The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c5.6

c5.6

The greatest historians of science have not always been able to escape this inconvenience of unilateral knowledge when they had to compare the Greek and Indian data. A. Paul Tannery, so justly famous for his studies in the field of ancient Mathematics, has been himself an example of the same. It is known that the trigonometric sinus is not mentioned by the Greek Mathematicians and Astronomers, that it has been in use in India since the Gupta period, as the *Sūrya-siddhānta* of the fourth or the fifth century A.D. gives a table of sinus, that the Arab Astronomers who borrowed from India had known the sinus and that its usage came to the occident in the twelfth century A.D., when the astronomical work of Al-Battani was translated into Latin. From this, the conclusion should have been drawn that the sinus had been invented, not by the Greeks but by the Indians whose tradition on this point had been taken up by the Arabs for completing that of the Greeks. But, being sure that the Indians could not have invented anything in Mathematics and believing that this science had no place among them, Tannery has preferred to suppose, without any basis whatsoever, that the sinus could have been the response to a Greek idea, not adopted by Hipparchos, who had merely established a table of chords. The mere fact that Indians had known the sinus sufficed to persuade Tannery that the Greeks had known it and had then taught its concept to the Indians.¹