History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.177

v6.c82.177

Thibaut (*Grundriss*, p 42) holds that the name Puliśa has decidedly a non-Indian appearance. One fails to understand why these learned writers are so positive about a certain name being non-Indian. We have in Sanskrit such ancient names as Pulastya,⁷⁴⁴ Pulaha, Paulastya (for Kubera) which contain most of the elements of the word Puliśa and are very similar to it. Even in these days Hindus bear such names as Nabobsingh. The siddhāntas are called Paitāmaha and Pauliśa because they were deemed to have been composed by Pitāmaha and Puliśa. Alberuni, Thibaut says, traces the name Puliśa to a Greek author Paulus; but Alberuni who was familiar with both Indian and Greek authors might have committed a mistake, as even such a scholar as Weber, whose vast reading and phenomenal industry are a marvel, was misled by mere similarity in name and one recalls what was said in the drama Śākuntala by the attendant of Śakuntalā's little son that the child was misled by the similarity of names. Thibaut himself admits that it cannot be proved that the Pauliśa siddhānta is related to the work of the Greek astrologer Paulus. Pauliśa-siddhānta appears to have restricted itself mostly to astronomical matters. We have seen (p 488) that the Paitāmaha-siddhānta was composed about 80 A. D. Therefore, that Siddhānta could not have borrowed anything from Ptolemy (150 A. D.). Prof. Neugebauer again has744a no doubt that the original impetus to scientific Hindu astronomy came from Hellenistic astronomy, since he thinks that the use of the eccentric-epicyclic model alone is sufficient proof. But he is inclined to hold that the period of reception lies between Hipparchus and Ptolemy and hopes that a systematic study of Hindu astronomical works might reveal information about pre-Ptolemaic Greek astronomy no longer preserved in available Greek sources. It is doubtful whether that hope will ever be fulfilled. If ancient Indians were capable of analysing the elements of the Sanskrit language and raising such a system as Pāṇini's, if they could plumb the depths of the human mind and create a mental discipline like the Yoga, if they carefully noted centuries before Christ the parts of the glottis and other organs in the mouth in the production of the letters of their language and produced the Prātiśākhyas and Śikṣā works, if they could create a fable literature and invent the game of chess and make a gift of these two to the whole of mankind, if their knowledge of Algebra was of a superior order (vide Colebrooke's Essays, vol. II. at p. 446 and Cajori's 'a History of Elementary Mathematics' pp 93-101), if they invented the decimal place value744b system for numbers and propagated it and the sign for a zero to Europe through the Arabs in the 12th century A. D, there is hardly any compelling reason for saying that it would not have been possible for them to arrive at their own eccentric and epicycle system (of which Prof. Neugebauer makes so much) independently of any other people to explain the supposed motions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets round the earth.