A History of the Kerala School of Hindu Astronomy (in Perspective) c7.s3.1

c7.s3.1

An insight into the mediaeval astronomer’s methodology, which consisted of prolonged and repeated observation, experimentation, recording of readings, checking of the values obtained from observation with those obtained by computation and the postulation of corrections (*saṃskāra*), in order to make computation correspond with observation, might be illustrated by certain statements which Parameśvara makes elsewhere. In his sub-commentary *Siddhāntadīpikā* on the *Mahabhāskarīya-bhāṣya* of Govindasvāmin,¹ he has a long excursus on a number of eclipses which he had observed carefully and about which he had recorded the details, with a view to effecting necessary corrections to prevailing rules of computation or for formulating new rules therefor (*op. cit.*, pp. 321-32). He commences the said excursus with the statement that he had been observing eclipses from Śaka 1315 (A.D. 1393), that he had found the observed times to have always preceded the computed times and, so, the computations needed corrections: