Indian Epigraphy c15.t2.1

c15.t2.1

The Indian students of astronomy, mathematics and many other subjects generally composed their works in verse. The nature of the works in some of these subjects necessitated the repeated mention of numbers, e.g., in the setting and solution of the problems of an arithmetical sum. There was, however, generally only one word in Sanskrit to indicate a particular number. Since the repeated mention of a word in the same sense was regarded as a bad style of composition, and such a word would often not fit in the metre of a stanza, the authors required a large number of words for indicating the same number. A convention therefore gradually developed, according to which ordinary words that can somehow be associated with particular numbers were used to imply those numbers. Thus all the Sanskrit words meaning ‘the hand’ came to be used to indicate 2, since man has only two hands. Similarly words meaning ‘the arrow’ were employed in the sense of 5 because Kāma, the Indian god of love, is represented in tradition as armed with five arrows of flowers. When there were more than one tradition regarding the number associated with a particular object, only one of them was adopted. Thus, even though traditionally the Vedas are regarded either as three or as four and the seas either as four or as seven in number, the early Indian astronomers and mathematicians used the words indicating both the Vedas and the sea to indicate 4 only. But uncritical authors of the medieval age are sometimes found to have violated this old convention and introduced an amount of confusion in the system. Thus, in some cases, we notice the use of a word for ‘the sea’ to imply both the numbers 4 and 7.¹ The name of a metre was often used to indicate a number according to the number of syllables in a foot of a stanza in that metre. Thus the word anuṣṭubh, the name of a metre with eight syllables in a foot, implied 8. But there was want of complete uniformity since in some cases the number of syllables in all the four feet of a stanza was counted; e.g., Jagatī, a metre with 12 syllables in a foot, was used by late authors in the sense of both 12 and 48. When such a word-numeral was a compound of two words, often either the first or the second member of the compounds was used to indicate the number in question.