Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.74

c13.74

The Hindus had undoubtedly made some progress at an early period in the astronomy cultivated by them for the regulation of time. Their calendar, both civil and religious, was governed chiefly, not exclusively, by the moon and sun: and the motions of these luminaries were carefully observed by them: and with such success, that their determination of the moon's synodical revolution, which was what they were principally concerned with, is a much more correct one than the Greeks ever achieved.¹⁰³ They had a division of the ecliptic into twenty-seven and twenty-eight parts, suggested evidently by the moon's period in days; and seemingly their own: it was certainly borrowed by the Arabians.¹⁰⁴ Being led to the observation of the fixed stars, they obtained a knowledge of the positions of the most remarkable; and noticed, for religious purposes, and from superstitious notions, the heliacal rising, with other phenomena of a few. The adoration of the sun, of the planets, and of the stars, in common with the worship of the elements, held a principal place in their religious observances, enjoined by the Vedas:¹⁰⁵ and they were led consequently by piety to watch the heavenly bodies. They were particularly conversant with the most splendid of the primary planets; the period of Jupiter being introduced by them, in conjunction with those of the sun and moon, into the regulation of their calendar, sacred and civil, in the form of the celebrated cycle of sixty years, common to them and to the Chaldeans, and still retained by them. From that cycle they advanced by progressive stages, as the Chaldeans likewise did, to larger periods; at first by combining that with a number specifically suggested by other, or more correctly determined, revolutions of the heavenly bodies; and afterwards, by merely augmenting the places of figures for greater scope, (preferring this to the more exact method of combining periods of the planets by an algebraic process; which they likewise investigated)¹⁰⁶ until they arrived finally at the unwieldy cycles named *Mahayugas* and *Calpas*. But it was for the sake of astrology, that they pushed their cultivation of astronomy, especially that of the minor planets, to the length alluded to. Now divination, by the relative position of the planets, seems to have been, in part at least, of a foreign growth, and comparatively recent introduction, among the Hindus. The belief in the influence of the planets and stars, upon human affairs, is with them, indeed, remotely ancient; and was a natural consequence of their creed, which made the sun a divine being, and the planets gods. But the notion, that the tendency of that supposed influence, or the manner in which it will be exerted, may be foreseen by man, and the effect to be produced by it foretold, through a knowledge of the position of the planets at a particular moment, is no necessary result of that creed: for it takes from beings believed divine, free-agency in other respects, as in their visible movements.