using big words, vague parallels and non-sequiturs,

was accepted for publication in a special issue of Social Text that was devoted to

the defense of a postmodern turn in science studies. Aer it was published, Sokal

revealed to the journal Lingua Franca that his essay was a hoax which he had

concocted to see "would a leading journal of cultural studies publish an article

liberally salted with nonsense if a. it sounded good, and b. it attered the editors'

ideological preconception?"

21 Sokal, 2006, p. 287.

22 Hammer 2004, p. 206.

23 e 1998 "Ig Nobel" prize in physics was awarded to "Deepak Chopra of e

Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation

of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happi-

138

are creation stories, but they become "Vedic creationism" or "scientic

creationism" when geological evidence or fossil records are interpreted

as if they support these stories.24

Pseudo science is simply fake science. It is a "science" that dares

not speak its own name. Just as no adherent of a religious doctrine calls

himself a "heretic", no one ever identies himself or herself as a "pseu-

do-scientist".25 What is distinctive about the claims which are labelled

"pseudo science" is that it "tries to gain legitimacy by wearing the trap-

pings of science, but fails to abide by the rigorous methodology and

standards of evidence that demarcate true science. Although pseudo

science is designed to have the appearance of being scientic, it lacks

any of the substance of science."26

e connection between scientism and pseudo science is clear:

scientism – as purposive, active positioning of ones claims in the light of

modern science – is how pseudo science is generated. One great advan-

tage of this understanding of scientism is that rather than look for es-

sential features that will, once and for all, demarcate properly scientic

claim from non-scientic or pseudo-scientic claim, it allows for the

attitude, agency and political purposes. It is the "active positioning" by

historically-located agents that make a claim appear scientic, or not.27

ness." According to Wikipedia, "Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes

and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in

scientic research. e stated aim of the prizes is to "honor achievements that rst

make people laugh, and then make them think". e same year Chopra was "hon-

ored", the Ig Nobel for Peace went to " Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of

India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peace-

ful explosions of atomic bombs."

24 For a "Vedic alternative to Darwin's eory" of evolution, see Michael Cremo,

2003. e book is a compendium of paranormal beliefs derived from Hinduism

and presented as a theory of evolution. Cremo is a member of ISKCON and writes

on matters of natural sciences from a Krishna Consciousness perspective.

25 To quote Michael Gordin (2012, p.1): "ere is no person who wakes up in the

morning and thinks to himself, 'I'll just head to my pseudolaboratory, do some

pseudoexperiments to try to conrm my pseudotheories with pseudofacts.' As is

surely obvious, pseudo science is a term of abuse, an epithet attached to certain

points of view to discredit these ideas."

26 Quoted here from Rational Wiki at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pseudoscience.

27 For a recent survey of non-essentialist and contextualist attempts at demarcating

science proper from pseudo science, see Martin Mahner, 2007.

139

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

At this point, let me introduce the work of Paul agard, who is

widely regarded as a pioneer in what is called computational philoso-

phy of science and who has written extensively on the role of analogical

thinking in science. In their book titled Mental Leaps, agard (and

his co-author Holyoak) argue that nding analogies, parallels or resem-

blances – what they call "mental leaps" – between something that is

already known and familiar to us (the source domain), to something

that is new, unfamiliar and puzzling (the target domain) is a fundamen-

tal mechanism for making sense of the new and the unknown. Human

beings and other higher mammals seem wired for analogical thinking.

ere are no hard-and-fast rules of logical deduction that dictate these

mental leaps, but they are not entirely haphazard either: analogies are

guided by noticing some kind of rough similarity in the actual content,

structure and/or the imagery, rhetoric and metaphoric content of two

otherwise dierent domains.

Both science and religions propose unobservable things which

make sense by analogy with things that we can observe. us, the invis-

ible, all-powerful God makes sense as the heavenly analogue of father

here on earth, and the invisible all-pervasive Brahman or Conscious-

ness makes sense as the salt dissolved in water which is in every particle

of the water and yet invisible to the eye. History of science, likewise, is

replete with many well-known examples of scientic discoveries start-

ing out as analogies which, "like sparks that jump across gaps",28 carry

an idea from one domain to another. Some examples: Galileo defended

Copernicus' idea that the earth moves around the Sun by comparing

the earth to the moon he observed from his telescope: if a big dense

rock like the moon can orbit around the earth, there is no reason why

the Earth couldn't move; Newton made an analogy between a planet

and a stone thrown from the earth with greater and greater force to

argue that the laws that applied to the stone can also explain the mo-

tion of planets; Benjamin Franklin explained lightening by comparing

it with electrical phenomena. My personal favorite is how Charles Dar-

win arrived at his theory of natural selection by seeing an analogy with

articial selection performed by animal breeders, and how he gured

28 Quoted here from Holyoak and agard, 1995, p. 7.

140

out the basis for natural selection by seeing a likeness between omas

Malthus's tract on human population and the struggle for existence in

nature. ese analogies, of course, played a largely heuristic role in the

discovery process: Darwin spent nearly 20 years collecting evidence to

test the analogy and to support his claim that nature can produce new

species by selecting those better adapted in the struggle for existence.

While both religion and science use analogies, scientic theories, unlike

religions, must eventually evaluate the theories inspired by analogies in

relation to observable evidence: that is the essential dierence between

science and religion.

Analogical thinking has a shadowy twin that leads not to science but

to pseudo science. agard calls it "resemblance thinking" and denes

it as "a style of thinking that infers two things are causally related from

the fact that they are similar to each other."29 is, he says, is the chief

culprit behind pseudo science.

What does this statement mean? Why is it that inferring causality

from similarity turns analogical thinking from a source of creativity in

science to a source of fake-science?

e problem of inferring causality from similarity is that it adds

many unwarranted layers of meaning and signicance to a relation-

ship based on nothing more than a surface similarity. Inferring causal -

ity from similarity means that objects or processes which look and feel

similar to each other are deemed to act upon each other, and upon the

rest of the world, in a like manner. erefore, by understanding one, you

automatically think you understand the other, and by controlling one,

you automatically get to control the other. No more laborious testing

and falsication is needed. us, the evidential basis of genuine science,

acquired through hard work, gets transferred to untested claims based

upon nothing more than an analogy.

A classic example goes as follows: gold among the metals is like

(in color and signicance) the sun among the planets, or like the heart

within the body. Because of the metaphorical similarity between the

sun and gold, wearing gold next to the heart is supposed to attract ben-

ecial energy of the sun to the heart. Or, take another example: the red-

29 agard 1988, p. 162, emphasis in the original.

141

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

dish cast of the planet Mars resembles the color of blood and that is

the reason Mars is supposed to cause bloodshed, wars and aggression

and the "pretty" Venus is associated with beauty and motherhood. Re-

semblance thinking is what makes people think that redheads are short

tempered, that those with a bad handwriting are disorderly, those with

large foreheads are smarter, those with long "lifelines" on their palms

live longer etc. Such relations are based entirely on supercial similari-

ties, rather than on any correlations based upon rigorous, double-blind

studies.

To sum up, agard does not give a necessary and sucient de-

marcation principle, but a historically located prole of pseudo science.

In his most recent writings, agard (2010) has improved upon his ear-

lier work, and oered the following proles of science and fake science:

1. Science explains using mechanisms, whereas pseudo science

lacks mechanistic explanations.

2. Science uses correlation thinking, which applies statistical

methods to nd patterns in nature, whereas pseudo science

uses dogmatic assertions, or resemblance thinking, which in-

fers that things are causally related merely because they are

similar.

3. Practitioners of science care about evaluating theories in rela-

tion to alternative ones, whereas practitioners of pseudo sci-

ence are oblivious to alternative theories.

4. Science uses simple theories that have broad explanatory pow-

er, whereas pseudo science uses theories that require many ex-

tra hypotheses for particular explanations.

5. Science progresses over time by developing new theories that

explain newly discovered facts, whereas pseudo science is

stagnant in doctrine and applications.30

e idea that similar objects exert inuence on each other assumes

"deeper" metaphysical similitude. To quote Sal Restivo who wrote criti-

cally of Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics, "the basic assumption is that if

30 agard, 2010, p. 27.

142

the imagery and metaphoric content between physics and mysticism

is similar, the conceptual content must be similar and the experience

of reality must also be similar among particle physicists and eastern

mystics."31 Supercial similarities begin to take on extra weight. First

a metaphysical equivalence is established. If two entities evoke similar

subjective experience and imagery, resemblance thinking leads one to

conclude that they must be about the same reality: thus the dance of

Shiva becomes another way to describe the result from a cloud chamber.

Once such connections are made, it is easy to see how the epistemologi-

cal status of a cloud-chamber and particle physics gets transferred to

Eastern spiritualism, or how (as we see, below), a Vivekananda can turn

a yogi in meditation into a counterpart of a scientist in a lab. is kind

of status-transfer through resemblances creates pseudo science, which

is nothing more than ideas pretending to be scientic without actually

undergoing the tests for empirical verication.

Social scientic interest in the harm "resemblance thinking" can do

was given a fresh boost recently by Daniel Kahneman's popular book,

inking Slow, inking Fast in which he recounts a well-known experi-

ment he did in the 1970s. Without going into the experimental details

which will take us too far aeld, this is what he and his co-researcher

(Amos Tversky) found:32 when people make analogies with a cultural

stereotype, they always end up making wrong guesses at probability.

Kahneman considers "representativeness heuristic" to be one of the

major sources of cognitive illusions that are found among otherwise

normal people. e term "heuristic" here stands for judgmental short-

cuts that provide quick, intuitive answers to questions that puzzle us.33

31 Restivo 1978, p. 151.

32 Amos Tversky, a psychologist, worked with Kahneman for many years. He passed

away in 1996 and the Nobel Prize for their work was awarded to Kahneman alone

in 2002. Kahneman belongs to the select group of non-economists who have won

the Nobel Prize in economics.

33 ese intuitive jumps at answers are what constitute the "thinking fast" in Kahne-

man's book inking, Fast and Slow. e fast-paced component of the process of

thinking is referred to as the System 1, while the slow, more deliberative, eort-full

component is referred to as the System 2. Kahneman's and Tversky's work stands

out for their experimental exploration of the System 1. e intuitive System 1

operates through associative thinking, based upon supercial similarities which

can provide quick answers to questions that are quite complex. But the price for

143

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

e representativeness heuristic works through resemblance thinking

pretty much as described by agard and Restivo (see above). A clear

exposition of what this heuristic involves goes as follows:

e representativeness heuristic involves a reexive tendency to assess the sim-

ilarity of objects and events along salient dimensions and to organize them on

the basis of one overarching rule: "Like goes with like." Among other things, the

representativeness heuristic reects the belief that a member of a given category

ought to resemble the category prototype and that an eect ought to resemble the

cause that produced it.34

What is the signicance of "resemblance thinking" for the task at

hand, namely, how Yoga Sūtras were re-written in the vocabulary of sci-

ence? As I show below, the seemingly scientic description of modern

yoga meets all the features of pseudo science discussed in this section:

it is steeped in resemblance thinking, its practitioners are dogmatic and

not bothered by the lack of independent evidence or with obvious con-

tradictions with accepted science; and for all its claims of being a "sci-

ence", it has made no contribution to any real science.

6. Resemblance thinking in the Western and Indic traditions

In order to fully understand how yoga got scientized, it is important

to add a historical dimension to resemblance thinking. Simply put, re-

"thinking fast" is that more oen than not, our intuitive answers are wrong and

misleading. at is why rationality, according to Kahneman, is not intelligence

that can be measured through IQ tests, but rather consists of "thinking slow", of

engaging the System 2 with the data provided by System 1.

34 Gilovich and Savitsky, 1996. e authors give many examples of how pseudo sci-

ence is generated through this style of thinking. One particularly striking example

comes from the discovery by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren of Australia that

stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium and not by stress alone. (e two were

awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine for this discovery). e medical com-

munity initially ridiculed the idea as preposterous, because the belief that stress

was the real cause of peptic ulcers was too strongly entrenched. But the stress-

ulcer connection was based upon nothing more than an intuitive association be-

tween the two: "Because the burning feeling of an ulcerated stomach was similar

to the gut-wrenching, stomach-churning feeling of extreme stress, albeit more

severe, the connection seemed natural." is is nothing but "like goes with like"

style of thinking: eects (symptoms) which feel alike are assumed to be brought

about by the same/similar/like causes. One can see how this style of thinking leads

to ideas about causation which seem correct and "scientic", but are actually false.

144

semblance thinking as described in the previous section, constituted

the dominant episteme of ancient civilizations right through the Middle

Ages upto the Early Modern era. To use Foucault's vocabulary, a chain

of "similitudes" between the heavens above and earthly aairs below

constituted the "positive unconscious of knowledge" that does not reg-

ister in the consciousness of the scientist, but is nevertheless very much

there.35

Before the Scientic Revolution that unfolded from the 16th

through the 18th century, humanity everywhere lived in a magical world

in which all that happened in the heavens above (the macrocosm), was

reected in the earthly life of humans below (the microcosm). Or to put

it simply, "as above, so below". Figuring out the hidden resemblances,

or correspondences, between the macrocosm and the microcosm was

considered the highest form of wisdom: what were the stars trying to tell

us about human aairs? How are the signs of God's meaning and pur-

pose imprinted on the shapes, sizes and textures of plants, animal and

even stones and minerals? How is the macrocosm contained in the mi-

crocosm of human body? is knowledge of correspondences was to be

found both by observing signs of similitude between above and below,

but it was to be conrmed by turning inwards, by feeling the indwelling

god in your soul. e knowledge of hidden ("occult") resemblances was

highly valued, as it allowed manipulation of the unobservable entities

and powers in the heavens by manipulating their known counterparts:

this was the source of the powers attributed to prayer, rituals, talismans,

magical incantations etc. Clearly, the correspondence relations were

supposed to work as resemblance relations as understood above: like

35 "Up to the end of the sixteenth century resemblances played a constructive role

in the knowledge of the Western culture. It was resemblances that largely guided

exegesis and interpretation of texts; it was resemblances that organized the play of

symbols; made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible and controlled

the art of representing them. e universe was folded upon itself: the earth echo-

ing the sky, faces seeing themselves reected in the stars, and plants holding in

their stems secrets that were useful to man." Michel Foucault, 1970, p. 17. To this

one can only add that similitudes constituted the main style of thinking in non-

Western cultures, especially the cultures of Asia, as well.

145

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

goes with like, similar eects had similar causes, and in controlling one

can control the other.36

inking through similitudes or correspondences between macro

and microcosm ourished in the neo-Platonic academy founded in

Florence by Cosimo De Medici in the second half of the 15h century

where Marsillo Ficino translated into Latin a newly discovered Greek

manuscript Corpus Hermeticum (supposedly), originating with semi-

divine Hermes, and dating back to the time of Moses. is was con-

sidered at that time to be the most ancient expression of "primordial

wisdom" or "Eternal Truth" that predated Christianity. is "Hermeti-

cal" or "esoteric" tradition diered from Judeo-Christian tradition in

imagining a spiritual force emanating from a divine mind to animate

the material world. is created a state of discord with the Christian

teachings which opposed any attempt to assign meanings and purposes

to material nature, as it would take away from God's omnipotence. Eso-

tericism in the West, therefore, has always existed at some tension with

the Bible, even though elements of it were absorbed into the Christian

tradition as well.37

It is in the Indic/Eastern religions where correspondence-thinking

really comes into its own. In the Vedic tradition, the correspondences

are to be established not between two, but between three planes of exist-

ence: "the macro-cosmos, or adhidevta, the sphere of gods; the meso-

cosmos or the ritual sphere, adhijajan, related to the sacrice or the yag-

na; and the micro-cosmos, adhyatama, relating to the self. … entities,

things, forces, activities … [on all three planes are supposed to] have

essential anities to related others."38 Clearly, the concern of the Vedic

thinkers was to discover the connections that bind the three spheres to

each other. e underlying assumption was that the cosmos is a web of

relationships and things that merely appear to stand alone, are actually

36 e Western esoteric tradition had four necessary features: correspondence think-

ing, vitalism (i.e., seeing nature as alive), imagination and mediation and personal

experience of transmutation (Hanegraa 1998, pp. 396-401). For similarities

between the Western esoteric tradition and Hinduism, see De Michelis 2005, pp.

27-31.

37 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2009) is a good source for history of western occult.

38 Smith 1998, pp. 46-47.

146

connected. ese connections are not visible to ordinary people, but

accessible only to those with philosophical and ritual knowledge.

Indeed, as the noted scholar of the Vedic tradition Brian Smith has

observed, nding resemblances between the three spheres constitutes

the "philosophical center around which all Vedic thought revolves" and

the surfeit of analogies between otherwise dissimilar things is not a

symptom of over-active imagination of ancient Vedic priests, but rather

the very basis of Vedic rituals.39 at correspondence-thinking is ba-

sic to Indic thought is evident from the fact that the literal meaning

of "Upanishad", is simply "connection" or "equivalence".40 Indeed, the

deepest spiritual truth of the identity of the individual atman with Brah-

man, or the World Soul was arrived at by drawing parallels between the

two: just as the human body is supposed to have a soul that is eternal,

so was the universe ensouled.41 Analogical thinking is not limited to the

orthodox Vedic texts and rituals, but continues to serve as the basis of

astrology and allied divination methods which are widely practiced in

India. Indeed, it is fair to say with Axel Michaels that "establishment of

identity by equating it with something else" has become the dominant

"identicatory habitus" of modern India which allows Indians to accept

dierent, even contradictory ideas, as "all the same".42

Brahman, the World Soul that is present as potency in every par-

ticle of the universe, serves as the metaphysical nexus of all connec-

39 Smith, p. 47. e most well-known example of analogical thinking is the opening

paragraph of the Bhadārayaka Upanishad in which the body of a sacricial

horse is analogized with the cosmos: "e head of the sacricial horse, clearly, is

the dawn – its sight is the sun, its breath the wind and its gaping mouth the re

common to all men. e body of the sacricial horse is the year – its back is the

sky, its abdomen is the intermediate region and the underbelly the earth…. When

it yawns, lightning ashes, when it shakes itself, it thunders and when it urinates,

it rains…. its neighing is speech itself." See Olivelle,1996, p. 7.

40 Olivelle, 1996, p. Iii.

41 Other examples: the 'Puruṣa-Sūkta' of g Veda where parts of the universe are

described as parts of Purua, or a giant man; and the funeral hymn addresses the

departed: "'Let thine eyes go to the sun, thy breath to the wind.' When the Vedic

sacrice is interiorized, the body itself becomes a microcosm of the universe:

the spinal cord becomes identied with Sumeru, the supposed axis mundi of the

universe, the four limbs to be four continents, head to be the world of Devas, the

two eyes to be the Sun and the Moon." Hiriyanna, 1993, p. 55.

42 Michaels, 2004, p. 7.

147

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

tions; while the Vedic ritual, or yajna, serves as the means for activating

the potencies that lie within. us unlike the Abrahamic religions in

which the divine is separate from matter, the Vedic tradition provides a

complete metaphysics to make rational sense of resemblance relations,

along with a highly developed ritual technology to manipulate the caus-

al eects of resemblances. e Vedic ritual, as is well known, gradually

got interiorized and took the form of a mystical union of the self within

with the universal soul.

7. e n de siècle America: Growth of the "Cultic Milieu"

As we know, Vivekananda grew up in the midst of a great ferment of

ideas about science, religion, philosophy, nationalism that marked the

Hindu Renaissance, especially in the second half of the 19th century

and especially in his native Bengal. We also know that he arrived in the

United States of America in 1893, 30-years-old, rst time in the West-

ern world, determined to speak up for his faith and his country, both

of which had long suered the condescension of British colonists and

missionaries. He spent four crucial years lecturing and networking in

the US.

In order to understand the kind of paradigm-dening innovations

that Vivekananda brought to Hinduism it is important to understand

his cultural context – which includes both India and the United States.

Given the objective of this essay – that is, to understand how Vive-

kananda scientized meditational yoga – his familiarity with the criss-

crossing intellectual currents in the two sites has obvious relevance.

What follows in the rest of this section (and the next) is a somewhat

unusually detailed examination of the intellectual milieu in America

(this section) and in India (the next section).43 ose readers who are

in a hurry to get to how Patanjali's sūtras were scientized can skip these

sections without losing the thread of the argument.

anks to Elizabeth de Michelis' History of Modern Yoga, it is now

well established that Vivekananda literally stepped o the boat into the

"cultic milieu" that was thriving in New York, Boston and other indus-

43 e material for these two sections is largely taken from an earlier essay of mine.

See Nanda, 2010.

148

trial cities on the Eastern seaboard which had, to use de Michelis' words,

"a proto-Woodstock feel". 44 Rapid industrialization had brought with it

ideas of progress and individualism that fuelled a revolt against Calvin-

ist ideas of sinfulness of man and the need for God's grace for salvation.

Moreover, the bloody civil war had claimed countless lives, and people

grieving for their loved ones were seeking solace in spiritualism which

promised communication with the dead. As a result, there was a ower-

ing of alternative religions including spiritualism, Swedenborgianism,45

Mesmerism, Christian Science, eosophy, mind-reading, astrology,

psychic research and other more avant garde alternatives (Transcen-

dentalism of the "Boston Brahmins" Emerson, Walt Whitman and the

Unitarians). What was common to all these movements was a belief –

originally derived from neo-Platonic and esoteric Western philosophies

and later supplemented with Hindu teachings – in a spiritual substance,

or "mind-stu" that permeated the entire cosmos, connecting the hu-

man soul with the soul of everything else. is spiritual substance was

variously understood as a magnetic uid (as in Mesmerism), as simply

Holy Spirit in Swedenborgianism and Christian Science, or "prāa "

or "energy" or "ether" as in eosophy (and eventually, also in Vive-

kananda's writings).

Out of all these new religious movements, theosophy as taught by

the eosophical Society is most relevant for a proper understanding of

44 See de Michelis for the Woodstock comparison, p. 114. Cultic milieu, as dened

by Colin Campbell in 1972, is the "cultural underground" of a society and includes

all those groups and individuals who nd the conventional belief systems of their

time and place as inadequate and unsatisfactory. As a result, they seek out beliefs

and indulge in practices that are "heterodox or deviant in relation to the dominant

cultural orthodoxies". p. 122.

45 e possible connection with Brahmo Samaj is examined in the next section. Em-

manuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a well respected scientist who worked with

the Swedish Board of Mines and did signicant work in metallurgy and mining

engineering. Hanegra (1998, p. 424) suggests that his scientic work led him to

give up on nding any signs of the divine in nature. is intellectual crisis was re-

solved by a vision of Christ which he interpreted as a divine command to explain

the spiritual meaning of the Bible to people. He devised an elaborate system of

correspondences by which he explained the natural world as a mirror that reects

the spiritual world.

149

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

the emergence of scientism in neo-Hinduism.46 e eosophical Soci-

ety's importance lies in its borrowings from Hindu doctrines, its physi-

cal presence in India and the active role it played in the Hindu Renais-

sance and the struggle for independence. But to fully understand where

eosophists were coming from, we have to get to know the 19th century

"cultic milieu" in the US.

As mentioned earlier, the late 19th century America had a Wood-

stock-like feel about it, with a variety of proto-New Age movements

thriving in the big cities, especially in the Northeast. ese movements

had broken free from the mainstream Protestant Christianity and

sought an alternative form of religious experience.

Participation in these movements was by no means a fringe phe-

nomenon. Bruce Campbell estimates that at its height around 1855, the

spiritualist movement alone claimed between one to two million adher-

ents. Given that the total population of the US at that time was about 25

46 e eosophical Society was founded in New York City in November 1875 by a

Russian émigré Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), and her American friend

and "spiritual twin" Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). "HPB" as she was sometimes

called, was a woman with a colorful past involving psychic phenomena, magical

materializations including mysterious letters from Tibetan Masters or "mahatmas"

and an intense involvement in a range of secret societies including Rosicrucian

Freemasonry in her native Russia, Masonic lodges, Sus and Oriental secret soci-

eties in the Middle East and Europe.

Aer her endless travels, HPB arrived in New York in 1873. Almost immediately,

she began work on her rst major book, e Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the

Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and eology, which appeared in print

in 1877. In the meantime, she and Olcott established the eosophical Society

with three aims: to promote brotherhood of man, to encourage a comparative

study of ancient and modern religions, philosophies and sciences, and to carry out

"scientic" investigations of unexplained laws of nature involving hidden psychic

powers immanent in matter.

e founders soon set sail for India, arriving in Bombay in February 1879. By

1882, they had established the headquarters of their society in Adyar in the state

of Madras (now Tamil Nadu), where it stands even today. Aer some initial

misunderstandings with the Indian organization that they had aliated them-

selves with – Arya Samaj founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1882)

– eosophical Society soon emerged as an all-India organization that brought the

western educated Indian elite into close contact with liberal members of the Brit-

ish community, including gures like A.P. Sinnett and Allan Octavian Hume, who

later went on to form the Indian National Congress in 1885. See Nanda, 2010.

150

million, the level of participation in spiritualism was quite signicant.47

What is more, most of these movements were a popular rather than an

elite phenomenon: they involved ordinary Americans "from 'thinking

persons' on down to the level of shopkeepers and dressmakers [in Bos-

ton] who took it for granted that 'psychic force' was a reality while the

language of mind-cure could be heard in everyday conversations."48 Ac-

cording to Stephen Prothero, "spiritualists were a diverse lot… includ-

ing women, blacks, urban and rural laborers, southerners, and Cath-

olics", who were drawn to the populist impulse of spiritualism which

"criticized the privileged knowledge of the clergy and appealed to the

natural wisdom of unlettered folk".49

e growth of the cultic milieu was part of a historical trend in

the West where, as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke points out, "esoteric

ideas attend the breakdown of settled religious orthodoxies and socio-

economic orders."50 Rapid rise in levels of industrialization and rising

levels of prosperity had brought with them new ideas of progress, free

will and ecacy of individual eort which were fuelling a revolt against

Calvinism:

…progress in science and technology fostered condence in human reason

and gave credence to belief in progress. ese developments challenged an un-

derstanding of man which emphasized sinfulness and depravity, the control of

God, the need for grace, and preoccupation with the hereaer.51

But the revolt against conventional pieties of Protestant Christian-

ity did not mean secularization. Instead there was a deep crisis of faith

aecting growing numbers of thoughtful people who were dissatised,

in equal measure, with Christian orthodoxy and the mainstream ma-

terialistic science of that era. As a result, they could neither pray to the

personal God of their Christian faith, nor accept the bleak mechanical

philosophy of Newtonian science. ose attracted to the cultic milieu

were looking for "a reasonable alternative to what they saw as the 'ir-

rational dogma' of Christianity on the one hand, and the 'dogmatic ra-

47 Bruce Campbell, 1980, p. 16.

48 de Michelis 2004, pp. 113-114).

49 Prothero, 1993, p. 199.

50 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, 2008, p. 13.

51 Campbell 1980, p. 17.

151

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

tionality' of the Enlightenment, on the other."52 It was in this context

that the alternative forms of religiosity, which would later embrace

modern interpretations of Hinduism and Buddhism, were gaining

ground. ree features of the cultic milieu in the n de siècle America

are relevant to our story.

One, the cultic milieu had high regard for Wise Men from the East.

At a time when working men from India and China were objects of

discrimination, and the country was rife with moral panic over "tide

of turbans" and the "Yellow peril", gurus and spiritual teachers found

America to be a very hospitable milieu. As an Indian immigrant, Saint

(sant) Nihal Singh, wrote in an essay that appeared in Los Angeles' Out

West in 1909:

East-Indian religious teachers and students have received better treatment than

Hindoo[sic] laborers. Of all men from India who have visited the US, the late

Swami Vivekananda stands pre-eminent. He seems to have won an instant way

into the heart of American men and women of highest intellect and culture. …

ere is a mystical charm attached to the Hindoo fortune teller. It is sucient

that he comes from the East. It must follow that he is a "Wise Man".53

is sentiment was echoed by another Indian immigrant, Krishnal-

al Shridharan who wrote in his autobiography, My India, My America

that Indian "Wise Men" could be found among the "ten or twenty In-

dians who have some claim to upper-bracket earnings in the US. One

or two of these priests have real-estate interests in some of the most

fashionable purlieus of NY, Boston and LA and some are millionaires.

India is over-advertised with respect to her religiosity…."54

Secondly, the cultic milieu was uid. ose seeking dierent modes

of religiosity moved in and out of a range of religious movements which

sometimes shared nothing more than a rejection of Trinitarian Christi-

anity. Crossovers from Unitarianism to Free ought and from there to

spiritualism, eosophy, Buddhism and Vedanta were common. Henry

Steel Olcott himself moved from his Presbyterian beginnings to spiritu-

alism to eosophy and esoteric Buddhism, while Annie Besant shed

52 Hanegraa 1998, p. 414.

53 Quoted here from Tweed and Prothero, 1999, p. 85.

54 Shridharan 1941, pp. 98-99.

152

her Protestant upbringing rst for freethinking and socialism and then

for eosophy.

Most Americans who came to Asian religions "were women, many

were foreign born, and a good number came to Hinduism (and Bud-

dhism) out of alternative religious traditions, such as eosophy, New

ought and Christian Science."55 One of Swami Vivekananda's devout

followers, Sister Christine (born Christine Greenstidel), who migrated

to America from Germany in 1869 when she was three years old, was

a Catholic who practiced Christian Science. She became a nun in the

Ramakrishna mission aer she listened to a lecture by Swami Vive-

kananda in a Unitarian Church in 1894. She later moved to Bengal

where she co-founded the Sister Nivedita Girls' School. To take another

example, Marie Canavarro (1849-1933), or Sister Sanghamitra, was the

second American to take Buddhist vows on the US soil. She did that

in New York City in the presence of Anagarika Dharmapala, the Bud-

dhist monk from Sri Lanka. Her spiritual journey took her from Ca-

tholicism to eosophy, to Buddhism, to Bahai faith, to Hinduism. By

the time she wrote her autobiography, Insight into the Far East in 1925,

she had embraced Vedanta at Swami Paramananda's Ananda Ashram

in California.56 Asian religions were thus thoroughly integrated into the

American cultic milieu which made it possible for ideas, personalities

and organized movements to move eortlessly in both directions.

irdly, and nally, the cultic milieu was scientistic in the sense

described in an earlier section. Even though rejection of materialism

of modern science fuelled the growth of the cultic milieu, such was the

hegemony of science that even the most heterodox religious-spiritual

movements felt compelled to show that, at a minimum, their faith rest-

ed on rational foundations and was not contrary to the experimental

spirit of modern science.

is tension between hostility to the materialism of modern sci-

ence on the one hand, and yet, the imperative to speak in its language

was resolved by two strategies. On the practical level, it meant prac-

ticing and investigating the occult in a "scientic" way. us mesmer-

ists went about conducting experiments, phrenologists measured the

55 Tweed and Prothero, p. 145.

56 Both examples come from Tweed and Prothero, 1999.

153

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

human head while spiritualists kept careful records of séances. On the

more theoretical level, however, spiritualism and allied psychic practic-

es failed to make much headway. Communication with spirits of dead

people, or manipulation of animal magnetism or psychic energy pro-

vided "evidence" for belief in immortal soul, but the spiritualists could

not explain the nature of this soul, nor relate their idea of the soul to

any known tradition that wouldn't lead them back to the dogmas of

Christianity.

is is where the eosophical Society came in: it provided an an-

cient and yet seemingly "scientic" tradition for explaining the spiritu-

alist phenomena. While the more elite counter-cultural movements of

Transcendentalists and Unitarians tended to stay away from scholastic

debates about metaphysics and doctrine, eosophical Society reveled

in metaphysics. It linked spiritualist beliefs and practices to an amalgam

of ancient cosmological doctrines with roots in Hermetic and Renais-

sance neo-Platonism, updated with the Orientalist discovery of India

on the one hand, and with the Darwinian theory of evolution on the

other.57 As Goodrick-Clarke sums it up:

In the West, eosophy was perhaps the single most important factor in the

modern occult revival. It redirected the fashionable interest in spiritualism to-

wards a coherent doctrine combining cosmology, modern anthropology and

the theory of evolution with man's spiritual development. It drew upon the

traditional sources of Western esotericism, globalizing them through restate-

ment in terms of Asian religions, with which the West had come into colonial

contact.58

e key to this synthesis of Western esotericism, Asian religions,

evolutionary theory and laws of physics lay in conceiving God as a

creative force that acts as a vital force that is internal to nature, and not

57 Stephen Prothero sees the eosophical Society's attempt to provide theoretical

foundation for spiritualism as "an elite attempt to reform spiritualism from above.

If spiritualism constituted a democratic or populist movement in the history of

American religion, then early theosophy represented an attempt by elites like

Blavatsky and Olcott to reform spiritualism by "upliing" its masses out of their

supposed philosophical and moral vulgarities, to transform masses of ghost-

seeking spiritualists into theorists of the astral planes" (1993, p. 198). Ordinary

"ghost-seeking spiritualists" did not take kindly to eosophical Society, advising

them to pack up and move to the Orient!

58 Goodrick-Clarke, 2004, p. 18.

154

externally as a Designer. If divine agency could be imagined as an in-

visible, hidden (or occult) "energy" that enlivens matter, then it could

presumably be studied as scientically as any other form of energy, or

any other element of nature (molecules, radiations and particles) that

is invisible to the human eye. is paradigm of ensouled nature had

the obvious advantage of explaining magic, paranormal and other oc-

cult phenomena as being internal to nature and therefore amenable to

experiential testing, albeit using "super-physical" modes of "seeing" in

the mind's eye, rather than through the physical eye. As Blavatsky fa-

mously put it, "Magic is but a science, a profound knowledge of the

Occult forces in Nature, and of laws governing the visible and invisible

world." eosophists saw themselves not as mystics, or as naïve spiritu-

alists communing with the spirits of dead people. ey saw themselves

as, in Henry Olcott's words, scientists who were seeking a "science deal-

ing with strictly veriable order of facts, though an order transcending

that with which physical science is concerned."59

Indeed, what they meant by "science" came out very clearly when

eosophists tried to defend themselves against critics who accused

them of trying to convert Indians to a foreign religion or to a new sect.

Henry Olcott liked to remind his Indian audiences that they had come

to India not to convert them to some new Western cult, but only to save

them from the ills of materialism and skepticism on the one hand, and

the false religion of Christianity that the missionaries were trying to

spread. In a lecture delivered in the town hall of Calcutta in 1882, Olcott

assured his Bengali audience:

We are not preaching a new religion, or founding a new sect, or a new school of

philosophy or occult science. e Hindu Sastras, the Buddhist Gathas and the

Zoroastrian Desatri contain every essential idea that we have ever propounded,

and our constant theme has been that eosophy is the scientic and the only rm

basis of religion. We deny that there is the slightest conict between true religion

59 Olcott, 1895, p. 23. is impulse to study the paranormal in a scientic spirit was

not limited to eosophists. John Gray (2011) shows how the great minds of that

era, including Alfred Wallace (the co-discover of the theory of evolution by natu-

ral selection), William James the psychologist and some renowned experimental

physicists, went about designing experiments that could conrm the existence of

spirit that could survive death.

155

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

and true science. We deny that any religion can be true that does not rest upon

scientic lines.60

e reference to Eastern texts was crucial to what "science" meant

to eosophists. ey believed that a holistic science which included the

spiritual dimension of nature was known to the ancients before Judeo-

Christian monotheism overpowered it. e original home of this an-

cient wisdom had been a subject of intense debate and controversy. e

Western esoteric tradition had long considered pre-Hellenic and Hel-

lenized Egypt – the home of the "thrice great" Hermes Trismegistus

and the great Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) who

taught in Alexandria – as the original home of the ancient wisdom.61

But by the time eosophy arrived in the 19th century cultic milieu, In-

dia and the Vedas had already begun to displace Egypt and the Corpus

Hermeticum. In her rst major book, Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky declared

Hinduism to be the original source of primordial wisdom out of which

all other religions and sciences had emerged. Most of her understand-

ing of Hinduism was derived from the writings of Louis Jacolliot (1837-

1890) the French occultist and Indophile whose fanciful and unreliable

writings on India – including his translation of the Laws of Manu – were

extremely popular among the reading public and intellectuals in the late

19th century in the West. Madame Blavatsky apparently owned all 13

volumes of Jacolliot's India writings and made more than 50 references

to him in her Isis Unveiled. India and Hindu doctrines of karma, rein-

carnation and the seven-fold nature of human beings became central to

her mature work, e Secret Doctrine . 62

One can safely say that eosophy, among all other esoteric move-

ments in the West, moved closest to India and embraced the doctrines

of Hinduism.

60 Olcott, 1895, p. 145.

61 e writings of Hermes Trismegistus were rediscovered and translated into

Latin by the Florentine humanist, Marsilio Ficino in 1463 under the patronage

of Cosimo de Medici, the leading merchant-prince of Florence. Ficino was also

responsible for reviving Neo-Platonism.

62 David Smith, 2004. It appears that Nietzsche derived his understanding of Hindu-

ism from Jacolliot's Manu, a book he seems to have read with great attention. See

David Smith (2004).

156

8. e Fin de Siècle India: Crisis of faith and co-option of science

By the waning decades of the 19th century, a new generation of edu-

cated, urban and urbane Indian elites had emerged, especially in Ben-

gal, the cultural heart of colonial India. ey have been described as

"the Oriental version of the Enlightenment man".63 Like their Western

counterparts, these men were restless: not altogether religious and not

altogether secular, they stood at the cusp of faith and skepticism. ey

simultaneously felt the need to defend the tradition of their forefathers,

especially against the colonial critics, and at the same time, felt a com-

pulsion to modernize and reform the religious tradition they were born

into. While they expressed a great faith in science and reason, they

shied away from secular humanism.

ey had inherited a crisscrossing stream of ideas. On the one

hand, they had absorbed the myth of the Hindu Golden Age created

by the British and German Orientalists. On the other hand, they were

exposed to modern ideas and ways of thinking through Christian and

Hindu educational institutions that had sprung up in Calcutta and other

urban centers. In addition, they were painfully aware of the low opinion

many Christian missionaries and colonial administrators had of their

Hindu faith, rituals and culture. ey were caught in pretty much the

same dilemma as their counterparts in the West: they could neither pray

to the God(s) of their fathers and forefathers, but nor were they fully com-

fortable with the stark materialism of modern science which came with

colonial baggage, to boot. us they faced the same old quandary that

had haunted the post-Enlightenment generation in the West, namely,

how to harmonize science and religion, or modern ideas with tradition.

is shared crisis of faith served as a "link between the enlightened

few in Calcutta and the enlightened few in England and the United

States".64 e rst generation of this link was undoubtedly the heroic

age of British Orientalism which had lasted from 1773 to 1837. Aer

the British Orientalism came to an end, a second generation of the "re-

63 De Michelis, 2004, p. 52. All the major public gures of Bengal Renaissance were

men. But Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo had Western-born female devo-

tees/companions – Sister Nivedita and the Mother, respectively – who emerged as

well-respected public gures in their own right.

64 Kopf, 1979, p. 4.

157

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

ligious le" that was rebelling against the dogmas of Calvinist Christi-

anity in their native lands – including those like Unitarians who were

still at least nominally Christian and those like Freemasons and e-

osophists who espoused esoteric and occult beliefs – began to arrive on

the shores of India from Britain and the United States. ese religious

skeptics and seekers were led to India in part by the scholarly output of

the Orientalists which had introduced them to Hindu Veda s, Bhagavad

Gita, Manusmriti , Vishnu Purana and other sacred books. As described

earlier, they were seeking a rational theology cleansed of revealed dog-

mas of Christianity.

In the post-Orientalist period, especially aer the 1857 rebellion

when the British began to aggressively promote Westernization, it was

this second generation that lled in the gap le behind by the Oriental-

ists. As Elizabeth de Michelis points out,

the only body of interlocutors that was now [i.e., aer the thwarting of Ori-

entalist plans for Anglo-Indian cooperation] eager to communicate and coop-

erate with Indians qua Indians was that of the esotericists, whether Christian

[Unitarians] or otherwise. Bengalis reciprocated, while Orient-inspired Ro-

mantic, Transcendentalist, occultist and in due course theosophical ideas were

being propagated by a steadily growing body of literature, or through lecture

tours and personal contacts.65

Providing more evidence for Jocelyn Godwin's well-known thesis

that "Blavatsky's eosophy owed as much to the skeptical Enlighten-

ment …as it did to the concept of spiritual enlightenment with which it

is more readily associated",66 it was the Unitarians, who shared the En-

lightenment skepticism against Trinitarian Christianity, who prepared

the ground for acceptance of eosophical ideas in India. e early dec-

ades saw the emergence of neo-Vedantic Enlightenment, which gradu-

ally embraced more spiritualist and esoteric ideas.

e contact between Boston, London and Calcutta began with

Raja Rammohan Roy's (1774-1833) attempt to interpret the Vedas and

the Upanishads to bring them in accord with monotheism strongly in-

uenced by Unitarian ideas that were emerging from William Chan-

ning and Joseph Tuckerman from Boston, Reverend Lant Carpenter in

65 De Michelis, 2004, p. 47.

66 Godwin, 1994, p. xi.

158

Britain and other Christians with Unitarian leanings in Bengal itself.

Roy absorbed the rational theology of Unitarians that eschewed rev-

elation and depended more upon intuition and personal experience

of the divine and tried to nd it in the Vedas and Upanishads. In his

many debates with his Christian friends and critics, he tried to "prove

that the message of the Vedanta not only contained the unity of God,

but did so in a way superior to the Judeo-Christian Bible… because it

did not attempt to categorize the attributes of the Almighty – a gesture

that Rammohan found both anthropomorphic and futile. Rammohan

was now using Unitarianism in an Indian way…"67 is view of the di-

vine became the basis of Brahmo Samaj he founded in Calcutta in 1828

which took a lead in combating socially regressive practices like child

marriage and widow immolation.

e next step toward spiritualism was taken by Debendranath

Tagore (1817-1905), who took on the leadership of Brahmo Samaj af-

ter Roy's death. While Roy had tried to reconcile his Unitarian faith

in One God with the Vedas, Tagore broke free of this compulsion to

refer back to the Vedas or any holy book. Aer a deep and long study

of Hindu scriptures, he felt he could not accept the doctrine of karma

and rebirth. Consequently, he made a break and announced that not the

Vedas, but "the pure, unsophisticated heart was the seat of Brahmoism"

and henceforth Brahmos "could accept those texts only which accorded

with that heart. ose sayings that disagreed with the heart [they] could

not accept."68 Under his leadership, Brahmo Samaj gave up the idea of

the infallibility of the Vedas and instead made the truth of the Vedas

dependent upon the spiritual experiences of believers. is idea was to

play an important role in the later development of self-understanding

of modern Hinduism both as a "religion of science" in which spiritual

experience began to serve as the basis of empiricism, and Hindus as a

people endowed with the "yoga faculty". But at the time when Brahmo

Samaj rst adopted this principle, it was literally unprecedented as

"there is simply no evidence of an indigenous Indian counterpart to the

rhetoric of experience prior to the colonial period".69

67 Kopf, 1979, p. 13, emphasis added.

68 Quoted here from de Michelis 2004, p. 59.

69 Sharf, 1998, p. 100.

159

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

e real turn toward spiritual scientism took place with Keshub

Chunder Sen's famous "New Dispensation" which laid the foundation

for Swami Vivekananda's paradigm dening writings and teachings.70

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838-1884) was a protégé of Debendranath Sen,

but he later split from the original Brahmo Samaj in 1866 to start his

own Brahmo Samaj (leaving the original body to attach the prex "Adi",

or the Original, to its name). For most of his life, he remained staunchly

committed to the Unitarian social gospel and counted the American

Unitarian minister Charles Dall to be an honorary Brahmo. But by all

accounts, he underwent a profound change in the years immediately

following a trip to England in 1870. He apparently came back from

England convinced that:

the Christian vision needed completion by a distinctively Indian contribution,

and implementation by an Indian….thus was born the idea of New Dispensa-

tion, an amalgam of ideas and practices culled from dierent religions, espe-

cially Hinduism and Christianity, with Keshub, the Great Man, at the head.71

He formally declared the formation of the Church of New Dispen-

sation (or Nava Vidhan) in 1879 with an express purpose of bringing

about such a completion. His "church" sought to harmonize all reli-

gions; harmonize all religions with science; and to provide empirical

evidence for such a concordance. As he announced rather grandly in

1880: "We are going to enter into a new domain of a new dispensation,

that of science and faith harmonized. … In the new faith everything is sci-

entic . In all your beliefs and in all your prayers, faith and reason shall

be harmonized in a true science."72

Keshub found an ideal exemplar of his Nava Vidhan in Ramakrish-

na Parmahansa (1836-1886), a tantric worshipper of Goddess Kali in a

Calcutta temple, who he met in 1875 and who he thought could dem-

onstrate, through personal experience which could be repeated by oth-

ers, the harmony of all religions. Ramakrishna was an intensely spir-

itual man who spent his entire life seeking direct experience of God:

70 Elizabeth de Michelis places Sen somewhere in-between "Debendranath Tagore's

neo-Vedantic romanticism and Swami Vivekananda's neo-Vedantic occultism",

with Sen progressing throughout his life from the former toward the latter (p. 74).

71 Julius Lipner, quoted from Brown, 2007, p. 431.

72 Brown 2007, p. 431. Emphasis added.

160

he taught that a "feeling for God" – directly seeing God and hearing

God – were superior to book-learning which he compared to "mere dirt

and straw aer realization of God".73 A worshipper of Kali, he "experi-

mented" with Islam and Christianity by worshipping as a Muslim or a

Christian would do, observing all the rites and rituals of these faiths.

From these experiences, he concluded that all religions lead to the same

goal, namely, god realization, and therefore all are true.74

Keshub interpreted Ramakrishna's teachings as proof that religious

harmony can be empirically demonstrated. is became his basis for

asserting the "scientic" basis of New Dispensation and led him to in-

vent highly syncretic rituals which combined, for example, traditional

Vaishnava bhakti with Salvation Army-style parades and bands, Chris-

tian-style baptism ceremonies and "pilgrimages" in which he encour-

aged devotees to imaginatively replicate the spiritual experiences of

Socrates, Moses, Mohammad, and Chaitanya, and so on.75

But even though he taught equal truth of all religions, he clearly

singled out Hinduism as being more open to experiential knowledge of

God because, as he wrote to Max Muller, he, as a Hindu was "free of bi-

ases of the true believer in a revealed religion".76 Keshub can be counted

among the architects of the idea of spirituality being the essence of Hin-

duism. Meticulous research by Elizabeth de Michelis shows that as he

broke his ties with Unitarianism, he turned more and more to yoga and

meditation, declaring "we Hindus are specially endowed with, and dis-

tinguished for, the yoga faculty, which is nothing but this power of spir-

itual communion and absorption. is faculty which we have inherited

from our forefathers enables us to annihilate space and time…."77

73 Rambachan 1993, p. 33.

74 For a description of his experiments with god realization, see Farquhar, 1915, pp.

188-200. One of the lessons Ramakrishna drew from his belief that all religions

are true was that religious conversions were pointless and that "every man should

follow his own religion. A Christian should follow Christianity; a Mohammedan

should follow Mohammedanism, and so on. For the Hindus, the ancient path, the

path of the Aryan Rishis, is the best." p. 198.

75 Kopf, 1979, pp. 268-281.

76 Kopf, 1979, p. 270.

77 De Michelis, p. 89.

161

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

us Keshub initiated the process of braiding together mystical

empiricism, scientic empiricism and Hindu exceptionalism in a po-

tent mixture which has continued to beguile Hindu nationalists of all

shades. is mixture was inherited by Swami Vivekananda, a protégé of

both Keshub and Ramakrishna and through his enormous inuence, it

became the fundamental assumption of neo-Hinduism.78

is scientistic turn became most obvious in Keshub only close to

his death in 1884. By that time, Madame Blavatsky had already pub-

lished her rst major book, Isis Unveiled, which came out in 1877. By

1879, Blavatsky and Olcott had already moved to India and were soon

to establish the headquarters of their society in Adyar in Madras. By

the time Keshub enunciated his New Dispensation in 1880, there were

already "over a hundred branches of eosophical Society in India and

Hindus everywhere rejoiced in their work…eosophy was provid-

ing a new defense of Hinduism for thousands of educated men, whose

Western education had lled them with shivering doubts about their

78 It has been suggested by Elizabeth de Michelis and Mackenzie Brown recently

that this concern with bringing about concordance of all religions with modern

science was picked up by Keshub from his contact with the Swedenborg So-

ciety during his visit to London in 1870. Swedenborg Society shared the same

intellectual space in the cultic milieu in the West as the eosophical Society,

Mesmerism, spiritualism and Transcendentalism. Its unique contribution was the

application of scientic methods to the spiritual world, a project that eosophical

Society shared.

According to de Michelis (p.61), extensive contacts with Unitarians had already

familiarized Sen and his fellow Brahmos to the Vedanta-inuenced Transcen-

dentalist writings of Emerson and Parker which had predisposed them favorably

toward emphasizing spiritual experience over holy books and theological treatises

as the basis of a universal religion. us Sen was receptive to the Swedenborgian

and theosophical idea that spiritual experiences verify the spiritual phenomena in

the same manner that sensory experiences verify the natural phenomena, and that

the spiritual phenomena correspond with the natural world.

Mackenzie Brown (2007) provides more evidence. He quotes from the welcome

speech at Swedenborg Society on June 2, 1870 when "New Dispensation" was

mentioned as heralding "an astonishing revolution in modes of faith and forms of

thought" following the passing away of old religions. Indeed, in the 19th century

cultic milieu, the idea of "New Dispensation" was routinely used to refer to spir-

itualism and other occult movements. Brown suggests that this encounter made

Sen receptive to the more metaphysical writings of the eosophical Society.

162

religion."79 Jocelyn Godwin has suggested that Blavatsky and Olcott

originally intended to make contact with Brahmo Samaj, rather than

with Arya Samaj.80 Olcott himself admitted that he had "written to Ke-

shub Babu to ask him to join us in our work, and I was ready to serve

in any subordinate position, under and with anybody, no matter whom,

in the interest of India and Indians." But, he goes on to say, "the back of

the hand, not the palm, was oered to me."81 Blavatsky had admired the

founder of Brahmo Samaj, Raja Rammohan Roy as a great reformer,

but she did not take kindly to the devaluation of the Vedas in favor of

Unitarian Christianity among the post-Roy Brahmos. She also objected

to Keshub's proclamations of himself as a prophet of the New Dispen-

sation. It appears that Keshub returned the criticism, calling Blavatsky

"an imposter", "adventurer" and a "pretender".82 All this provides ample

grounds to believe that eosophical Society was not an unknown en-

tity in India by the time Keshub took his neo-Vedantic-scientistic turn

in the early 1880s. It is quite likely that Keshub was familiar with the

content of eosophical teachings, even though he disapproved of the

famous "eosophical twins" who had made India their home.

eosophical Society was by no means the only organized body of

esoteric thought that had found a niche in India. Freemasonry, which

had the agenda of creating a universal brotherhood of Man in the One,

had been present on the subcontinent since as far back as mid-18th cen-

tury, brought to its shores by British aristocrats. Freemasons opened

their doors to the "native gentlemen" in 1843, and by the early 1880s

it had become a "fashion with the Indians to become members of the

Freemasonry. Lawyers, judges and government ocials were its mem-

bers. Its membership gave a chance to mix with the high dignitaries and

ocials."83 By 1920, there were 183 lodges in Calcutta (now Kolkata),

Bombay (now Mumbai) and Madras (now Chennai).

One Bengali with one foot in Freemasonry and the other in Kes-

hub's Brahmo Samaj was Narendranath Datta, the future Swami Vive-

79 Farquhar, 1915, p. 233.

80 Godwin, 1994, p. 320.

81 Olcott, 1895, p. 12.

82 Brown, 2007, p. 445, note 26.

83 Quoted from de Michelis, p. 69.

163

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

kananda. Vivekananda's spiritual and intellectual journey has been a

topic of great scholarly interest. e outlines are clear: born in 1863 in

Calcutta, he received the standard middle-class English medium edu-

cation, and even joined the Freemasons as many aspiring young men

of his milieu did in order to gain contacts among the elite. Aer initial

sympathy with the socially more progressive wing of Brahmo Samaj,

he became an active member of Keshub's wing (which had gradually

turned its back on social reform) and joined the New Dispensation

in 1880 when he was barely 19 years old. Even though he renounced

his Brahmo aliation later in life, he remained distrustful of revealed

knowledge in favor of the kind of mystical empiricism and concordance

of religions that the New Dispensation taught.

Aer Keshub's death in 1884, he came under the inuence of Ram-

akrishna Parmahansa for pretty much the same reasons as Keshub: he

saw Ramakrishna as providing empirical demonstration of God.84 Aer

Ramakrishna's death in 1886, leadership of his disciples fell upon Nar-

endranath. But critical of the ecstatic devotionalism, anti-intellectual-

ism and lack of social concerns among his brother monks, the future

Vivekananda broke away and pursued his own quest. (He returned to

establish the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta in 1897.) In 1893, he ad-

dressed the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago which made him

a celebrity in the United States and back home in India.

It is through his deep engagement with the cultic milieu in the

United States, where he stayed for other three-plus years aer his Chi-

cago address, that he began to blend neo-Vedantic esotericism and

avant-garde American occultism. His years in America were spent

discoursing – and raising money for his future work in India– in nu-

84 Young Narendranath was exposed to the writings of British empiricists, notably

Locke, Berkeley and Hume in his college years and took to heart the empiricist

dictum that all knowledge was dependent upon sense experience. is predis-

posed him toward Keshub's New Dispensation and even more fatefully, toward

Ramakrishna's experiments with spiritualism. e oen-told story has it that the

rst question he asked Ramakrishna when he went to see him at Dakshineshwar

temple was "Sir, have you seen God?" to which Ramakrishna replied, "Yes, I see

him just as I see you." e idea that direct experience of God is the most direct

means of knowledge and therefore spiritualism is a kind of science remained one

of the guiding principles of Vivekananda's philosophy. See, Emilsen (1984).

164

merous gatherings of Unitarians, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists,

Swedenborgians, Transcendentalists and eosophists who welcomed

this celebrated Wise Man from the East. As he became familiar with

the Western quest for a non-dogmatic spiritualism that was compat-

ible with the Enlightenment values of scientic evidence, progress and

evolution, he settled on Advaita Vedanta into which he read all that the

Western seekers were seeking.

In the process, he created an image of his spiritual master, Ram-

akrishna – the devotee of Kali – as a great Vedantic sage who exempli-

ed the rational, experiential and therefore "scientic" core of Advaita

Vedanta. What is more, he claimed that this Advaita that he and his

guru Ramakrishna taught, was the same doctrine taught by the great

seventh century sage, Shankaracharya (788-820 CE). us he man-

aged to read an experience-based way of knowing spiritual realities that

eschewed doctrine and revelations back into the original teachings of

Shankara.85

Where were the eosophists in Vivekananda's journey? He did

not have a good opinion of them and tried his best to dissuade his fol-

lowers from joining them. Vivekananda's relationship with the found-

ing members – especially with Olcott, Blavatsky having already le In-

dia for Europe by the time Vivekananda began to get involved in these

issues in late 1880s – was fraught with mutual distrust, professional

rivalry, and resentment against foreigners presuming to teach Hindu-

ism to Hindus. William Emilsen has likened their relationship to that

of porcupines huddling together who prick each other if they are too

close, but yet, feel compelled to huddle because of the warmth they

provide to each other. Vivekananda started out with a negative impres-

sion of Blavatsky and Olcott because of their prior dispute with Swami

85 But Shankara taught no such empiricism. If anything, he distrusted personal

experience as a valid source of knowledge of the divine and insisted that Vedas

themselves were the highest authority. According to Rambachan (1994, p. 3), "un-

like Vivekananda, who presented the armation of śruti [the revealed scriptures,

the Vedas] as having only a hypothetical or provisional validity and needing veri-

cation that only anubhav [experience] could provide, Shankara argued for sruti as

the unique and self-valid source for our knowledge of absolute reality or Brahman.

In relation to the gain of this knowledge, all ways of knowing were subordinate to

śruti."

165

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

Dayananda, someone he held in great esteem. His negative impression

deepened into a deep resentment when Olcott refused to recommend

him for the World Parliament of Religions – a grudge he carried even

aer he emerged as a celebrity. (He managed to get to Chicago with the

help of his old colleagues in the Brahmo Samaj). With his keen sense of

which way the intellectual winds were blowing, moreover, Vivekananda

came to the conclusion that eosophists were a minority wing of the

spiritualist scene in America, and that it was more respectable to ally

with the more sophisticated Boston Brahmins (i.e., the New England

Transcendentalists) and academic Orientalists like Max Muller and

Paul Deussen. e irony is that many of his own best friends (notably,

the distinguished judge Subramanian Iyer) were ardent eosophists

and he had to persuade his followers from joining the eosophical So-

ciety. As Emilsen puts it, Vivekananda's movement had become "like a

gecko, almost indistinguishable from the eosophists."86

rough the intellectual currents that led Hindu reformers like Ke-

shub Chunder Sen and Vivekananda away from accepting sacred books

on faith alone, there was one reform movement which stood steadfast

for trusting nothing but the Vedas. is was the Arya Samaj of Swami

Dayananda, who was the rst ally of the eosophical Society in India:

when Blavatsky and Olcott landed in India, they came as disciples of

Dayananda and even agreed to merge their own society into his as "the

eosophical Society of the Arya Samaj of India". e relationship did

not last long, and by 1882 Dayananda was denouncing the two as Bud-

dhists and atheists who knew nothing of philosophy of yoga but were

only good at jugglery and magic tricks.87

Even though Vivekananda maintained a sti-upper lip when it

came to the eosophical Society, above evidence clearly shows that he

was in the thick of these crosscutting currents that were Hinduizing and

86 Emilsen, p. 216. Excerpts from Vivekananda's remarks on the eosophists can be

found in this essay.

87 See Dayananda's lecture in March 1882, 'Humbuggery of the eosophists' at

http://www.Blavatskyarchives.com. It is curious that Indian critics, including Day-

ananda, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and later even Gandhi, should have made

such a fuss about Blavatsky's pathetic little tricks. India is replete with any number

of magic-working holy men who could have taught Blavatsky a lesson or two!

166

spiritualizing Western esoteric cults, while eosophizing and scientiz-

ing Hinduism. is thesis has found armation in a recent book titled

e Yoga Sūtras of Patanjali: A Biography, written by David Gordon

White, an authority on tantra and alchemy:

Vivekananda's Raja Yoga is a palimpsest of the many non-Indian inuences

…. Although he refused membership in eosophical Society, there can be no

doubt that Vivekananda was inuenced by its doctrines, as well perhaps by its

position on yoga. …In many respects, the eosophists and Vivekanandas pro-

jects were like mirror images of each other. For whereas Madame Blavatsky had

earlier graed Indian terminology and concepts onto Western spiritualism and

occultism, Vivekananda graed terminology and concepts from Western spiritu-

alism and scientism on to Indian spirituality and neo-Vedanta philosophy. e

eosophical writings turned out to be far more successful in India than in the

West, while Vivekananda's lectures and writings have had their most lasting

impact in the United States and Europe.88 [emphasis added]

To sum up this section, secularization of Vedantic spiritual mon-

ism – that is, the attempt to adapt the holistic or spiritual-monistic

worldview to the empiricist philosophy of mechanistic science – was a

dominant trend among the Hindu reformers in the 19th century India.

In this, the cultic milieu of America and Britain played a key role by

bringing critics of orthodox Trinitarian Christianity, from Unitarians to

eosophists, to the shores of India where they sought a more rational

theology. But Indians were by no means passive recipients of their ideas.

ey actively participated both in appropriating Western ideas and in

lending a Hindu hue to them.

9. Vivekananda in America

e cultic milieu that Vivekananda found himself in during his stay in

the US was not entirely alien or novel to him. e above two sections

have provided enough evidence to show that the Swami was already

familiar with many of the spiritualist currents in the West.

My own reading is that Vivekananda found these new religious

movements quite congenial to his own evolving worldview. Many in

the new religious movements were disenchanted Christians – and this

emboldened Vivekananda to loudly and publicly pronounce Chris-

88 David Gordon White, 2014, pp. 128-129.

167

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

tianity as irrational and superstitious. At the same time, he saw su-

cient shared ground between the Western spiritualist movements and

the spiritual monism of Vedanta and he wanted Hinduism to take the

mantle of the original source of all varieties of spiritualism, Western

and Eastern. He repeatedly states in Raja Yoga that while the assorted

faith-healers, spiritualists, Christian Scientists in the West have "only

stumbled upon the discovery of a spiritual force linking cosmos and the

man", it is only the yoga tradition that oers a reasoned and well-tested

understanding of this force. He asserts that such groups are actually do-

ing yoga, even though they don't know it: "wherever any sect of body of

people is trying to search out anything occult and mystical, or hidden,

what they are doing is really yoga" (CW, 1, p. 159).

Raja Yoga, the founding text of modern yoga, was thus born out of

Vivekananda's self-conscious positioning of yoga as the mother-tradi-

tion of all spirit-centered, esoteric religious movements. But writing at

the close of the 19th century which was deeply infused with Newtonian

faith in empirical science, and a Darwinian sense of evolutionary pro-

gress, Vivekananda faced a problem: How to present the millennia-old

Yoga Sūtras in a manner that would make them relevant to his post-

Enlightenment audiences in the United States? His strategy was simple:

he would nd analogues in modern physics, physiology and evolution-

ary biology to propound the metaphysics of yoga.

In appropriating science as an ally of yoga philosophy he was actu-

ally following the pattern of "secularization of esotericism" described

by Wouter Hanegraa in his important work, New Age Religions in

Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular ought. Accord-

ing to Hanegraa, esoteric traditions in the West underwent a radical

makeover as they tried to come to terms with a disenchanted world

of mechanical philosophy and mathematically precise, experimentally

veriable cause-and-eect relationships that rose in prominence aer

the Scientic Revolution. One stream of Western esotericism (what

Hanegraa calls "Occultism") accepts the Newtonian worldview of me-

chanical causality and tries to adapt to it, while the other stream (what

Hanegraa calls "Romanticism") rejects any compromise and tries to

re-enchant the world.

168

eosophy, and some other spiritualist movements like Mesmer-

ism, Swedenborgianism, Christian Science, clearly belong to the oc-

cultist stream which sought to adapt to Newtonian and Darwinian

breakthroughs. But how did these movements manage to keep their

spirit-drenched understanding of cosmos intact while claiming to be

in harmony with the essentially mechanistic worldview that emerged

aer Newton and Darwin? How did they manage to claim "harmony"

between two ways of looking at the world which are diametrically op-

posed to each other?

e answer to this question holds the key to understanding not just

Western esotericism and its contemporary incarnation, the New Age,

but also the emergence of Vivekananda's neo-yoga and neo-Hinduism.

Hanegraa claims that the secularization of esotericism took the form

of "syncretism between magia [magic] and science, between corre-

spondences and mechanical causality".89 What happened was this: the

esoteric/spiritualist movements simply overlaid a framework of mechani-

cal cause-and-eect on the older set of correspondence relations. In other

words, the magical cause-and-eect based upon "sympathies", "corre-

spondences" and "resemblances" were not rejected, but only restated

in terms of mechanical causality of "energy", "vibrations" and (today)

quantum physics. is syncretism between magical thinking and instru-

mental rationality of science was an attempt to appropriate the vocabu-

lary of science while rejecting its materialistic worldview.

As I have shown in the previous section, this kind of appropriation

of science for the defense of spirit-centered metaphysics was already be-

ginning to show up in the circles that Vivekananda was active in before

he came to the US. How it inuenced his interpretation of Yoga Sūtras

is what we will look at in the rest of this essay.

10. Vivekananda's scientized yoga

Now that I have all the ingredients I need, I will proceed with a close

reading of how Vivekananda "actively positions" the Yoga Sūtra within

the discourse of physics of his time. His translation of Patanjali's text,

89 Hanegraa, 1998, p. 423.

169

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

accompanied by his own commentary, appears in the rst volume of his

Complete Works.90 e text is based upon the lectures he gave in New

York, which were later written down and published as a book which

became an instant best-seller in the US and Europe.

Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra (henceforth YS ) is a compilation of 195

sūtras, or short aphorisms, ascribed to Patanjali (2nd century BCE). Even

though it has become fashionable to use Patanjali's name and murtis

in trendy yoga studios and ashrams, Patanjali has nothing whatsoever

to do with physical āsanas, which belong to the hatha-yoga tradition.

What Patanjali is interested in is this: how to induce a state of samadhi,

or altered consciousness, through which the soul comes to realize that it

is actually distinct from the body. is state of consciousness is to be

achieved through quietening the mind through eight-fold practice that

involves clean and ethical living, breath control, mental concentration

and contemplation. e aim of "Raja Yoga" – as Patanjali's tradition is

sometimes called and is the name adopted by Vivekananda – is spiritual

freedom, not physical tness.91

Vivekananda opens his Raja Yoga with salvos against blind faith

and superstitions which he associates entirely with the idea of a "god in

the clouds", taking a swipe at Abrahamic faiths, especially Christianity.

In contrast, he presents Patanjali's YS as an enlightened text that sur-

passes Christianity because it does not invoke a God that is over and

above nature, and surpasses "materialistic" or "surface" science because

it does not deny the existence of miracles or extraordinary phenomena

(CW 1, pp. 121-123). Here Vivekananda turns modern science's hard-

won victory over magic and mystery on its head: skepticism toward

magical practices is deemed a "failure" of science.92

Patanjali succeeds where Christianity and modern science fail,

according to the Swami, because Patanjali had perfected a method of

accessing the "subtle" levels of nature. "ere is no supernatural, says

90 All quotations, with their page numbers, that are cited in the body of this chapter

are from vol. 1.

91 See Klaus Klostermaier, 1998.

92 Here Vivekananda was in "good" company: similar "failures" of science to explain

the occult were oered by Annie Besant and Henry Olcott for their turning to

eosophy.

170

the yogi, but there are in nature gross manifestations and subtle mani-

festations" and while the "gross can be easily seen by the senses" only

the "the practice of Raja Yoga will lead to the acquisition of more sub-

tle perceptions" (p. 122). Yogic meditation is simply this science of the

subtle: "the rishis or sages declare they experienced certain truths, and

these they preach" (p. 126). While in the "religions of the book", only

the original founders/teachers actually experienced God, yoga makes it

possible for everyone to experience the reality of God. All they have to

do is to follow the "scientically worked out method" of yoga (p. 128).

All this seems vaguely similar to natural theology of Anglican

churches through the 17th -18th centuries which sought empirical evi-

dence from nature, rather than from faith, to infer the existence of

God.93 Vivekananda, too, seems to be engaged in a similar endeavor

of nding an experiential (albeit non-sensory) basis for arming the

Vedantic conception of divine intelligence. Clearly, Vivekananda shares

the modernist impulse of grounding religious beliefs and practice not

in faith, or in the literal word of scriptures, but in some kind of experi-

ence which could be justied with evidence and reason.

But whereas natural theology in the Christian tradition armed a

Designer God using experimental evidence from nature, Vivekananda

goes in the opposite direction: he infers facts about nature from the yo-

gic seeing of the divine soul within oneself. He claims that the "certain

truths" experienced by yogis are not limited to the soul, but encompass

within them external truths about the material world as well, because

the "external world is only the gross form of the internal or subtle….

e external world is the eect, the internal the cause" (p. 132). e

spirit, in other words, is the primary, or the independent, creative force,

while matter is an epiphenomenon of the spirit. From this, Vivekanan-

da infers that if you can know and control the spiritual force within you,

you can know and control the material world:

e man who has learned to manipulate the inner forces will get the whole of

nature under his control. e yogi [seeks nothing less] than to master the whole

universe, to control whole of nature… [e yogi seeks to get to a point] where

"nature's laws" have no inuence on him [as] he will be beyond them all. He will

be the master of the whole nature, internal and external. (p. 133)

93 John Hedley Brooke (1991) is the most authoritative guide to natural theology.

171

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

Suppose a man understood the prāa perfectly and could control it, what pow-

ers of earth would not be his? He would be able to move the sun and the stars

out of their place, to control everything in the universe, from the atoms to the

biggest suns, because he would control the prāa. (p. 148)

When the yogi becomes perfect, there will be nothing in nature not under his

control. If he orders the gods or the souls of the departed, they will come at his

bidding. All the forces of nature will obey him as slaves … e yogi …gains

perfection. He becomes almost almighty. (p. 151)

Here, Vivekananda is defending the extraordinary powers (itali-

cized in the quotations above) which clearly defy all known laws of na-

ture that Patanjali promises in YS. He not only defends, but celebrates

these paranormal powers: "Absolute control of nature, and nothing

short of it, must be the goal. We must be the masters and not the slaves

of nature" (p. 140).94 He goes on to celebrate the "Indian race" for the

special gi for acquiring inner knowledge that allows control of the

outer nature (p. 133).

Vivekananda is clearly and unambiously defending magic.95 But he

has evidently internalized the eosophist slogan cited above (section

7) that "Magic is only a science" of the "subtle" forces that the "materi-

alistic" Western science is unable to get to. In order to pass Patanjali's

2000 years old Yoga Sutra as "science," Vivekananda ends up distort-

ing both Patanjali and science. What is interesting is that the moves he

makes in this double-distortion follow the script laid out by the Blavat-

sky and her followers in the eosophical Society before him. Let us

look at how he proceeds to scientize Patanjali.

Magical powers are certainly of great interest for Patanjali. He de-

votes the entire third chapter of YS (about one-sixth of the text) to the

extraordinary powers one gains by single-minded concentration. Some

94 Indian ecofeminists, led by Vandana Shiva's much-celebrated 1988 book, Staying

Alive, like to present Hinduism (especially Sākhya) as eco-friendly and women-

friendly. Vivekananda's interpretation of Sākhya-yoga as absolute domination of

nature ought to give them some food for thought.

95 Magic, to put is simply, is the belief that "there are supernatural and spiritual

forces that can be controlled through rituals and incantations." ese rituals don't

necessarily try to draw down supernatural powers of gods, angels or demons.

Rather, the so-called "natural magic" tries to control the "occult" or "subtle" forces

of nature that supposedly lie beyond the scope of "materialistic" science. See Bur-

ton and Grandy, 2004, p. 36.

172

of these powers (culled from Vivekananda's own translation of Patan-

jali) are: acquiring the knowledge of past lives, becoming invisible, pre-

dicting the time of one's own death, becoming as strong as an elephant,

seeing remote things, acquiring knowledge of the Sun, the Moon and

the stars, the ability to see spirits of the dead, the ability to "enter a dead

body and make it get up and move", the ability to become as "light as

cotton-wool" that can y through the skies, the ability to become "as

minute as a particle and as huge as a mountain", the ability to makes

blazes of light come out of one's body... and so on (pp. 270-288). In his

translation and commentary, Vivekananda defends all these powers as

a simple matter of "doing sayama", which amount to "directing the

mind to a particular object and xing it there and keeping it there for

a long time" (p. 271). So, for example, when a yogi does "sayama on

the form of the body… the yogi's body becomes unseen… or he can ap-

parently vanish" (p. 277); or "by making sayama on the relationship

between akasha (space) and the body and by becoming light as cotton

wool through meditation on them, the yogi goes through the skies" (pp.

282-283), etc.96

at Patanjali ascribes magical powers to yoga is not surprising,

considering he was writing more than 2000 years ago. e question is

how could Vivekananda defend occult powers at the cusp of the 19th

and 20th centuries? How could he hope to get a serious enough hearing,

especially aer he very grandly declared Hinduism to be a religion of

science? Why wasn't he afraid of being laughed at? Why are his writings

on yoga still taken seriously in the New Age circles in the West, and in

the national mainstream in India?

is is where scientization comes in. Vivekananda manages to get

away with defending thoroughly discredited superstitions because he

dresses them up in the vocabulary of science. How is this scientization

accomplished? By completely re-writing the Sākhya philosophy, in

which he rst replaces the material substrate, or prakti with what he

calls "ākāśa" and the spiritual principle, and purua with "prāa". He

96 What is surprising is that Vivekananda celebrates these occult powers while his

own guru, Ramakrishna Parmahansa, had rejected them in no uncertain words:

"occult powers are as abominable as the lth of a prostitute". Quoted here from

Sharma, 2013, p. 6.

173

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

then proceeds to draw resemblances or parallels between ākāśa and

"ether" and between prāa and "energy". Both "ether" and "energy" are

well-dened, experimentally veriable concepts derived from Newto-

nian physics, which was the very parardigm of science in the 19th cen-

tury. Once these resemblances are established – based upon nothing

but a poetic, metaphoric "feel" of sameness – they are brought within

the eld of empirical science of physics, and take on its aura. Once this

identity is established, the control of prāa through prāāyāma simply

becomes "control of cosmic energy", and the occult powers that result

from prāāyāma become simply a matter of "scientically" manipulat-

ing this "energy".

Vivekananda is celebrated in India as someone who revived the

yogic and Vedantic tradition. But he wasn't bringing the old back to

life in its original form, as much as re-writing it and transforming it

beyond recognition. He completely rewrote the fundamental categories

of Sākhya philosophy that is the basis of YS. While ākāśa is one of the

ve basic constituents of nature recognized by Indian philosophy, in

Sākhya-Yoga philosophy, it is merely a minor evolute of prakti as-

sociated with the sense of sound.97 It is by no means the primal sub-

stance out of which everything has evolved, as Vivekananda describes

it: "[ākāśa is] the omnipresent all-penetrating existence. Everything

that has form, everything that exists.. has evolved out of this akasha. It

is the akasha that becomes the air … that becomes the sun, the earth,

the moon … it is this akasha that becomes the human body, the ani-

mal body, the plants …" (p. 147). e constitutive role he assigns to the

"subtle" ākāśa ("so subtle that it is beyond all ordinary perception", p.

147) is actually assigned to the category of prakti in Sākhya , where it

is not considered as necessarily "subtle".98

Even more curious is the elevation of prāa to the status of the

"manifesting power of the universe" (p. 147) – the role that Sākhya -

97 e other four bhūtas are: pthvī (earth), āp (water), tejas (re) and vāyu (air)

(Hiriyanna, 1993). For a basic outline of Sākhya philosophy, see Indira Mahalin-

gam (1997).

98 Prakti in Sākhya philosophy is by no means described as "subtle" and all perva-

sive: it is both nite and limited in space and time (in its manifest form) and subtle

and invisible (in its un-manifest form). See Indira Mahalingam, 1997, p. 162.

174

Yoga philosophy assigns to purusha, the pure or non-material con-

sciousness.99 Patanjali, whose philosophy Vivekananda is expounding

upon, devotes all of one verse to prāa where he clearly means nothing

more than the act of breathing: "Or the stability of mind is gained by

exhaling and retaining the breath."100 is is all. Controlling the breath

is one of the many ways Patanjali recommends for stilling the mind

by focusing it on a single object, which can be anything, a mantra, an

image, or it can be one's own breath.101 Moreover, Sākhya philosophy

makes no mention of prāa at all, not even as a minor evolute of prakti .

If there is any Indian tradition that gives breath-control central role in

salvation, it is haha yoga – the same tradition of bodily yoga that Vive-

kananda looked down upon!102

Vivekananda admits that Patanjali "does not lay much stress on

prāa or prāāyāma" (p. 223). But that does not prevent him from

turning prāa into the spiritual, vital force of the entire universe. For

Patanjali prāa is simply breath – the air we breathe in and breathe out.

Vivekananda announces repeatedly and very clearly that prāa is not

breath. Rather:

Prāāyāma is not, as many think, something about breath; breath indeed has

very little to do with it, if anything. (CW1, p. 147)

Prāa is not exactly breath. It is the name for the energy that is in the universe.

Whatever you see in the universe, whatever moves or works, or has life, is a

manifestation of this prāa. e sum total of the energy displayed in the uni-

verse is called prāa. (p. 223)

So, prāa is not "exactly" breath, even though it not not-breath ei-

ther, for it is by controlling his breathing that a yogi can control what-

ever prāa is! When we breathe in and out, we are not just breathing

99 e kind of dualism between the body and the body-free soul that Sākhya

teaches has been totally defeated in science and philosophy. For a lucid treatment

of this subject, see Flanagan (2007).

100 See Bryant's translation, 2009. e verse about breathing is in the rst chapter,

verse 34.

101 Stilling the mind (citta), which is part of prakti , or the material body, so that you

can "see" the pure soul, purua, freed from all bodily entanglements is the whole

point of yogic meditation in YS.

102 "It is the primary aim of haha yoga to prevent the dissipation of the vital breath,

or prāa … in order to awaken the "serpent force" or kuālinī (King, 1999, p. 71).

175

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

in air, this ordinary mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and

other trace gases. Rather, we are breathing in some kind of disembodied

"universal energy" which has the following features:

Just as akasha is the innite, omnipresent material of the universe, so is prāa

the innite, omnipresent manifesting power of this universe. (p. 147)

Out of prāa is evolved everything we call energy, everything we call force. It

is prāa that is manifesting as gravitation, as magnetism. It is the prāa that is

manifesting as the action of the body, as nerve current, as thought-force. (p.

148)

….prāa is the generalized manifestation of force. (p. 149)

So prāa is just physical energy, but at the same time, it is a special

"spiritual" energy that is responsible for life, mind and consciousness.

e same energy that is working outside as electricity and magnetism,

Vivekananda claims, is changed into ojhas, the state of "super-con-

sciousness" or samādhi, when the yogi's mind is vibrating at the same

frequency as the subtle universal force, the One, the Absolute Spir-

it.103 Processes that characterize life, including those of mental life and

consciousness, are not emergent properties of biochemical matter, but

rather require the work of "cosmic energy" which is quasi-physical and

quasi-spiritual.

Vivekananda makes these radical changes in classical yoga phi-

losophy most nonchalantly and without any explanation. He seems to

assume that the categories of prāa and ākāśa were already familiar to

his Western audiences and therefore brings them center-stage in his

commentary on YS, where they actually do not belong at all.

He was not wrong in this assumption: both ākāśa as "ether" and

prāa as "energy" were innovations of eosophists who had taken

these words from Sanskrit sources and used them as synonyms of ether

and energy of physics. In her Isis Unveiled published in 1877 (when

Vivekananda was only 14-years old), Madame Blavatsky had already

claimed that the universe was bathed in akasha, some kind of subtle

ether that she claimed was similar to the "magnetic uid" of Mesmer. In

103 Here, Vivekananda smuggles in the vocabulary of chakras and kuālinī. He inter-

prets these imaginary meditative aids in the haha yogic tradition as anatomically

real nerve structures lying along the spinal cord. Nothing remotely resembling

these chakras has ever been detected by neuroscience.

176

fact, it was through this medium that she claimed to get telepathic mes-

sages from her Himalayan masters. Likewise with prāa-"energy" par-

allelism, which one nds in her second big book, e Secret Doctrine ,

published in 1885 aer Blavatsky had already moved her Society to Ad-

yar. is linkage was picked by her Indian followers. e eosophist

Shrinivas Iyengar, in his translation of the haha yoga text, Hahayoga

Pradīpikā, published by the eosophical Society in 1893, borrows this

expanded notion of prāa from the Secret Doctrine and makes a clear

distinction between prāa and breathing: "Breath does not mean the

air taken in and breathed out, but the prāa, i.e, the magnetic current

of breath."104 It is well known that just before he started his series of

lectures on YS Vivekananda had requested his publisher to procure for

him a copy of the aforementioned Hahayoga Pradīpikā, along with

copies of Kūrma Purāa and Sākhya Kārikā . It is quite likely, as White

suggests, that "if Vivekananda did not take his lead directly from Mad-

ame Blavatsky, he may have done so indirectly through his reading of

the society's translation of the Pradīpikā ." 105 Even more importantly, it

was the eosophical Society that put the YS on the world map: it is

the eosophists who were the rst to publish English translations of

Patanjali's great work on yoga, rst by Tookarm Tatya in 1885, and M.N.

Dvivedi in 1890. In so many ways, then, Vivekananda was walking the

talk of the eosophists – even though he continued to decry them in

public.

Coming back to the question at hand, what does this fascination

with "subtle uids" that Vivekananda shared with eosophists, mes-

merists and other spiritual movements, have to do with scientization of

yoga? And furthermore, what role does resemblance thinking play in

this scientization?

e answer is simple: restating the philosophy of yoga in terms of

"subtle invisible uids" allowed Vivekananda to unify these beliefs with

modern science. Although the idea of uids so "subtle" that they escape

all detection circulating in the universe may seem strange to us, this

104 Quoted here from White, 2014, pp. 129-30.

105 Quoted here from White, 2014, p. 129. White uses "Little Lamps", as the title of

Pradīpikā.

177

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

corresponded to the concept of ether that was accepted as the cutting

edge science in the 19th century: ether (or aether, as it was sometimes

spelled) was supposed to be the invisible medium that lled the space

through which all waves were transmitted. us all wave and wave-like

entities – heat, light, magnetism and the newly discovered electromag-

netic waves – were thought to be transmitted through some kind of

an ether which was invisible, odorless and did not interfere with the

physical entity. All attempts to nd this invisible ether failed, and nally,

Einstein's theory of special relativity eliminated the need to postulate

ether. e idea of ether is now only of historical interest, and plays no

role in physics.106

But this all-pervasive invisible ether was of great value to spirit-

ualists of all shades, for it bore a strong resemblance with what they

thought of as disembodied spirit, or the animating force, or the breath

of God: they could simply point to the physicist's ether when they

wanted to describe the nature of non-material, invisible yet omnipres-

ent spirit. is way, they could appropriate the language of science of

their time, without accepting the mechanical philosophy which treated

matter as made up of lifeless particles in motion, obeying mathematical

laws which could be experimentally checked.

e resemblance between the vital breath that the yogi controls

through prāāyāma and "cosmic energy" of the universe is not a poetic

metaphor. As his statements quoted above clearly show, in Vivekananda

this equivalence is to be understood in realistic terms: controlling prāa

within the body, the yogi in eect, controls the cosmic energy that causes

the pull of gravity, magnet force and electric current. Clearly, this implies

a resemblance relation in the strong sense described earlier (see sec-

tion 5): entities that resemble each other have the same causal agency.

Indeed, Vivekananda's strong defense of paranormal powers through

yoga makes sense only against this background.

We now have the key to understanding the apparent paradox of

Vivekananda defending occult powers of yoga and still claiming to be

"scientic". To use Paul agard's vocabulary, Vivekananda had made

106 For more details on the idea of ether, see the entry on "Ether" in the Encyclopedia

of the Scientic Revolution, edited by Applebaum (2000).

178

a "mental leap", an analogy, between the occult prāa and the physi-

cist idea of energy. But this mental leap landed him not in science but

in pseudo science, because he continued to think in terms of resem-

blances, and not experimentally established correlations, which are the

hallmark of science.

is tradition of pseudo science involving prāa – or what the

Chinese call "chi", the Japanese "ki", and the New Age "touch thera-

pists" call "human energy elds", or auras – has only grown in popu-

larity globally. e problem with this is that, despite years of rigorous

attempts to detect this so called vital energy and their localized nodes

(chakras) , 107 mainstream science has found nothing. If a denite, peer-

reviewed case study disproving the ability to detect and manipulate

vital energy was needed, it was provided in 1998 by a nine-years old

school girl, Emily Rosa. e experiment showed conclusively that ex-

perts in "therapeutic touch" who claimed to be able to sense "human

energy elds", and "balance" them by moving their hands on a person's

body, were unable to detect the presence or absence of Emily's hand

under their own when they were behind a screen. Emily had designed

this experiment for her 4th grade school fair, and became the youngest

person ever to have a scientic publication in any peer-reviewed scien-

tic journal.108

e underlying problem with Vivekananda and other spiritualists'

equation of spirit with energy, is that energy is a very specic idea in

physics which means the capacity for doing work. As such, it is a prop-

erty of matter, and not a free-oating entity that you can capture out

of thin air, as it were, and transmute into consciousness, sentience or

awareness at will. Energy has no consciousness. And consciousness has

no unique vibration, no auras, no bio-energetic elds – that have never

been detected by even the most sophisticated instruments. Life and

consciousness are properties that emerge out of matter and, as Victor

Stenger put it, "the physics and chemistry of living cells is the same as

107 Which, for all his dislike of haha yoga, Vivekananda happily smuggled into YS

and as he did with prāa, drew unfounded parallels with the human nervous

system revealed by modern medical science.

108 See Rosa, 1998. For a critical look at alternative medicine, see Bausell, 2007.

179

Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda Rewrote Patanjali's Yoga Sūtra c

the physics and chemistry of rocks." No spiritual energy is needed to

explain life.109

11. Conclusion

e great Hungarian philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos once said

that "the problem of the demarcation between science and pseudosci-

ence is not merely a problem of armchair philosophy: it is of vital social

and political relevance."

is could not be truer anywhere than it is in India today. All possi-

ble lines of demarcation between legitimate science and ideas pretend-

ing to be scientic are being erased, with complete disregard of evidence

and logic. In the previous chapter we saw the erasure of boundary be-

tween mythology and science. In this chapter we have grappled with a

far more sophisticated erasure of demarcation between spiritual prac-

tice of yoga and scientic empiricism, and between metaphysical con-

cepts (prana, akasha, chakra and the like) and precisely dened and

experimentally veriable and quantiable concepts like energy, ether

and nerve centers.

is second kind of erasure – pioneered in India by Swami Vive-

kananda – does not recruit gods and goddesses and their supernatural

powers. Indeed, the Swami would have looked askance at the attempts

of his namesake to invoke Lord Ganesh or Karna from the Mahabharata

to make a case for ancient roots of modern medicine. Far from harking

back to the age-old myths, Vivekananda grabbed hold of the cutting-

edge physics of his time and simply laid it on top of the millennia old

guide to spiritual enlightenment, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. He kept the

conceptual framework of the Yoga Sutras – complete with occult pow-

ers and all – but simply re-described it in terms borrowed from 19th

century physics. How Vivekananda carried out this re-description is a

classic example of "resemblance thinking," which has been identied

by prominent philosophers of science as a source of pseudoscience and

cognitive illusions.

109 Stenger, 2007, p. 85.

180

d Science in Saron

180

What Vivekananda started has only grown deeper and wider in In-

dia and in the New Age milieu around the world. Fancier concepts from

quantum physics and cosmology have replaced ether and energy that

Vivekananda had access to at the close of the 19th century. Given the

pervasive, and by now almost taken-for-granted equation between an

undened and undenable spiritual something with physicists' "ener-

gy" in some form or the other, it is important that we become cognizant

of the pseudo-scientic sophistry that lies behind such enterprises. And

it is this sophistry that this chapter has tried to expose.

181

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Index

Al Biruni 57, 112

Archimedes 81-82

"Ayurvedic Anatomical Man" 121-122,

Caraka Samhita 102-107

"Genetic science," in 103-106

Comparative history 4, 16-17, 21, 50-52

Eurocentrism 3, 51-52

Genetic science 102-103

Greek anatomists 115-116

Heritage 8-10, 16

Indian Science Congress 2, 19-20,

Kuhn, omas 100

Lam, Lay-Yong 49, 54-55, 75-78, 87-90

Myth 93-97

Needham, Joseph 17, 43, 45, 54-55, 63, 87-90

Neugebauer, Otto 27, 58, 60

Occam's Razor 106-107

Postmodernism 3, 133-137

Presentism 4, 15-16, 99-102

Pseudoscience 7, 138,141,

Public Intellectuals, 3

Pythagoras 19, 32- 36

Pythagorean eorem 4, 19-48

China, in 42-47

Egypt, in 25-27

194 194 194

Explained 21-25

India, in see Śulvasūtras

Mesopotamia, in

Plimpton 322 28-30

YBC 7289 30-31

Resemblance thinking 131, 139-143

history of 143-147

Scientic Revolution, the 11-14

Scientism 129, 137-138

Spiritualism, and 152-153,

eosophical Society, and 153-155

Sokal, Alan 134, 136-137

Śulvasūtras 36-43

Baudhāyana 37

"Pythagorean eorem" 40

Sushruta Samhita 107-114

Anatomy 112

Buddhist inuences 119-120

Human "dissections" 113-114

Nose reconstruction 108-111

Stagnation 111-112, 117-119, 122, 125

eosophical Society 132, 148-149, 153-155, 161-162,

Vesalius, Andreas 122-125

Vivekananda, Swami 127-180

Akasha as "ether" 172-173

Bengal Renaissance, and156-166

Chicago Address 5, 127-128

Cultic milieu in the US147-155

Patanjali 169, 171-172,174

Prana as "energy" 173-175, 177-178

Raja Yoga 128, 131, 167, 169- 179

Defense of occult powers171

Resemblance thinking, and176-177

Sangh Parivar, and 130-131

Secular le, and 134-135

eosophists, and 164-166, 175-176

Zero 49- 91

Bakshali ms. 84-85

Bhūta-sankhyā 56-57, 68-69

195

Brahmi numerals 59, 65-68

"Counter-culture" 52-53, 71-74,

Counting rods, China 75-78, 82

Decimal 58, 62-63

Gwalior temple 84

Place value 58-60, 71-74

Southeast Asia 83-84

Madhulika Banerjee

The parameters of modern knowledge systems are clearly showing fault lines—that if there is a continuation of the technological systems at the heart of development, neglecting the twin issues of ecology and equity—there is a serious threat to human existence. This article seeks to answer a specific question: in the context of the twenty-first century search of offering alternatives to the hegemonic development paradigm, what kind of knowledges of production in society could possibly be best developed at this point in history? It argues that the answer lies in 'already existing knowledge systems ( AEKS)', accompanied by critical thinking on production, distribution and consumption systems. Locating the production of knowledge in five spaces—historical context, policy formulation, political economic structures, forms of collective action and articulation of contested epistemologies—it argues that when AEKS are understood both in form and transformation in these spaces, that the possibilities they offer for substantial alternatives can be explored.

Michael Matthews

Before its segueing into a fully-fledged metaphysical cosmology, feng shui was merely the collective, passed-down of Chinese and other Asian cultures that needed to attend to environmental realities in order to sow, harvest, herd, and build houses, tombs, and villages; and live safely with whatever comfort could be garnered. Traditionally, feng shui practitioners have distinguished good or vital chi (sheng chi) from bad or torpid chi (ssu chi) according to the function the chi is performing, and this function varies in daily and seasonal cycles. There is a certain naturalism in chi cosmology and metaphysics: change and events in the world are to be explained by procedures occurring within the world, not by intervention from outside, not by 'non-natural' causes. Each of the thousands of contemporary exponents of feng shui and the hundreds of feng shui schools give their own account of chi. The widespread East Asian chi (qi), and Japanese ki, beliefs and practices have affinity with versions of Hindu yogic understandings. They are components of a chi-based worldview.

Amit Prasad

This article makes a case for post-structuralist intervention in history of science and technology. The issue for me is not simply historical/archival elisions and distortions. Rather, following Derrida, I would like to highlight that the presences and absences (i.e. what is seen/shown and what is erased) are systematically related, and a deconstruction of their interplay is necessary to unravel the cultural (un)conscious that often undergirds any historical discourse. Specifically, I explore two (post) colonial implications of Eurocentric historicism that undergird diffusion theories and continue to impact history and sociology of science and technology. First, I investigate how the West not only becomes the center of calculation but also an object of calculation for local hegemony and dominance. Second, through a deconstructive reading of Meera Nanda's critique of Hindu science, I suggest that both Hindu science and its critique are exemplifications of a (post) colonial present.

Renny Thomas
Robert M. Geraci

Ayudha Puja, a South Indian festival translated as "worship of the machines," is a dramatic example of how religion and science intertwine in political life. Across South India, but especially in the state of Karnataka, scientists and engineers celebrate the festival in offices, laboratories, and workshops by attending a puja led by a priest. Although the festival is noteworthy in many ways, one of its most immediate valences is political. In this article, we argue that Ayudha Puja normalizes Brahminical Hinduism within scientific culture through the inclusion of non-Hindus and through scientists' description of the festival as "cultural" rather than "religious."

Stefano Bigliardi

This article, after tracing a precise classification of the exegetical trend known as iʿjāz ʿilmī, summarizes and discusses the criticism leveled at it and examines how the "scientific interpretation" of the Qur'ān is liable to blend with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories to the detriment of a solid harmonization of science and religion and of a genuine appreciation of natural science. Furthermore, the article offers some practical ideas that can be implemented in order to effectively and fairly address iʿjāz ʿilmī in the Muslim world.

Robert Segal

This article presents the approach to religion taken by the Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, edited by Robert Segal. The approach taken is largely, though not wholly, that of the social sciences: anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology. The social scientific approach to religion is pitted against the approach taken by the field of religious studies itself—an approach called "religionist." The claims by the religionist approach against the social sciences are identified and refuted.

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Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303857130_Science_in_Saffron_Skeptical_Essays_on_History_of_Science