Science and Vedic Studies

D. WUJASTYK SCIENCE AND VEDIC STUDIES ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the issue of how science and history of science may help or be helped by Vedic studies. The conclusions drawn are that: 1. Vedic studies are important for the history of Indian science; 2. Modern science, in particular physics, is not a useful source of philosophical ideas that confirm aspects of Vedic studies; 3. Vedic studies will not contribute to modern scientific research; and 4. Vedic studies are nevertheless centrally important for an understanding of Indian history and culture in general. 1. SCIENCE IN THE VEDA The knowledge of a country’s history and past cultural and scientific achievements is a central part of its self-consciousness. India is unique in having unbroken cultural traditions reaching back almost four thousand years. Those traditions have changed and evolved, but much ancient practice and belief survives even today in India: the brahmin priest still murmurs prayers from the second millennium BC; the villager cleans his tongue with a scraper described in medical texts from the time of the Buddha. Since science is such an important, even defining, element of modern international culture it is natural to seek India’s historical contribution to this field. The contribution is there, and it is real. During the latter part of the second millennium BC, the eastward migrations of the Indo-European peoples reached South Asia.1 The ritual liturgy of these peoples was memorized wholesale by families of hereditary priests. By extraordinary feats of memory and tradition 1028 of these hymns have reached us today in much the same form as they existed circa 1200 BC. This body of Sanskrit liturgical literature is called veda, ‘the knowledge’.2 The subject matter of these hymns is religious and includes the praise and worship of the gods, and prayers for health, long life, and many sons. From these hymns, we are able to deduce obliquely some information about health, healing and other sciences in these early times. It must be stressed that there is no such thing as ‘Vedic Science’ in any unified sense. What we can do is scour the surviving liturgical texts for insights into the scientific thinking of the time. Historians of science have found in these texts, and in the commentarial and explanatory literature that grew around them, important information on traditional Journal of Indian Philosophy 26: 335–345, 1998. c 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 336 D. WUJASTYK medicine, geometry, astronomy, philosophy, and other subjects. And no doubt more remains to be discovered.3 It must be remembered that these are the religious documents of an ancient, nomadic and priestly group. We have no treatises from this very early period on politics, history, agriculture, architecture, or other subjects, although there must have been discussions, and perhaps actual compositions, on these topics. There is a great deal from these ancient times that is lost forever, and that we shall never know. But equally, since these texts became generally available to historians in the nineteenth century, they have carefully built up a reasonably good picture of the religion and society of those far-off times. There is a coherent pattern to ancient history that emerges from the many pieces of evidence that have been gathered together: evidence from historical linguistics, history of religions, archaeology, geography, social and cultural history, and more recently from genetics and the study of mitochondrial DNA. The facts that emerge fit together in a certain way, providing a series of checks and balances on the historical picture that emerges. And this is true not just of Vedic studies, but also of the study of world history and the history of science. From this coherent pattern of accumulated scholarship we can be completely certain that claims for advanced science in Vedic times, for aircraft, electricity, atomic energy, and so forth, cannot be true. It might be argued that we must spend time checking and double-checking such claims. But here we may consider an argument proposed by Steven Weinberg. As a winner of the Nobel prize for physics, he receives many letters asking him to investigate paranormal and similar phenomena. In making the judgment that these ideas are not worth pursuing even to disprove them, he says4 ::: our greatest aid [: : : ] is our understanding of the pattern of scientific explanation. When the Spanish settlers in Mexico began in the sixteenth century to push northward into the country known as Tejas, they were led on by rumors of cities of gold, the seven cities of Cibola. At the time that was not so unreasonable. Few Europeans had been to Tejas, and for all anyone knew it might contain any number of wonders. But suppose that someone today reported evidence that there are seven golden cities somewhere in modern Texas. Would you open-mindedly recommend mounting an expedition to search every corner of the state between the Red River and the Rio Grande to look for these cities? I think you would make the judgment that we already know so much about Texas, so much of it has been explored and settled, that it is simply not worthwhile to look for mysterious golden cities. In the same way, our discovery of the connected and convergent pattern of scientific and historical explanations has done the very great service of teaching us that there is no room for atomic energy or higher mathematics in Vedic times.  SCIENCE AND VEDIC STUDIES 337 Time and resources spent on trying fruitlessly to find modern science in the ancient Vedas are time and resources taken away from research into the serious and truly great contributions that India has made to the world history of science. For example, the book Vedic Mathematics by a former Sa  nkar _ acarya of Puri5 has created a small industry of wasted scholarship trying to find the Atharvaveda parisis. .ta which the  nkar Sa _ acarya said was the source of his arithmetical methods, and trying to develop a historical view of the Vedas which includes such arithmetic. It is to the credit of the Rashtriya Veda Vidya Pratishthan that they have published a clear rebuttal of the claim that the contents of the Vedic Mathematics are ‘Vedic’ in any original sense.6 Many other specialists have known this for some time. This is not to say that the  nkar Sa _ acarya’s arithmetic is not interesting and valuable: it is both, and it probably deserves to be taught in schools. But it is quite definitely the Sa nkar _ acarya’s own discovery, and not Vedic. Oddly enough, there is another reason we can be sure that the Vedas do not contain advanced mathematics: one of the first people to translate the R . gveda was Herman Grassmann (1809–1877), who was coincidentally one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known. If there were advanced mathematics locked in the Veda, we may feel sure Grassmann would have been the first to notice it.7 And all this attention to the Vedic Mathematics book only serves to divert attention from the real achievements in the history of Indian mathematics, such as the truly astounding discoveries made by the jyotis.ı Madhava of Sangamagr _ ama and his pupils who discovered the so called ‘Gregory’s Series’ for  and the power series for sines and cosines over two hundred years before Newton and Leibniz, who are usually credited with these discoveries.8 Knowledge of these discoveries has been uncovered only through the painstaking collection and decipherment of palm-leaf manuscripts from Kerala. If more people would search for manuscripts, instead of making strident claims for Vedic mathematics, we might find even more important scientific results in the work of Madhava’s school. It has to be added that books are beginning to appear by people who, initially attracted to Indian mathematics by Swamiji’s book, have then gone on to find more material of interest in the real jyotis. a and gan. ita literature.9 To take another example, the Vaises. ika sutras  suggested that the world is made of pieces and that there must therefore be a ‘smallest’ piece, called an atom. This has been taken by some scholars as evidence of atomic theory.10 But none of these philosophers had anything like 338 D. WUJASTYK our modern idea of what a successful scientific explanation would have to accomplish: the quantitative understanding of phenomena.11 Having a philosophical idea about atoms – as did thinkers in many ancient cultures – is not at all the same thing as discovering scientific experimental evidence for the structure and size of the atom, as Ernest Rutherford did in 1911. Again, these claims and arguments obscure the fact that the Vaises. ika  sutras contain much more serious material of interest to the historian of science, which has not yet been integrated into the wider study of the history of science in India. There is evidence that the authors knew of magnetism and perhaps the compass, that darkness is the absence of light, perhaps an idea of a downward force responsible for falling objects, that hot air rises, and so forth. These claims are not as glamorous as ancient aeroplanes, but they are vitally important for any genuine history of Indian science. 2. MODERN SCIENCE/ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY There are many popular books available today on the philosophical implications of modern science, especially physics. These books often have alluring titles such as The Mind of God: science and the search for ultimate meaning,12 Theories of Everything: the quest for ulti- mate explanation,13 The Matter Myth: towards 21st century science,14 Unravelling the mind of God: mysteries at the frontier of science,15 and so on. These presentations share an up-beat optimism about the ability of science to answer all our ultimate questions; they identify the ultimate problems of philosophy with the ultimate problems of physics. It is as though we were somehow ‘wrong’ with respect to the world, but that through one last supreme effort, physics will provide a final understanding of the universe, and all our questions will be answered. Indeed physicists have been so verbose on these topics, that the theologian Paul Tillich once observed that ‘only physicists seem capable of using the word “God” without embarrassment’.16 A related genre initiated by Capra in 197517 argues that the explanatory models of modern science are converging with those of ancient religious mystics, especially the Chinese. Such books are exciting and optimistic, but unfortunately most of their claims about the attainment of ultimate explanations are untrustworthy. One finds that amongst these authors the scientists have only the most superficial understanding of Asian history and philosophy, and the Asian philosophers are woefully ignorant of real hard science.  SCIENCE AND VEDIC STUDIES 339 Studies by scientists, philosophers and cultural historians who are firmly rooted in the traditions of scholarship with which they work suggest that science cannot contribute meaningfully to the fundamental philosophical and moral problems of today.18 Take, for example, the recent book by Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory.19 He and Abdus Salaam were awarded the 1979 Nobel prize for Physics for their work on unifying two of the fundamental forces of nature, weak nuclear and electromagnetic. In his book, Weinberg notes that even if physics is able to find a unified theory of forces, ‘the old question “Why?” will still be with us’.20 He also denies that physics provides any opportunity for a reconciliation between the spirit of science and the ‘gentler parts of our nature’: he goes so far as to say that he ‘cannot find any “messages” for human life in quantum mechanics that are different in any important way from those of Newtonian physics’. Other serious writers go even further: Bryan Appleyard, in his survey of these issues, says that in spite of its huge and defining importance for today’s world, ‘science has no morality or faith and can tell us nothing about the meaning, purpose and significance of our lives’.21 As a practical example, let us consider the social and personal effects of one of the most important recent breakthoughs in physical science. In 1983 the scientists at CERN headed by Carlo Rubbia finally found experimental evidence for the W particle, thus validating the Weinberg–Salaam theory of electroweak interactions, the greatest unification in science since Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism in 1865. This event was widely reported in newspapers, but most people undoubtedly skipped rapidly to more interesting matters such as the football results. Far from making any substantial moral or social improvement in the world, the vast majority of people today are utterly unaware of these matters. And if the physicists find the right mathematics for a unified field theory (if that is possible, and if fields survive as an explanatory concept) it is unlikely to make an iota of difference to the state of the world, or to the sense of fulfilment of anyone except the scientists directly involved. By its very nature, science changes fast. An idea that seems true today may be swept away tomorrow, together with any philosophy it may have supported. Today, super-gravity – only recently the favoured approach to a final physical theory – has already given way to superstring theory. Physics, with its attractive promise of unified theories and ultimate convergences, may well have lost its position as the most relevant science for explaining the world. One must be careful here: in 1894 the physicist Albert Michelson declared that ‘it seems probable that 340 D. WUJASTYK most of the grand underlying principles [of physical science] have been firmly established’, and it was seriously claimed, probably by Lord Kelvin, that there was nothing new to be discovered in physics.22 And this just a decade before Einstein’s discovery of quantum physics and relativity! But as Tom Wilkie argues in his important book on medical ethics in genetic research, it may be that physics is in fact due to relinquish its position as the scientific market leader.23 ‘Big Science’ now means the human genome project, every bit as much as it means particle accelerators and space telescopes. Funding for the largest ever physics experiment, the superconducting supercollider, has been refused by the US Congress, whereas funding agencies around the world are pouring money into genetic research on the human and other genomes. And since the decipherment of the genetic pattern of Man will increasingly have a direct impact on the life and health of individuals, it is quite likely that in the next fifty years or more it will be genetics and biomedicine which will be at the forefront of popular consciousness as the sciences which explain our world. Weinberg notes that ‘it is not the certainty of scientific knowledge that fits it [to preserve a sane world] but its uncertainty.24 As a motto from computer science has it: ‘it is important to have an open mind : : : but not so open that your brains fall out’. For all these reasons, Vedic studies should not be too influenced by ideas about the success of science as an explanatory tool, neither as a source for mystical ideas that are thought to be similar to Vedic ideas, nor as a salve for the problems of the world. 3. SCIENCE AND RESEARCH Although it has been argued above that modern science does not genuinely provide ideas that converge with Vedic thought, the basic principles of scientific research are equally valid for Vedic studies. Sir Christopher Ball, a senior figure in Britain’s Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science25 has recently addressed several important points regarding academic research in a paper entitled ‘What’s the Use of Research’.26 In the context of national policy planning, he addressed questions such as ‘What is research?’, ‘How much is enough’, and ‘Who is to judge?’. These are important questions which also need to be considered in planning Vedic research and studies.  SCIENCE AND VEDIC STUDIES 341 Sir Christopher noted that the word ‘research’ did not enter the language until the late sixteenth century, and was still rare until the eighteenth century, when its modern meaning began to emerge. In the contemporary world, research is typically characterized by conformity with the ‘SORT’ rule: Scepticism, Originality, Rigour and Testability. Where these criteria do not or cannot apply, systematic enquiry may be research-like, but it will not be fully scientific research. He goes on to outline four broad functions of research which it may be useful to consider in the context of Vedic and other humanist studies. This simple set of criteria is no substitute for a rigorous analysis of what really constitutes scientific knowledge and methodology. For this one turns to the works of writers like Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Newton-Smith and many others. Nevertheless, these points are worth considering for their directness and simplicity: 1. the pursuit of new truths (the goal of ‘pure’, ‘basic’, or ‘fundamental’ research), 2. the achievement of wealth (the goal of ‘useful’, ‘applied’, or ‘near- market’ research, 3. the promotion of better education (the goal of ‘educational research, undertaken by teachers in higher education), and 4. the clarification of culture. The last point is especially interesting to us in the context of Vedic studies. Sir Christopher says, ‘Cultural research is concerned with the fourth function of higher education (as defined in the Robbins Report of 1963): “the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship” ’. 4. COMPUTERS IN VEDIC RESEARCH Computers are fashionable, and there is a vogue to apply computers to Vedic and other indological research. Computers are tools, only as intelligent as their users: it would be unreasonable to think that just by typing the Vedic texts into a computer to create a ‘data bank’ we would have achieved very much. However, computers are able to do menial tasks very fast, and there are areas where these machines can be useful. If a long Sanskrit work is available on a computer, then it is possible to save time in finding passages and references in that work, and in comparing it with other works. The entire corpus of Greek literature from Homer to about the 16th century has been put onto a disk, and 342 D. WUJASTYK Classics scholars are now able to scan that entire library of texts almost instantly for references, collocations, and so on. This makes available a quite new level of certainty in scholarship. Imagine being able to find  nkarabh instantly all the passages from the R. gveda to the Sa _ . ya on as  the Brahmasutras  in which the words sat and cit and ananda appeared within twenty words of each other. There would be a lot of data, but it would provide the fascinating basis for a history of a most important concept. At the end of 1994, Professor Muneo Tokunaga of Kyoto University announced that he had typed into machine readable format the entire texts of the Mahabh arata  and the Ram ayan  . a. Moreover, in an act of enormous scholarly generosity and cooperation, Professor Tokunaga has made these machine-readable files freely available to all scholars on the global Internet.27 Within weeks, textual studies of the computer files of these epics had delivered fascinating information about words occurring in one epic but completely absent from the other, and similar discoveries are set to continue. There remain a number of difficulties in the area of handling Indian scripts on computers, which arise if Vedic texts are to be stored and manipulated using computer screens and printers. It would be a valuable contribution if scholars of Vedic studies who are interested in such matters could sponsor the creation of free Indian script fonts and software – in adherence to international standards – to make these tasks possible. Some work on these lines has already been done. Computers can help by providing rapid communications between scholars: the INDOLOGY network group already provides that function for over 500 European and North American university scholars of Sanskrit and related subjects. But it is very desirable for that network to grow amongst Sanskrit scholars in India itself. Progress in Vedic studies will depend to a large extent on collecting and collating information about Vedic manuscripts in libraries across the world. In this task too, computers are essential tools today.28 5. POSITIVE DIRECTIONS FOR VEDIC RESEARCH There is still much important work to be done in finding, editing and translating the basic literature of the Vedas and their ancillary texts. Not very long ago K. Parameshwar Aithal identified 1600 works on Vedic recitation and related subjects, most of which have never been printed, and are lying in damp, insect-ridden libraries across India.29 An international survey of Vedic manuscripts is a central task awaiting  SCIENCE AND VEDIC STUDIES 343 Vedic scholars. A rescue program for manuscripts on Vedic and all other subject is an urgent need. The New Catalogus Catalogorum which Prof. V. Raghavan began publishing in 1968 is a vital reference aid in locating Vedic and other manuscripts. At the time of writing, the series has reached volume 13, which takes it only about three-quarters of the way through the Sanskrit alphabet. This work, which is done at Madras University, is only sporadically funded by different bodies at different times, and this slows its completion. Support for the NCC project would be an important contribution to the progress Vedic studies. There is an important place for trustworthy popular books on Vedic history and religion which would be able to convey to the general reader a feeling for the life and thought of those ancient times. The moral and ethical implications of Vedic thought deserve more attention than perhaps they have received, and this might provide a much needed impulse for good conduct in politics and other spheres of action in India. The great Poona dictionary will, when complete, be an absolutely fundamental tool for new scholarship in Vedic studies. At present publication of this dictionary is not expected to be finished in our lifetimes. Anything that can be done to speed up the progress of this dictionary will be a major contribution to Vedic studies. There are many other pressing research questions in Veda, vedanga, _  . yaka, brahman aran  . a, and the vast literature of later times. The methods and tools of modern science can be used to help the work forward. If Vedic study and research is to be successful, it must proceed on trustworthy lines, asking important historical questions, and always taking care to remain watchful, original, rigorous and objectively testable. NOTES 1 For excellent discussions of these migrations see Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, 19892 , and J. P. Mallory, In search of the Indo-Europeans: language, archaeology, and myth, 1989. 2 By extension, the word also means the commentaries and supplements to the  veda, and the philosophical literature derived from it (vedanta). 3 See, e.g., K. G. Zysk, Religious Healing in the Veda, 1985. 4 Dreams of a Final Theory, 1993, p. 38. 5 Svami Bharatı Kr.s. n. a Tırtha. 6 K. S. Shukla, ‘Vedic Mathematics: the deceptive title of Swamiji’s book’ in Issues in Vedic Mathematics ed. H. C. Khare, 1991. 7 See ‘Grassman, Herman Gunther’ in C. C. Gillispie, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. XV (supplement 1), pp. 192–199. 344 D. WUJASTYK 8 See K. V. Sarma, A history of the Kerala school of Hindu astronomy, 1972. 9 And good introductions to the scientific jyotis. a tradition continue to appear, e.g., Dr. S. Balachandra Rao, Indian Mathematics and Astronomy: Some Landmarks, Bangalore, 1994. 10 E.g., in the works of Madhu Sudan Ojha. 11 Weinberg, Dreams, p. 4. 12 Paul Davies, 1992. 13 John D. Barrow, 1991. 14 Paul Davies and John Gribbin, 1991. 15 R. Matthews, 1992. 16 Cited by Weinberg, Dreams, p. 194. 17 The Tao of Physics. 18 I have in mind the writings of Karl Popper, Roger Penrose, Lewis Wolpert, Menas Kafatos & Robert Nadeau, Newton-Smith, and others mentioned below. 19 1993. 20 P. 188. 21 Understanding the Present: science and the soul of modern man, 1992, p. xii. 22 Dreams, p. 9. 23 Perilous science: the human genome project and its implications, 1993. 24 Dreams, p. 207. 25 Director of Learning at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. 26 Published in Science & Public Affairs, a publication of the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 27 The internet address is: <ftp://ccftp.kyoto-su.ac.jp/pub/doc/sanskrit/>. 28 One of the few computer tools adequate for cataloguing manuscripts intelligently is Philobiblon created by C. Faulhaber and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. 29 Veda-laks. an. a: Vedic ancillary literature, 1991. REFERENCES Aithal, K. Parameshwar (1991). Veda-laks. an. a: Vedic ancillary literature, a descriptive bibliography, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Appleyard, Brian (1992). Understanding the Present: science and the soul of modern man, London: Pan Books. Balachandra Rao, S. (1994). Indian Mathematics and Astronomy: Some Landmarks, Bangalore: Jnana Deep Publications. Ball, Christopher (1993, Spring). ‘What’s the Use of Research’, in Science & Public Affairs, London: The Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, pp. 6–10. Barrow, John D. (1990). Theories of Everything: the quest for ultimate explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bharatı Kr.s. n. a Tırtha, Swami (1965). Vedic Mathematics, or sixteen simple mathematical formulae from the Vedas (for one-line answers to all mathematical problems), Varanasi: Hindu Vishvavidyalaya Sanskrit Publication Board, Banaras Hindu University. Capra, F. (1975). The Tao of Physics: an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism, London: Wildwood House. Davies, Paul (1992). The Mind of God: science and the search for ultimate meaning, London: Simon & Schuster.  SCIENCE AND VEDIC STUDIES 345 Davies, Paul and Gribbin, John (1991). The Matter Myth: towards 21st century science, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Faulhaber, Charles (1991). ‘Philobiblon: Problems and solutions in a relational database of medieval texts’, in Literary and Linguistic Computing 6.2: 89–96. Gillispie, C. C., et al. (eds.) (1970–1990). Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 18 vols. New York: Scribners. Kafatos, Menas and Nadeau, Robert (1990). The conscious universe: part and whole in modern physical theory, New York–London: Springer-Verlag. Mallory, J. P. (1989). In search of the Indo-Europeans: language, archaeology, and myth, London: Thames & Hudson. Matthews, R. (1992). Unravelling the mind of God: mysteries at the frontier of science, London: Virgin. Newton-Smith, W. H. (1981). The rationality of science, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Penrose, Roger (1989). The emperor’s new mind: concerning computers, minds, and the laws of Physics, New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popper, Karl (1979). Objective knowledge: an evolutionary approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press, rev. ed. Popper, Karl (1989).5 Conjectures and refutations, London: Routledge. Popper, Karl (1992). The logic of scientific discovery, London: Routledge, repr. Raghavan, V., et al. (1968–(1991)). New catalogus catalogorum: an alphabetical register of Sanskrit and allied works and authors, Madras: University of Madras. Renfrew, Colin (1989).2 Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sarma, K. V. (1972). A history of the Kerala school of Hindu astronomy, Hoshiarpur: Vishveshvaranand Institute. Shukla, K. S. (1991). ‘Vedic Mathematics: the deceptive title of Swamiji’s book’, in H. C. Khare (ed.), Issues in Vedic Mathematics, Delhi: Rashtriya Veda Vidya Pratishthan in association with Motilal Barnarsidass. Weinberg, Steven (1993). Dreams of a Final Theory, London: Hutchinson. Wilkie, Tom (1993). Perilous science: the human genome project and its implications, London: Faber. Wolpert, Lewis (1992). The unnatural nature of science, London: Faber. Zysk, Kenneth G. (1985). Religious Healing in the Veda, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine London, U.K.