History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.71
History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.71
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v6.c82.71.1
About Astronomy and Astrology as developed in India Western scholars such as Weber, Whitney, Thibaut have propounded many sweeping and unwarranted theories based on flimsy data. Here and there I may have to refer to them. But I must say in one place how and why their conclusions are often unacceptable In the first place, they do `not attach due importance to the fact that a vast literature in Sanskrit has perished beyond recovery (as it is admitted was the case in Greece after Ptolemy composed his Almagest)⁶⁹³ and what we now have is a mere fraction of what once existed. In the second place, they forget or ignore that much of the literature that survives is religious and not intended to be a historical and full treatment of any topic i.e. most of the references to astronomical matters found in the Vedas and Brāhmaṇas are not made of set purpose but are incidental or casual. They hardly seem to be aware of the rule of caution and common sense that in ancient literature what is expressly stated may be used for drawing inferences, but the non-mention of certain matters cannot necessarily be a valid reason for arriving at the conclusion of non-existence, unless the subject matter was such that if something connected with it existed it should ordinarily have been mentioned. Further, and most important of all, mere similarities in institutions, usages and other matters should not be regarded as evidence of borrowing by one people from another people.
v6.c82.71.2
Human mind is the same everywhere, its environment and the needs of human beings are often the same and no people, ancient or modern, can be regarded as having had the monopoly of great intellectual powers. Most of those who wrote on Indian literature and subjects in the 19th century were nurtured on the literature of the Greeks and Romans and on the vaunted superiority of the ancient Greeks in Philosophy, Mathematics, arts and other matters and of Egypt. But as ancient cuneiform tablets in Babylonia and the Middle East countries came to be deciphered, things began to be seen in proper perspective. Modern scholars have, it is refreshing to note, outgrown the stage when all arts were traced to Greek (see 'Sumerians' by Sir Leonard Woolley, 1928 p. 193, Glanville in 'Legacy of Egypt' p. 160 for the debt the Greeks owed to Egypt). Sir Thomas Heath was obliged to admit that the debt of the Greeks to the Babylonians was much greater than had been imagined.⁶⁹⁴ Sarton in 'a History of Science' (London, 1953) has to say that it is childish to assume that science began in Greek (Preface p. IX).
v6.c82.71.3
It has been found that the Greeks were inferior to the Babylonians in several respects, that their vaunted geometric lore was not as great intellectually as supposed, that out of 200 propositions in Euclid's twelve books only about a dozen are necessary as a preparation for modern mathematics and that the Greeks much developed geometry because they could not easily employ ordinary arithmetical methods owing to their dependence on the abacus.⁶⁹⁵ It was further found that the sexagesimal system of degrees, minutes and seconds used by Ptolemy was of Babylonian origin and according to Herodotus (II. 109) the Greeks derived two kinds of Sun-dials and the division of the day into 12 parts from the Babylonians.⁶⁹⁶ At present such nations as England, France, Germany, U. S. S. R. and U. S. A. are the foremost nations in Science, Technology and Industry but they clung for about 1400 years to the Almagest of Ptolemy as their astronomical Bible, were ignorant of the decimal place value system and the use of a sign for zero till the so-called 'Arabic numerals' (borrowed from India) were introduced into Europe.⁶⁹⁷ The intolerance of ignorant and bigoted priests in Europe went so far as to condemn Galileo, one of the greatest intellects in mechanics and astronomy, to perpetual imprisonment at the age of 70 for no greater offence than holding fast to the Copernican theory.
v6.c82.71.4
Hardly any parallel to such an attempt to suppress honest difference of opinion as regards heavenly bodies can be found in any non-European country claiming to have a civilization