Science in Ancient India

‘Veda’ means knowledge. Since we call our earliest period Vedic, this is suggestive of the importance of knowledge and science, as a means of acquiring that knowledge, to that period of Indian history. For quite some time scholars believed that this knowledge amounted to no more than speculations regarding the self; this is what we are still told in some schoolbook accounts. New insights in archaeology, astronomy, history of science and Vedic scholarship have shown that such a view is wrong. We now know that Vedic knowledge embraced physics, mathematics, astronomy, logic, cognition and other disciplines. We find that Vedic science is the earliest science that has come down to us. This has significant implications in our understanding of the history of ideas and the evolution of early civilizations. The reconstructions of our earliest science are based not only on the Vedas but also on their appendicies called the Vedangas. The six Vedangas deal with: kalpa, performance of ritual with its basis of geometry, mathematics and calendrics; shiksha, phonetics; chhandas, metrical structures; nirukta, etymology; vyakarana, grammar; and jyotisha, astronomy and other cyclical phenomena. Then there are naturalistic descriptions in the various Vedic books that tell us a lot about scientific ideas of those times. Briefly, the Vedic texts present a tripartite and recursive world view. The universe is viewed as three regions of earth, space, and sky with the corresponding entities of Agni, Indra, and Vishve Devah (all gods). Counting separately the joining regions leads to a total of five categories where, as we see in Figure 1, water separates earth and fire, and air separates fire and ether. In Vedic ritual the three regions are assigned different fire altars. Furthermore, the five categories are represented in terms of altars of five layers. The great altars were built of a thousand bricks to a variety of dimensions. The discovery that the details of the altar constructions code astronomical knowledge is a fascinating chapter in the history of astronomy (Kak 1994a; 1995a,b).