The Ancient Indic Roots of Modern Knowledge Systems | Raj Vedam

[Music] thank you everybody for uh coming today lovely sunday and spending your time here that's excellent wonderful i'd like to thanks regen for organizing this talk as usual wonderful to be back in delhi so today like talked about indic roots of modern knowledge systems and even before i start the talk i'd like to clarify uh anticipating certain pushback on this there are people who say uh am i being excessively jingoistic by trying to say that in the knowledge indeed knowledge came from most of the world knowledge systems came from india is that what i'm trying to say things of this nature and i assure you not i'm a person who's primarily seeing the existing narratives deconstructing them and trying to see is there an alternative narrative that fits the evidence and i'm presenting to you whatever that is so if you've seen my earlier talks you perhaps appreciated the antiquity of the indian civilization i'm not going to be repeating that over here so given that the civilization is pretty ancient people have been around india for a pretty long time and have had time to encounter problems or issues or ideas that confront the human civilization and propose solutions to them so that's the main reason you find that a lot of knowledge systems came out in india so i'm going to be talking about technological heritage mathematical astronomical medical and music so in ancient indian philosophical systems we had talked about this earlier i won't talk much about this but there's a prelude this is a prelude to tell you that here's a civilization that placed great emphasis on the generation of knowledge so the knowledge in it was pramana and different schools of thought came up with different ideas on what are the admissible parts for knowledge systems on nyaya yoga vaishashika and most of the knowledge systems of the ancient past only differed in what was admissible as a source of knowledge for example the charvaka said perception alone only if they can see it then it's something that is violent so they rejected the vedas as a source of knowledge they said only direct experience is what gives rise to knowledge that is their way of looking at things buddhism looked at perception and inference which is echoing the journey of gautama buddha he went through some trials and tribulations on his path to nirvana and so it reflects that kind of a system over here so you see that what i presented in the earlier page samkhya nyaya they only differed from the admissible schools samke was perception and inference nyaya took this this and comparison and analogy and so on so when you go by the time you reach advaita it's pretty open in trying to take different pathways to knowledge that's the way to put it so the example that i give is in today's world if you're doing your phd thesis you typically might want to refer to some professor maybe from berkeley or harvard or some such place and he might say that he has proved a certain theorem in his works and on the basis of his theorem reference one i'm going to prove my theorem and my thesis is based on that work so you're relying on the chapter pramana of some professor who came before you you have accorded or privileged his ideas as really good and you take that as an authentic source of knowledge based on that your idea of thesis that's the way we do it today but in the ancient indian world depending on the sampradaya in which you belong to various means of admitting knowledge were present that is the bottom line given a comparative outlook on on life primarily to see the conduciveness to knowledge not all cultures had a philosophy that was conducive to knowledge so at a very high level it has a dharmic in the western abrahamic categories over here goal of life was to dispel a video journey across lifetimes aware of karma dharmic living and the goal is to attain moksha whereas here to follow a divine dictated law for judged admission to heaven or eternal damnation and you have one life to live that is a philosophy of a life over there these big questions of today how do the dharmic people and the abrahamic people encounter that theory of evolution we are enjoined in dharmic systems to use the darshanas to appreciate whatever is vidya and avidya and make sense of theory of evolution whereas over here it's against the history centrism of creation that creation was a god mandated event one particular point in time god created the universe and so on climate change we understand our role in contributing to uh carbon and if we reduce the carbon footprint i say that's equal to reducing or karmic footprint we understand our karma and live dharmically so if you can afford to drive a let's say a hybrid or an electric car you do that rather than driving a gas guzzler you have a conscious choice in what you choose to choose to make out of life so in in the abrahamic way of looking at things god has put man in charge of creation thus this has led to unabated destruction today and there's an a tendency to deny climate change because climate change does not exist god has put you in charge of everything sustainable living and compassion for all life we recognize the atman in our life live dharmically mindful of the karma that we are generating over here man has sovereignty or all life animals have no soul therefore there isn't compassion to animals and we can exploit at will the issue of an ancient earth we can use darshana's to appreciate vidhyana vidya again again due to history centrism of creation the earth is not ancient in this way of thinking and tomorrow if there is life to be found outside earth then uh we would again have no problem in the dharmic framework appreciate using vidya vidya whereas in the western frameworks due to history centralism of creation there would be some problems over here so the bottom line is i'm trying to show what is the outlook on life and is it conducive to knowledge or not so that said i'm going to now breeze through the conclusion of my talk because i don't think i'll have time to get to the conclusion so i will straightaway talk about the conclusion so the roots of medicine we see medicine roots in atharva veda which led to ayurveda where companions of indeed medical knowledge the mittanis hittites egyptians chinese were influenced by by index systems medieval europe depended strongly on drugs from india arab medicine based on ayurveda since bin carson's invasion of synth ayurveda formed the corpus of european knowledge through right through the colonial era and ayurveda was taught in british medical schools in india till 1880 until such time their own systems came up the digestion of ayurveda was complete and it formed the core pharmaceutical methods in in the system i'm also going to be touching on mathematics and uh it's it's it's it's very pretentious to try and say i'm going to cover all of indict knowledge systems in a one-hour talk i mean that's very insulting so there's no way we can do it so this is going to be a snippet snippets here and there so math had origins in the vedas with number systems large numbers operations we know that silva sutras are both showing greatly refined knowledge of geometry square roots and so on by aryabhatta's time we have greatly refined trigonometry spherical geometry in algebra suri sadhanta shows intricate math and astronomical knowledge and refers to extinct siddhantas we'll talk about that by the time you come to brahmagupta bhaskara 1 and 2 greatly added to a corpus of works on algebra positional match 0 and so on careless school of math greatly refined astronomical models and developed the essence of calculus and right down to our times ramadan continued the tradition of indian mathematicians with deep results in infinite series like to also talk on the roots of music so i'd like to talk to you about how the earliest music system musical systems originated from the summer veda the three tonal liturgical music in some way the gave way to the fight note the seven tone to the twelfth semitone scales we'll talk about that musical intervals are based on chord ratios there's not a c h word it is a c o r d chords silver sutras chords chord ratios pythagoras use the same ratios and as originator of the western musical traditions we will talk about pythagoras and how we use certain ratios of music considering it to be divine and erected a statue for the goddess of music news as we talk about that talk about roots of astronomy where initially astronomical knowledge embedded in stories then we went to heliocentric model which is encoded in satepath abramna and i3a brahmana used by the greek aristarchus gave way to sudantic astronomy and many of these works are lost today mathematical models to estimate the course of sun moon and planets development of trigonometry spherical geometry this is also used by the greeks models to estimate eclipses duration length of shadows arya butter estimation of circumference of the earth in curvature brahmagupta and the rate of precision bhaskara 2 model for partial heliocentrism to sumayaji copernicus was influenced by aristacus who was influenced by these works and he exchanged the position of sun and earth in the known models and he came about the heliocentricism many centers of learning were destroyed in india by muslim invasions and the last great classical astronomer was pathani samantha chandrasekhar and we'll talk about that then the roots of our modern systems so today we cannot live in a world where you are not digitally connected you're not digitally connected like you don't exist so the basis of everything is in digital systems whether it is computers cell phones internet and very very pervasive digital systems the nasdia super has got examples like this a and not a in its kind of logic this very very clearly a boolean algebra kind of a formulation and this is not only one when you go to nyaya and other schools of logic you'll find that there's a lot of logical statements encoded in them so cole brooks were wrote a work on indian logic in 1824 and this work greatly influenced these two gentlemen this de morgan and this is george bull so anybody here who's an electrical engineer will recognize these names because these are the people who wrote the algebraic theory of boolean algebra once that was done then it was very easy to progress from there on to technological innovation so it influenced george bull and t morgan and bull's wife mary everest bull wrote a letter to bose both outlining the influence of indian logic and bull and de morgan so the use of boolean algebra is what has enabled the design development of complex digital systems so the key over here is not to claim that indians invented anything there is no indian who invented the transistor transistor was invented by shockley so we know that we know that so but the point is ideas don't come in isolation we live in a connected world ideas go from one place to the other ideas germinate our thinking and from that thinking we could move on to something else you all know that when you're discussing with your friends suddenly you get a brain wave but if you're sitting in your room working alone you probably would not have chance in that kind of thinking so that is what i'm laying on a path for saying that indian knowledge systems seeded world knowledge systems and so we are the recipients of a knowledge system starting from a tragic trick from the ancient indians that's what i'm trying to emphasize over here so i'd like to very quickly set the stage by showing you lovely pictures these are pictures that will demonstrate the technological progress of our ancestors so here's a lovely temple of the lights of ralph you could make out this is the rani kibab as you already noticed it and 1050 observe how beautiful the layout of this whole thing is many of you have heard about radhishura in tanjavur and built in 10-10 lovely temple maybe the biggest temple i've seen at least i don't know there's a bigger one in india this is the it's called periakoville for a reason it's a very big temple in maharashtra elora i don't believe this date i just read a work yesterday where a person talked about some greeks mentioning the alora caves around 260 or so current era so there's no way i trust these dates so we know about this very lovely rocket temples it's an engineering marvel if you look at it and in haleiwa i apologize for the quality of the picture but then these appear to be pillars that are turned on a lathe very very smoothly done very round and so on this is in rameshwaram it was built in the 11th century and once again in 1750 and you can see how these vanishing lines parallel lines as you can see lovely perspective over here and this is one more konark odisha we know about this also now when you see these things the first thing that must come to your mind is how did our ancestors build these things is it that the king gave some money to the people who do these things and they took some chisels and started working on it with what how did they do that because today we know that you're going to build a huge building like this you go to a cad or somebody who does computer aided design does the layout does the engineering calculations does how much of load can each pillar take based on that they build buildings today how did your ancestors do this there is a question to my surprise i found that they were using engineering scale diagrams way back in the 10th century way back in the 9th century this is from a talk with the professor aaron eingar you can google for this and find it on youtube and he shows this particular work there's a book over here out of which he shows these pictures these are all palm leaf diagrams so you can see that each of these is a palm leaf diagram and these palm leaf diagrams placed one below the other gives you a perspective of the entire temple as such and if you look at this in detail there is actually detailed calculations that show you how each section should be built even the wheel at konark detail instructions on how that wheel should be built and not just that if you go you can see deeper and deeper into these works it even talks about how much of work is involved how much of money to pay this so in other words engineering work order it's even telling you that i need five people to work on this particular aspect that we paid it so much this is what they have to give and so on so for lots of interesting information take a look at this intricate information on how this temple should be built so this when i saw it blew me away because i said till then i was under the impression that all right engineering came to us once the europeans came here and only after that we're using mathematics and building these huge buildings this is a revolution that there was actually in this case we have the palm leaves we don't have the palm leaves and many other places so we don't even know how they were built if you go to bradisha this epigraphy that says who built it but doesn't say how it was built in konark we are lucky that actually our palm leaves the detail the entire construction process so amazing amazing piece of work very brief on metallurgy metal metallurgy fines mentioned rigveda veda from earlier than 3000 bce copper bronze iron wood steel gold silver and zinc we have archaeological artifacts from 2300 here's for example a copper plate which could have been a prototype for a printing block in addition knives and you know the famous pillar over here and so on so what i've done over here is i started out the series with showing lovely pictures of indian engineering heritage from that i am jumping to selected profiles for indian mathematical heritage the subu sutras these form perhaps some of the earliest works next to the rigveda the rigveda itself has got an enumeration of the numbers it's got an enumeration of powers of numbers and so on and so forth basic operations of mathematics but silva sutra is one of the six disciplines of vedanga and the mathematics over here has got right angle triangles geometry square roots and numerals concept of zero from panninian rules shattapata brahmana shows all of this knowledge in the construction of altars and so on and therefore the silva sutras are probably dated to earlier than 3000 bce because later on i'll show you how the satyrpath satyapatha brahmana can be taken to that kind of a time interval so this knowledge was transferred to west asia around 1800 bc following migrations after the drying up of saraswati as well as a 200 year monsoon hiatus that we had we'll talk about this a little later so here is a square root of two as discussed in silver sutra this is critically important for us because this forms a battleground with professor otto nujbower who says that indians got their knowledge of mathematics from babylon based upon certain ideas we'll talk about that little later and it was based upon this tablet over here which is in the yale university collection the babylon cuneiform tablet over here it seemed to show in base 60 system how to calculate the square root of two soluble sutra in this verse and this thing tells you exactly how this calculation should be done it can be shown to be based on successive approximation by averaging and it comes out to be the same square root of two as over here very very interesting over here so the question comes who borrowed from whom or did they borrow at all the base is obviously different and uh otto nojbawa seems to think that it was babylonian and we'll try to see why those ideas were surya siddhanta is an amazing text we don't know the problems of that we don't know when it was written but there are statements that say that maybe arya butter's time but indian works always built upon a core body of work that is written by somebody else layered upon by somebody else layered upon by somebody else so by the time it comes hari but we know there are pretty ancient sections as well as recent sections so this one has got chapters that talk about all these things here i'm not going to read it but very very very modern looking knowledge systems that you can see over here that talks about astronomy as well as mathematics there are also time measurements in surya sadanta which if you take the second if you map it to our well-known second as one you can see that they go to powers of the second up to a cycle of brahma 10 to the power of 22 all the way to 10 to the power of minus 7 i still don't know why indians would have had a need to measure time to 10 to the power of minus 7 it's enormously short interval i don't even know what would have been there to measure such a passage of time but it is there a very very brief history of numbers indians we know invented decimal numbers at least 2000 years ago it was adopted by arabs in ninth century there was a book by al-qarashmi on calculation hindu numbers and the book by al-khandi and the use of hindu numbers and this diffused to spain in 1976 there were three monks who wrote about this and there's a gerbert of aarlik who wrote a book on multiplication and division he became the pope later pope sylvester ii and used abasas based on hindu numerals and fibonacci in fibonacci's book in the margins you can see there's a translation from a latin roman numerals to the indian numerals so that showed the mapping on how this was to be done so he introduced the hindu number zero decimal place in 12th century but even then europe did not adopt it because the church believed that anything coming from the muslims or others were works of satan and you should not take those works so although these ideas were introduced they still use roman numbers and so on until about the 15th century 1522 when this german he explained how to use positional arithmetic and decimal use for the calculators over the mechanics and others how to use these numbers once he did that then there was widespread replacement of roman numerals the 16th century so this is the background of how they they they started using indian numbers some recommended reading there's an origin of mathematics by satan burke and this book by uh gee work is joseph as well as this book by irfa and obviously not put it here but the works by ck raju also all give a pretty good perspective on these things some of the greats on indian astronomy i don't have to read these i've already done this in the past so this is brahma gupta who did some enormously interesting works he studied earlier works proposed solutions of linear quadratic indeterminate equations sum of squares and cubes rules for zero operation negative positive numbers theorems and geometry trigonometry interpolation astronomy quadratics amazing amounts of works by by this gentleman bhaskara 1 he wrote on the zero positional arithmetic and the approximation for the sine function addition this approximation for sine function is very very accurate even today you could substitute it in your algebra equations if you didn't want to use this transcendental function bhaskara the second he wrote siddhanta shiromani he also estimated the position of equinox between amazing number over here we'll talk about this little later he had elements of differential calculus also so amazing a continuation of works by indic people madhav sangama grammar in all of these expressions you see here were done by him they were all infinite series and he proposed how these infinite series can be expressed and this is work so he's the founder of the kerala school of astronomy and math worked in infinite series calculus trigonometry algebra it trades a solution of non-linear equations and gevarges says his mathematics was transmitted to europe a century before newton by the church and a lot of others following him this is one of the books that is in the news these days because this is written by somebody called jaishta deva who was in the same school of madhava he wrote a malayalam compendium of works of madhava nilakanta somayaji parameshwara and jaishtadeva and achita prasadi all these people seems to have foundation of calculus predates gregory and newton contains astronomy mathematics infinite series integral solutions series expansion integration differentiation amazing amazingly modern pieces of work before the europeans had a clue about doing these things more than 100 to 200 years before that the european line is that there's a person called vish who in 1832 published a paper on yuktivasa long after newton and so on however indicators like give or kiss and others state that these works are transmitted much earlier to the church by other by the church and and trade also like to very very quickly go through the astronomical heritage of hindus very ancient knowledge is encoded the metaphor of stories so if you go to very ancient works and look for mathematical astronomy you're not going to find it you're going to find stories and the encoding of the stories is what contains information you learn from that later periods saw mathematical treatment of astronomy this is a citadel period we'll talk about that just a little bit so we know that there are star trails if you look at the northern hemisphere look to the north skies you have drua over here if you keep a camera open in the evening you'll soon get these star trails that you see over here and the earliest astronomy is encoded as stories in vedic literature we have a story that the saptharishi's encircle dhruva everybody knows the story right we are told that saturdays go around and that really recounts this knowledge of this information so the early indians in the rig vedic period already had knowledge of the rotation of the earth of this nature early indians also had a clear eye to the equinox and solstice in your house if you have an east facing window you look at where the extremal rays of the sun come at eight o'clock in the morning and make a chalk mark over there wherever the extreme race every week one week later eight o'clock make a mark again next week eight o'clock make a mark again pretty soon you'll find the sun's extremal rays go from north all the way to the south for six months then the rate rate races back and goes back to the north for six months so using no more technology than a six-year-old child with a chalk mark you can trace out over a period of a year what is the extremal solstice point in the north and the south you could figure out both of these things you could also figure out the duration of the solar year knowing how much time it takes from here to here could figure out what the solar year you could figure out the equinox position you could figure out the source dispositions so our indians were very very conversant with these things uttarayana dakshinayana is mentioned even the puranas they could figure out the length of the solar year they could figure out that we need to add an adi kamasa in rigvedic times itself that to synchronize between the lunar calendar and the solar calendar they knew we needed to add a adika masa right vedic period so very very ancient logic we're talking about we need to talk about precision because precision is a critically important phenomenon for us to understand the earth in addition to rotating about its axis and pointing the northern hemisphere to polaris it is also tracing a slow path in the sky what is tracing the axis of rotation where it is pointing to now we're pointing to dhruva where does pointing to traces is a slow part that takes 26 000 years to complete and that is the precision cycle because of the precision cycle where we are pointing changes today we are pointing at polaris but when yagni valkyr wrote shatapatha brahmana were pointing at tuban thuban was a pool star there was a period of time when abhijit was a pole star brahmareshi and that is vega so precision does this to us vritta garga had already estimated the precision rate at 36 000 years brother approximately 500 bce or earlier he had already estimated this at that time bhaskara ii who lived in the 10th century 11th century he had estimated this to 25461 years amazing prowess by ancient indians to have done something like this so the indian astronomical model was one of nakshatras and rashi i've talked about this in earlier talks too so i'm not going to spend too much time on this bottom line it was a division of the sky in 13 and one third degree segments 27 of them they also divided the sky in 30 degree segments the 12 rashes and they also had a concept of month if the full moon appeared over the chitra nakshatra that month was referred to as a chaitra masa so indians in some parts of the country use a full moon as a marker in some other parts of the country they use a new moon as a marker so a manta month or the purnia month or month in different calendar systems you have these things so they had a concept of nakshatra of the day they had a concept of a month lunar month they had a concept of a solar year and they were able to now use that knowledge that evolve enormous mathematics to do yogas and other such things we will see that very very presently so here is a listing of the nakshatras in two of our ancient books the vedanga yotisha suri sadanta and the principal star which is aligned with these things so this mapping came about when the british came to india and they asked the pundits what is that nakshatra they'd say what the nakshatra is the pundits and the british should map it to their western systems that's why today we have a mapping of this nature if you're wondering how old is the nakshatra model well at least as old as in this particular reference if you use a griffith translation you see i have highlighted some names here it's talking all over the place of different nakshatra names over here so at least as old as atharva veda we know that the nakshatra model is that ancient ancient indians also noted something called the cyanotic and the sidereal months so from new moon to new moon it takes 29.5 days and that's referred to as a synodic month however if you go from the nakshatra if you start at chitra nakshatra and you want to see how long it takes to come back to that nakshatra that takes 27.3 days so there's a difference there's a difference between these two full moon to full moon or from the backdrop of the skies indians knew about these things and they wanted to reconcile between these two cycles in the observed solar year that gave rise to several insights adi kamasa the different yugas the great cycles we had the five-year cycle the other 19-year cycle the samatsara cycle 60-year cycle of jupiter and saturn all the way to the chatur yuga cycles all of these were outcomes of intellectual expression trying to make sense of the movement of the heavenly bodies and those kinds of things so indians use their brains to try and understand this phenomenon make sense out of this that's what gave rise to all of these things so today we know that we mark the passage of time using the panchanga panchanga is a multi-dimensional measurement typically we use a mahorta which is a 1 30 of a day or a 48 minute interval in which you make reference to nakshatra titi vara yoga and karna so these are the five dimensional measurements of time which indians use traditionally and even today traditional indians make use of this kind of a measurement of time i'm not sure you can see this from back there but i thought i'll very very quickly give you a brief background on indian astronomy when ancient indians saw the sky what did they see so this is today's night sky in new delhi so this is the horizon and this is the west direction north and east and this is polaris this circle is a precision circle that i talked to you about and here is abhijit and whenever indians talked about nakshatra for the day it was always in relation to when the moon appears over the eastern horizon what nakshatra is it in what section of the sky is it in so today when the moon appears in the eastern horizon i'm not sure the time i can't even read it here not going to make a guess but when it appears of the eastern horizon it appears to be in the rohini nakshatra this is rohini nakshatra so today's nakshatra would be rohini because when the moon appears that's where it is so in addition to that you see these circles over here these circles are projections of earth's latitudes and longitudes in the sky so they become celestial coordinates so this is the celestial north pole 90 degrees 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 and zero so zero the celestial equator on the day of the equinox the sun would be exactly on the celestial equator okay so the utharana is six months of a northward course of the sun so it goes up to 23.3 degrees north then the sun retraces crosses the equinox and goes minus 23.3 degrees to the south indians knew all these things so these were the cardinal positions so they could look at the sky and figure out the extremal points where it should come and what is the nakshatra against which a certain solstice or an equinoxes appear and they recorded these things they recorded these things in many many uh of our texts based on that we can have an understanding of how ancient these things are one big example and they've got these verses five and six and six and seven these verses say there was a winter solstice in the dhanishta nakshatra so the colonial indologist tried to make sense out of this winter solstice the danish nakshatra and they cranked back because of precision that's no longer a true statement when winter solstice happens we are not at the nakshatra it happened in the past so they cranked back in time and tried to figure out when did that happen and various scholars gave various times but the closest was colebrook and dikshit who came to 1400 bce and it turns out that i simulated this in the calendar and planetarium software winter solstice happens here when the sun reaches 23 or 24 degrees approximately over here to the south and here is danishta so this clearly shows 1440 bce would be the date for vedanga jyotisha why is that important it's important because you can use this to debunk some of the things that max miller did max miller had used a linguistic model and tried to say that the chandra's period is born the mantra period is one the sutra period is one he clammed all these things from 1200 bc to around 200 bce and he said that the jyotishas or the last sutra period composed between 600 not in 600 maybe 300 bc to 200 bce but then the vedanga jyotisha seems to have been written in 1440 bc so this was a huge hit to him towards the end of his career when people criticized him saying what about this you're talking about a particular date for the vedanga judiciary but the astronomy inside says 1440 bce this led to certain things in predictable uh ways i'll talk about that little later shattapata brahmana yagna valkyrie has got a statement that kritika never suffers from the east i'm not going to go into details of all of these things why why it was so but you have a helical rising of the kritika nakshatra and this would have happened on an equinox point and this equinox point is a circle and what you see is that this particular date works out to 2982 bce against an affirmation of the antiquity of a brahmana period again it goes back and hits against max miller's dating who said that brahmana period is 800 bc and so on you have a pretty ancient uh data encoded inside chatapatha brahmana we have an ancient epoch encoded in tables i'm not going to read all of these things but many of the puranas temple epigraphy and the books like surya siddhanta and others seem to be referring to an epoch that is pretty ancient so this lead gentle who came to india is a french man who came to pondicherry he got some tables in the brahmins and published it as tables of tribal war he sent it off to his friend cassini in italy to analyze that and cassini came back and said that it refers to an epoch as midnight of february 18 3102 bce so all of these things are referring to that particular epoch and that turns out to be a rare conjecture of planets sun moon in the river nakshatra and some people refer to this as the start of the kali yuga and also an attempt to do a dating for the mahabharata i know there are multiple opinions on this but this is one of the dates for that so simulating this in the planetarium software you say february 18 3102 here is revuti nakshatra this is the ecliptic on which all the heavenly bodies go and you find jupiter you find venus moon you find the sun you find saturn you find mercury and mars all of them are clustered in the river nakshatra a very very powerful affirmation that is a vedantic concept in an epoch of time in which they should the so-called aryans shouldn't even be in india because they are supposed to come only in 1500 bce very very powerful statement like to talk to you about aditi who's the mother of the gods aditi with kashyapa gave rise to adityas rudras vasus and they're supposed to be the devas and daityas bhagavad-gita talks about the six-month course of trina which is the part of the devas and then the part of the daitya such as dakshinayana and we get the impression that the mother should be equally distant from her sons whether it is devas or daityas she's got to be equidistant so you get the feeling that there's something to do with an equinox and aditi over here if you're thinking that you're right because that's what happens now for nakshatra punervashu the deity is aditi i'm not going to go into great details of why that is but balagangada tilak as well as abhayankar called this out and said the ear of aditi is 6000 bce it refers to the vernal equinox at punerva nakshatra and you find that the vernal equinox position is over here and the nakshatra at that time is punarvashu if you simulate this in the planetarium software it comes to 6000 bce so this is the era that abhayankar and balaganga tilak refer to as the era of aditi there's one more interesting data point with ashwinis ashwinis are there all over the place we know about the story of sun that he married sanjana and they had a twins ashwinis and sanjina couldn't take the heat so she decided to run away from the sun as far away as she could get from the sun to be cool if sun was in the winter solstice sanjin is in the summer summer solstice point if sun was there she's as far away from sun as possible she did that because she wanted to go to the cooler region she left the shadow chair and left and you find that there are a lot of mentions of ashwinis in the rig veda a lot of verses over here our ancients did not just say these stories because they loved to say stories they were encoding astronomical information in some of these stories so this particular episode along with this information ashwinis is interpreted by tilak and abbayankar as a heliacal rising of ashwini nakshatra because all of the rigveda you find versus like ashwinis appear at dawn for their share of sacrifice okay ashwinis appear at dawn for their share of sacrifice based upon that information you see the heliacal rising of ashwini with the solstice because in the northern hemisphere that's when it's cooler because that's when sanjin has fled from the sun and so on and this turns out to be 7200 bce very very early time frame in the rig vedic period and there are a whole lot of ancient observations i'm not going to read these things pv vartak has got about the seasons the rig veda and various other texts puranas and so on a whole lot of dates over there so what i've done so far is trying to emphasize to you that many of our ancient texts are encoding early information as stories so these stories are then the rigvedas and the brahmanas and other places if you do not know the key to unlocking the wisdom it's a silly mythological story for you which makes no sense but if you knew what the significance was you suddenly see their encoding dates and encoding information and so on i refer you to a talk of mine ted talk where i talk about some some of these things how information is encoded in stories so siddhanti gastronomy is a particular phase when indian astronomy went from encoding stories as metaphors and so on into using mathematics using mathematics to understand the course of the heavenly bodies and so on we know that there were many early sedantic works that are lost the surya sadanta talks about these things but it also says those works are no longer available even the author of the surya sadanta is referring to such an ancient epoch saying that those works are not available anymore that's what you see over here so the texts are lost but the citations remain this shows a gradual development of mathematical astronomy in the ancient past it's very very important because all of a sudden you have arya butter there with an enormously developed mathematics leading us to critique that maybe aryabhatta got his knowledge from the greeks and so on this is the critique that comes out against us but then when you look at the antiquities some of these works over here it's clear that there's a gradual development of mathematics i'm not going to read all these things there's a deep tradition of mathematical astronomy whether you look at vedanga jyotisha surya siddhanta vashishtra siddhanta paitamaha romaka pulisa siddhanta aryabhatta's work varhamira's commentaries on the five siddhantas mahabhaskarya a lot of information that there's a tradition of knowledge in india a slow growth accumulation of knowledge rather than a borrowing of knowledge from outside till such point when we came to nila khan to sumiyaji he already had a partial heliocentric model he had a model in which he thought the earth is stationary the sun is going around the earth and all the planets are going around the sun so he said that venus mars saturn jupiter all go around the sun and the sun along with all these things goes around the earth and the same model was used by tycho brahe in the in europe so you see there's a transmission of ideas from one place to another giving rise to a continuity of thought well there was a early attempt to discredit indian astronomy because like i said max mueller had come with a certain linguistic model and dated some of the vedas to certain periods of time and it turned out that somebody came and said confronted him and said that you know vedanga jyotisha is 1440 bce rigveda seems to have aditi's episode in ashwini's episode balaganga tilak he called out those criticisms confronted with all these things max mueller finally in this book he writes a four word very fiercely defends his position and he says he can accept only cole brooks date because 1400 bce is after arden invasion of 1500 bc and others he says hindu astronomy is unreliable same thing with this gentleman over here john bentley says that hindu astronomy is unreliable and these kind of views are loosely flaunted to the present times by index scholars i have talked to professors who are living today who you'd normally think are index scholars but even they have espoused views like this saying that intake astronomy is unreliable i think you can make such statements only if you had no idea about hindi gastronomy then you would make these kind of silly statements i talked earlier about otter news bower he is a very powerful man who set the stage for how western world views indian astronomy indian mathematics and so on this is a book that he wrote exact sciences and antiquity so his claims were the length of longest to shortest day is three is to do in both hindu and babylonian astronomy starts on page number 162. he makes a claim so he starts seeing parallels in babylonia as well as in indian astronomy he says as well as lead gentle lead gentle who saw how the thermal astronomers were using calculations to make uh duration of eclipse when the eclipse will uh start and so on he encoded this algorithm they actually went through a process of half an hour of calculation using shells and so on so he made a note of all the calculations and sent it off and based upon that he's saying they use something called linear function to compute the moon's motion that's what the thermal astronomers are doing after half an hour of calculation they said the eclipse will start at this time eclipse will get over at this time this is the duration of the eclipse all that he said is exactly the same as what was done in babylon in page number 165 he makes this claim something called a zigzag linear function the terminology as well as the zodiac name he says matches babylonia varamira he says incorrectly copied constants of planets from babylon and he concludes that indians copied astronomy from greeks and babylonians now i strongly urge people to read subash cock's work on babylonian and indian astronomy early connections where he makes a powerful rebuttal of all of these ideas so please do read this particular work i'm not going to go into details his student was pingree so pingree was auto newspower student and he mistranslated a nepali copy of this yagnaveshwara's yamana jataka and he continued claims of his teacher in indian astronomy that we incorrectly borrow from the greeks and babylonians the ratio of three is to two use of linear functions use of water clock concept of titi use of two inter calculate months five that is every five years it synchronizes concept of five year yoga once again refer you to subashkak who does a concise rebuttal of these things also case shukla shukla has also basically debunked some of these works that he did as well as mark bill mark he's also recently come out with works that says pingree fabricated findings misread and conjecture to arrive at conclusions very very strong statements from both bill mark as well as shukla that pingree had made incorrect understandings of yavana jataka and the translations of those things anyway these are the received wisdom that we have today nobody questions pingree and nobody questions auto news power so whenever you see works that claim that indians got knowledge from the greeks the babylonians you should understand that they are using newt bowers works as well as pingree's works this lady is the student of pingree so it's a three-generation paramparano so she's a kim lovka so she critiques subash kak's astronomical code of rigveda she subscribes to the aryan invasion theory this book on mathematics in india in page six to eight she says that she's leaning towards aryan vision theory if you subscribe to aryan invasion theory you have some constraints put on your thinking you cannot go outside those constraints those constraints will require you to assume knowledge came to india from outside so once she does that she also appears to be open to the babylonian transmission issue whether it came from india or babylon she appears to be open to that she discards the idea that careless school influenced europe in these stages she says that there's no influence of kerala on europe european mathematics again that's based upon certain assumptions that wish and other such things on the whole she's got a refreshing book but it's got a strong eurocentric subtext and you need to be careful reading that she reconstructs paramashira's expansion of the sine function and shows because of the factor of four instead of six she says it was a crude approximation rather than understanding taylor series taylor series is a mathematical entity where you take a non-linear function you can expand it as infinite series this is the basis of all of our today's technological works it's the basis of that once you have a linear function then you can start doing predictions and things like that and it appears that indian mathematicians from the kerala school of math had up to three terms of the taylor series taylor series the later term that came but then up to three terms because a factor four was used instead of six she says it is not based on understanding but by a crude approximation and she shows how that approximation was got in other words she's working just like pingree and just like auto newspower to show that indians got knowledge from babylonians and greeks so they had a labor very hard to go against the flow because there's overwhelming evidence from this side that says that indian knowledge went to babylons and the greeks so that is what it conclusions initially astronomical knowledge encoded stories later siddhantic astronomy saw a strong development of mathematics we have a long trajectory of knowledge from earliest works of pathani samantha mathematics partial heliocentric census model was the heights of accomplishment astronomy learning was greatly impeded by muslim invasions once who jain was destroyed and so on and so forth many of the knowledge systems are gone eurocentric attacks on indian math and astronomy from colonial to present times are dictated by difference to the rn invasion theory model so if you debunk the rna invasion theory model all these constraints fall none of these assumptions are true anymore the field is open to fresh interpretation and other things we're talking about the medical heritage of ancient india i'll show you that we had the most ancient medical systems in the world impacting every civilization in the world so in the hermeneutics of ayurveda surendra nadas gupta he says medicine was the most important of physical sciences it was intimately connected with samkhya and vaisheshika physics is the origin of logical statements encoded in yaya sutra everything needs a killer application right once you have a killer application then your thinking is very clear and he says medicine was a killer application in order to diagnose what a person has you must logically go could it be this could it be that could it be this could it be that and that kind of a thing so he said is the origin of logical statements so uh we i'm not going to talk about this very much over here atharva veda and ayurveda so basically wanted to show that indian thinking always existed in cooperation with the philosophy of the land there was no break between this is science this is philosophy everything was entitled with each other so how was disease and ill health scene disease and ill health was seen due to unwholesome diet which required ayurveda to cure or if you look at the psychological aspects due to your karma fuller and transgressions that's why you have a certain condition maybe mental condition or something else it required praise chitta and practice rituals and other such things to cure so in other words it's a very neat understanding of both the physical aspect as well as the mental aspect and these kind of things we all know hiroshima summit 120 chapters in five sections plus 66 later interpolations into this he discusses a whole lot of subjects as you can see over here describes 1120 diseases describes a human anatomy how many bones muscles veins and so on describes surgical methods i'm not going to read these things and he also describes 121 surgical instruments so that is the enormous scientific encoding this compendium that he did shishwata samita here's an example of the palm leaf this is from the la county museum it's a 12th century work in nepal that's how these words survived and until such time it was committed down to the modern book and other such things they were written in palm leaves like this so here are some of the surgical instruments that is then shush of the samita and you can take a look at this and say wow it looks like these look like modern instruments over here but then this is used by indians at a very ancient time for all kinds of operations he also use a kettlebell today we think that dissection and other things came from the west and they are the ones from gallaudet onwards roman times those are people who did these things but if you take a look and shush the summit it says cover a dead body with kosa grass place an edge of the water river let after three days take it out and wipe out successive layers of epidermis and dermis the muscles bini by gently rubbing it over the soft brush thus the smallest and thinnest arteries which would have swelled and obtained a distinct extinction are made palpable everywhere even to the minotaur's details in other words he said how we can use a dead body to understand the internal working of the organs and things like that this is there so these are all western timelines over here so it's it got its inspiration from atarva veda which went to punerva or the baylor sumatra agni vasa's this is the citation trial for these works once again 120 chapters and eight stanas i'm not going to read these things but very very intricate knowledge of diseases and treatments and how we do various things very very interesting i'd like to talk about bohr manuscript boho manuscript is the earliest extent manuscript that we have of indian medicine this is found in xinjiang province in 1890 birchbach document written in prakrit gupta brahmi script it seems to be a subset of character samita refers to rishi zatriya harita parishara gargashi vashishta and accepts the dosha's three doshasvata pitta kappa but also talked to rakhta dosha this was translated by rudolph harnell in this particular work and this is how it appears so rodol fornal was a person who dated sushruta to around 600 bce and how did he do that he basically said the jataka records that medicine was taught in taksha sheila as well as in kashi so he places sushruta to the east at kashi and charaka is a physician in the court of king kaneshka and atreya as a contemporary of srishthan takshila so one person he places here other person he places over here then he plays as yagna valkyrie author of shatapatha brahmana the court of king janaka of vaidahi and the contemporary of ajata shatu then he uses weber's work to place yagni valkyr to find it bc why this why is that important because he says shatapata brahmana seems to be aware of the bones described in shruta and not the bones in atreya so based on intricate understanding the bone structure he makes certain claims that shatapatha brahmana seems to have knowledge of the bones of shrutha because of that he says yagni walker has to find at bce therefore hundred years before him i'll play sushruta and give 600 bc as arbitrary as that but we can go and see if there's any other way we can date shatapatha brahmana shatapatha brahmana was deciphered in 1893 by both dikshita as well as balaganga tilak we already talked about this and basically they used kritika and they tried to say the kritika would have a heliacal rising in 2982 bce you can't understand this picture over here because this is talking about precision so 2982 bc we don't have a pole star this is our pole star in the current time this would be the center over here but this is how much in the past we would have moved so kritika in 2982 bce was on the celestial equator today it is somewhere over here because of precision so we know that shatapata brahmana should be dated to 2982 bce and because of that shatapatha brahmana that mentions this kritika phenomenon is in this date and based upon knowledge of bones shushutta and punarisha 3 should also be before 2982 bce and character after this so bottom line we are using the same methods of rudolph hornell to date shushritha and sushrita's lower bound comes to at least 2982 bce so i have a combined section over here for all the knowledge systems to talk about knowledge transfer so very quickly talk about knowledge transfer we know that there was ancient climate change approximately in 2000 bce if you look at this nature paper 2014 200 year drought doomed the indus valley civilization a genetics paper that says empty dna from bronze age such as a link between indian subcontinent and mesopotamian cradle of civilization this paper came out just in july of 2019 that says the zebu was found in mitani and hittite lands and it talks about how there was a migration from the indus valley area 4.2 thousand years ago and that had the presence of zebu cattle in the mittani lands so we know that approximately four thousand years ago there was huge migrations out of india to places where water was in the euphrates tigris and those kind of areas isn't it amazing that if you look at egyptian medicine or hittites or anything they don't have any evidence of any knowledge until after 1800 and 1500 bce their earliest medical texts the smith papyrus eboz papyrus the cajon papyrus all of these things are only after 800 1800 bce after the migrations have taken place that is when you see evidence of these the contents of magic trauma surgery gynecology and gynecology surgery magic all these things were contents of atharva veda all of these things are contents of early ayurvedic works and these things seem to be injected over here and there's a book over here that talks about antiquity of hindu medicine that says plants and materials from india were in use in egypt and he hints at knowledge transfer from india so this is an example of how indian medical knowledge is transmitted to egypt's early time frame if you look at the metanese hittites and casites the mittanis invoked indra varuna and ashwinis in the peace treaties with the egyptian pharaohs when egyptian pharaoh amenhotep fell ill the mechanic king sent a healing statue of shaoka shaka is like durga on a line so same thing is sent as a healing statue for him and there is that evidence out there hittite suffered through 20 years smallpox and they had a deity called kamru sepa who was linked with varuna and she's supposed to trap the disease demon the bronze spot and save lives if you're in a place where there's a lot of infection into smallpox you're interested in knowing how to be antiseptic how to have good water we know that if you store water in a copper pot overnight it's got some antiseptic properties so it recounts an idea that trap that this is demon bronze spot and save lives very very interesting if you look at babylon accordion medical text 1800 bce it talks about rational examination looking familiar right rational examination came from nyaya and other things looking on how to diagnosis and so on logic therapy uses exorcism to cure illness due to curses the cascite medical letter from nippo that also talks about the same thing based on herbal medicine and spells so very clearly metans hittites calcites have been exposed to ayurveda and indic knowledge systems we should not go and see a direct uh maybe a clay tablet saying we got it from india there's no such concept in those days there's no concept of visa no concept of foreigners people come live give an idea and people start using those things so we see a course of indian thought in early periods of time that is what we are looking for over here transmission to the greeks and romans very clear if you look at ayurveda talks about the doshas all the doshas over here maps very clean to hippocrates model of this yellow bile and black bile and phlegm and blood and hot dry cold wet maps to this very very well so hypocrites propose a system expanded by gallon later if you see who was hypocrites you're a student of democrats democrats were somebody who seems to have intimate knowledge of vaishya shika sutra we talked about this earlier reach subwash cock's work you'll find a lot of these kind of things also the buddhist transmissions from fifth to fourth century bce indo-greek contacts from alexander onwards 330 bc we know this is a mistake it's not alexander's uncle but we know that alexander ordered translation of works for aristotle we know library of alexandria set up in egypt for transmission of east to west knowledge all of these things we know were sources how the greeks could get information like this jeff roy also shows materia medica of greeks romans borrowed from india and there was a core of the spice state we have said that they came to western india for spices pepper and these kind of things what they don't tell you was western india was the pharmacy of the world if you think why today kotakularia vadishala and all those places make shavana prasha and all these kind of medicines even in the early days they made medicines that was a drugs for the entire world so that is a core of these uh transmissions this is the places in western india from where trade would take place from here going on to greece and so on transmission the medieval period also we have works dear scholars i think i'm pronouncing it right he was a physician's 50 to 70 current era he wrote a five volume materia medica with large number of indian herbs recipe for drugs this was used for 16 centuries in europe as a medical manual spice herbs medicinal drugs all of these things ended when there's christianization of rome in 330 current era as soon as constantine adopted christianity as a state religion the trade with india stopped almost overnight and they went into dark ages not only dark ages they went through literacy illiteracy and they also went through disease disease took hold of them why because they were no longer getting drugs from india they are no longer getting spices from india they are no longer getting the materia medica from india to cure their problems so you see europe suffered a lot of diseases after that time frame the byzantine emperor he persecuted the nestorians and they fled to kerala these are the syrian christians who started around 500 current era we are told that they came with saint thomas i don't think there's any evidence for that the evidence says that they were historians who came to india and they were the source of transmission to syria because they had links with edessa the bishop at edisa and they had constant links with them all the time and that formed trade links from all the way from kerala to syria nestorians and greeks fled to jandi shapur in persia and 530 current era and that was a center for indian medicine and learning we know about anu sharivan who sent his visa this barcelo to india to get medical texts and this is a picture in today's tehran courthouse of this king anushirovan eastward also we have lot of information about eastward transmission of indian medicine we know silk road was used to build this transmission route the fact that bohr manuscript was found in the silk route in xinjiang province is an example of how indian knowledge also is part of trade with the eastern part and western parts of the world ideas of hot and cold yin yang dhyana to zen all those things are there fahian who came to india made several observations similar to bodhi dharma shaolin and uh human song and geek zing and others and we also have a curious poem by somebody called liu yuxi who says a brahman priest physician who bestowed eyes this turns out to be nagarjuna who was a buddhist actually not a brahmana and he practiced cataract surgery cataract surgery from shushruth amita and he saved chinese eyes and she wrote a poem for him and survives till the present time that he somebody bestowed eyes on them so very very amazing so we know about these transmissions transmissions to muslim lands we know once uh synth fell to the muslims manka who went to the court of harmonal rashid translated used by ibn sena and this medical text formed the foundation of european medicine from 12th century onwards we know about al-thabari who wrote comparative works of greek and indian medicine and this person allah ibn ali who translated character samitha to persian and all this knowledge was transmitted into spain all these were under muslim control from sindh onwards to arabia to north algeria to all these places up to southern spain so indian knowledge was taken and injected over here and we know about al kindy who translated many of these things and wrote works on mathematics medicine astronomy and so on in toledo we know that there were christian monasteries whose only job was to translate from arabic into latin and that formed the basis of many of the european works too and that's how their corpus of knowledge also built they used excuse me they used astronomy they used translations on mathematics on medicine and this form the corpus of their own works for the renaissance and such thing colonial period not going to read this a whole lot of people who took indian knowledge this person in goa he wrote this particular book on ayurveda translated to latin by this particular clusius botanist hendrik van reed he came to malabar and wrote this with the physician's help johan koenig he was a pupil of carlinius a very famous botanist he was a source for lineage works on botany he's described about the plants of india and so on barthelemy ziegenberg who collected many many thermal medical works and other such work 1712 he has a bibliography of all his works over here and other people so medical colleges in india that was in pondicherry madras and kolkata they were teaching ayurveda for the longest time because their own medicines did not cover what should be done their pharmacology was entirely making drugs out of ayurvedic preparations however all that stopped in the late 1880s or so after they digested all of indian medical knowledge and they had their own chemical processes and making drugs so after that the western uh uh education system started so conclusion from this section is that enormous antiquity of indian medical knowledge the roots nathrava veda we talked about in character ayurvedic medicine was transferred to all parts of the ancient world egypt babylon greece transferred to west asia and europe and medieval and colonial times after digestion of this knowledge the practice of ayurvedic knowledge was discouraged today scientists are rediscovering fundamental truths about body mind effects for cure so it's 303 i will very quickly talk about roots of music and we will stop after that so typically when we hear about music the received wisdom is music arose independently in various parts of the world in india in greece and china and all these places music independently arose we'd like to examine some of these assertions and see how how how real is those things we are told that universal music is universal language however it became a standard and we had to ask how is it that was standardized if it was universal arose independently we would expect variation in the way music is formed but there's a standard that we see so some questions how did similarly space scales evolve in indian and western music what accounts for commonality of instruments we'll do a very very brief investigation so indian music we know that ancient period from the most ancient times of 12th century medieval period 13th to 18th century in the modern period and there are several things to learn about and talk about indian medicine music not going to go into all of these things if you look at chandogya upanishad it talks about division of the octave into 22 parts 22 parts is something alien to most of us because we are we know about a seven tone music we know what the twelfth semitone music but twenty two parts so basically this is you have rig the seven notes over here and here you have the semitones the 12 semitones and here are the 12 shrutis now each of these remember in india every knowledge system was deeply tied with the philosophy of the land so music was also associated with divinities and swaras that is the earliest way music was seen if you look at the evolution of the scale in the beginning samagana only used three notes as uddata anodata and swarita later on it evolved into the seven tone music that we see here now one important question is what was the reference for indian music in other words today if you get a musician to do some work for you he's going to get a pitch pipe that's what the europeans use a pitch pipe they'll tell you that this is the pitch of the a note there's a pitch of the scene or a pitch of something else today you have on your iphones and phones you've got a tonal generator that can tell you what the reference stones are in ancient india the reference stones are the sounds of these animals over here so the sound of the heron was this ma goat was gah and bull was this re and so on so this was a reference notes that was told for indians because how do you communicate to somebody from north to the south that this is the sound of the sound of ray it could be anything right so the reference notes were these things so the relation between east and west the 12 shrutis are mapped to 12 semitones as shown this over here in the european practice the octaves divide into 12 semitones of exactly the same width there's the concept of cents so the entire octave is divided to 1 200 cents and each division here is 100 c to c sharp is 100 c to d is 200 and so on and so forth so that is a division of the scales seen in western music the tonal relation between carnatic hindustani and western we see that in carnatic these are the names very similar names with slight differences in the hindustani not going to read all these things and here's the equivalent western notes associated with these things these are 12 semitones now we come to the interesting aspect there appears to be transmission from samaveda to the greeks and we see that the oldest form of samoa vedic scale is pentatonic gamut arrived at by quintal tuning i have not gone to great details about this but in this particular work by this gentleman over here fadigan he says that he talks about pythagoras and he says about pythagoras how he lived at the same time as upanishads and the same time about these things and he talks about silva sutras and he says by analogy for the present surmise the minute study of musical intervals in india took place at the end of the vedic period that apart the bottom line is there seems to be exposure of pythagoras to not only the upanishads but also the silva sutras so let's take a look at this pythagore pythagoras is seen as a father of western music so he avoids something called a pythagorean scale the spider green scale is f c g d a e b derived from circle of fifth this is a very very musical terminology where you jump from one note to the fifth note that will give you from f to c the fifth note fifth note is g fifth notice d fifth note is a this way you can do the whole thing now if you put it in order from c d e f g a b c you'll get a pattern of the major scale tone tone semitone tone tone tone semitone this is the same as uh for example uh shankarabharanam tune in raga in southern india the same tone tone semitone tone tone tone semitone same same pattern over there so these are the notes in uh in c major and in in the sequence interval like i said over here so pythagoras use the ratio of 3 is to 2. what is more important the number three was important for him we know that in india the number three has got very sacred uh meanings he also use a three is to ratio the three is to ratios what gives you the circle of fifths to get the scales and other such things so uh by doing that you the various other kinds of music is ionian and i'm not going to lydian and all these things you get that so bottom line from c you see g is the 3 is to 2 ratio from c to g from g to d would be a 3 is to 2 ratio from d to a would be a 3 to 2 ratio that is the bottom line i know it's very mathematical but the bottom line is pythagoras made use of ratios from the chord to do that so if you look at the 7 knot lydian scale same as the kalyani raga you can i'm not going to read all these things but three whole notes semitone two more whole notes and final semitone if you look at the tonal frequencies of the indian music system and the western music system it is very clear to me that these are related it cannot have been an independent development and getting the same tonal frequency difference from each other i'm not going to go into great details over here but it's clear by studying these things you figure out these so the we talked about silva sutras we talked about how there's a lot of mathematics and silver sutras and from silver sutras to pythagoras pythagoras is known for his pythagorean theorem he believed the idea of soul transmigration what is today known as reincarnation pure vegetarianism no meats beans or wine and the constant working towards an attainment of bodily purification and purity to be able to interact the divine meaning universe in other words internalized vedantic ideas greatly not only is a vegetarian he says your constant goal in life is to attain brahman so that is his thinking over here he saw music as a holy spiritual scientific endeavor which is exactly the same in india in india music did not start with bollywood music it started with sama veda hymns it started over there that was a first part of music started with liturgical it was holy so he saw the same thing so he promoted what became the basic fundamental idea of music theory that by dividing the length of a string that's very important dividing the length of a string ratios of half's thirds quarters fifths he can create a musical intervals now this is exactly the same as silva sutra silva sutra all of mathematics or the string they take a string divided into ratios and teach how we can do ratios how we can do mathematics and other such things so pythagoras came to india studied sulu sutra studied all this mathematics studied these ratios and he seems to have taken exactly the same music into western notation and that became the foundation of western music from there on of course in india we don't see harmonic music the way there is in the west today of harmonies over there we don't see that but we see a lot of melodic music in india with the raga system and so on so pythagoras is not going to read all these things we already talked about how the vegetarian curriculum and transmigration of souls interesting connections indian music silva sutra math with strings pythagoras your string ratio to define note sama veda started with three notes three sacred for pythagoras three by two ratios starting with point four scale he didn't use one by two he didn't use that kind of thing he used three by two it's very very critical summary the swara system of seven notes diatonic music of seven notes from twenty two shrutis we get 12 semitones and 7 swaras from 12 semitones 7 notes swaras are associated with divinities music used for samoa veda chants initially he saw music as holy and spiritual even he did not say music is for entertainment he started as a spiritual endeavor and we have saraswati as a patron of learning and music and he actually erected a statue of muses outside the library in where he lived because that was a patron of music and learning just like saraswati who's patron for us the muses were divinities female divinities who were also for learning in greek the patron of learning and music very very interesting connections so interesting question which came first the chicken and egg question did scales come first or did musical instruments come first what came first so evolution of musical instruments we see in bimbetka 12 000 years ago we see evidence of dancing take a look at this figure over here you see drumming and you see all these things there's already some evidence of music over there it's mentioned the rigveda rigveda's got this nali similar to a flute and dum dubi which is a drum and the veena and other such things are also mentioned not going to go to detail over here we have a nati shastra compiled by bharat muni we have several stringed instruments wind instruments percussion instruments and instruments that do not require tuning you see evidence of that in sculptures and so on the bansuri flute which is mentioned rigveda ngati shastra there's also a flute in harper harappa also got evidence of a flute that is over there the veena purchaser of string instruments mentioned in rigveda veda so we see an evolution of veena over there here's a figurine showing the arena there's a gentleman in new delhi i believe who's recreating harappan music by taking harapan sounds and creating instruments for example this bull and creating this his name is shail vyas look him up and he's got some very interesting works that he's doing nadaswaram now the swarm is an ancient instrument used in southern india and i believe it could have been a inspiration for the trumpet as mentioned in the sangha meera tamil works as well as in the story of kanagi in this particular work we know ancestor of violent i don't even want to say all these things but there is a book that talks about the antiquity of this how the arabs introduced this to the middle east as reba this is a rebarb in cairo and from there it went to europe and became the violin so this is the ancient precursor of the violin drums we find rhythm percussion earliest is in china 5000 bc we find very closely associated with the shiva symbolism and the western claims are 40 000 bc the flute was invented in europe in haarp in mesopotamia and trumpet in egypt violent in italy piano and guitar 35 000 years ago there seems to be a bone flute from germany and some skepticism is that a flute or the chewing of bones by bears that's not very clear and by looking at this we can't tell a tonal ratio what kind of sounds would have come could it just mean sounds not tones or scales or any such thing 8 000 years ago from china in a grave they used they found these bones from this bird birds bones are hollow remember so they use the bird bones to make all uh flutes and he's appeared to have a seven hole having a rough scale with a modern octave so that appears to be there in china from 8 000 years ago i think that if you look at china that's a good mirror to what could have been in india because chinese were strongly influenced by indians so if you find it over there there's a good chance that it could have been influenced by india too so here's a grave where they found the flutes in sumeria this particular articles she says that the earliest codes are there scores are where you can communicate your musical information using notes so she claims that a particular work in curry form turned out to be a musical score in the lydian scale egypt we see evidence of music and dance and once again evidence of loot in egypt a very ancient period of time from greece 1300 bce you find some evidence of the earliest layer with seven strings held by a man we know about the hemochandra numbers how it leads rhythm patterns very recently popularized by manju manja bhargav mathematics of music leads to rhythm and scales so he talks about how the short syllable is one beat long syllable is two beats and the problem of how to fit in a certain number of beats into an eighth note interval and so on that gave rise to enormous numbers of binary ways of doing these things so he talks about that look at poetry daisies and cobra by his work you can see that or you might listen to this bc manjana who does an amazing performance of this fibonacci sequence in this conical rhythm pattern again the idea is that in india mathematics was deeply tried and written with music and other such things so concluding remarks roots of music in sama veda division of octave shruti and swara is as ancient as chandragupta nation three note to seven note music evolution vias phi note examine pythagorean music i propose a study of silver sulfur to show evolution of scale western music antiquity of instruments and showed connection between mac close city and rhythm and this is my big conclusion over here we talked a lot today i'm not sure whether i succeeded in communicating or putting you to sleep but at any rate indian civilization arcing back to enormous antiquity we traced knowledge systems showed methods of indian astronomy antiquity in astronomical measurements and we talked about some astronomers antiquity of medical systems impact on all ancient modern civilizations root of mathematics and vedic era medieval mathematics transfer to west asia europe and present-day narratives use faulty biased methodologies and do not acknowledge vedic hindu history or contributions so that is the grand end of my talk thank you very much thank you thank you you

Channel: Sangam Talks

Views: 47,499

Keywords: ancient india, aryan invasion theory, Epistemology, Roots, Technological Prowess, Mathematical Heritage, Astronomy Heritage, Music Heritage, Roman Numerals, Modern Knowledge Systems, Foundation of Calculus, Astronomical Heritage, Mathematics in India, Kerala school ofAstronomy and Math, Siddhantic Astronomy, Medical Heritage of Ancient India, Atharvaveda and Ayurveda, Vedic Civilization, Astronomical Measurements, Root of Mathematics, Vedic History, ancient indian history

Id: qYNs049AwnY

Length: 79min 23sec (4763 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020