India should keep scriptures out of science

[Homo Sapiens]

India should keep scriptures out of science
To find a clear science of physics or biology in stories of great power is a strange, infantile obsession

By C.P. Surendran, Special to Gulf News
Published: 16:26 March 12, 2018

In Delhi, on Sunday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron co-chaired the first International Solar Alliance (ISA), a group of 62 nations determined to make solar energy the main source of light and heat in practical applications.

Who would quarrel with the good intention of the 33 nations present at the convention? Who would grudge them that almost altruistic ambition?

Yet, amid all the bonhomie and earnest aspiration, there was a shadow. The shadow of superstition.

Indeed, with Macron promising some $860 million (Dh3.16 billion) by 2022 for solar projects in developing countries, and Modi himself claiming his country would be generating 175 gigawatts — gigawatts, as a cynic improved upon the term — power from renewable sources by the now nearly magical goal year of 2022, in fact, double India’s renewable energy capacity, there was the ubiquitous Vedic reference uttered by Modi, and stranger than usual for the context.

As a newspaper quoted him, this is what Modi said: “Vedas consider the Sun as the soul of the world, it has been considered as a life nurturer. Today, for combating climate change, we need to look at this ancient idea to find a way,” Modi said in New Delhi.

This is in keeping with a recent trend on the part of the Modi regime to find ancient answers to modern questions.

It is not uncommon these days to find researchers in accredited institutions actively writing academic papers reinterpreting what is now popularly called “Vedic science.” Consider for example a paper titled, Origin of Environmental Science From Vedas by Shashi Tiwari, where he says: “In Vedic view, this world consists of Agni i.e., fire or heat and Soma or water. Sun [Surya] is the soul of all which is moving and also of which is not moving.”

While it is not clear what is the exact text or dissertation upon which Modi based his observations, the general thought process of the Vedic scientists consist, in this context, of seeing the sun as the source of our existence.

The central relationship of sun to Man is fairly plain, and is likely to be evident even to our ancestors. And as in the quote above, what we get in Hindu scriptures is praise for the sun. But that hardly warrants attributing to them a whole metrics of the sun, a whole science of deriving energy from the sun.

This is not the first time, the ruling BJP has resorted to the scriptures for a Hindu hegemony of sorts over the discipline of science. Since their coming to power in 2014, important leaders like the union home minister Rajnath Singh has repeatedly exhorted the layman and the specialist to go back to the Vedas and Mahabharata for answers.

There have been allusions from the spokesmen of the BJP and its mother organisation, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), that IVF, for instance, had been widely practised in those distant times. Teleportation, too, a wildly popular mode of transport of the saints. Not to mention planes (as in Ravan’s use of Pushpak Viman to abduct Sita in Ramayana) or the use of nuclear missiles (as in the bow and arrow battles between Arjun and Ashwathama in Mahabharata).

To find a clear science of physics or biology in these stories of great power is a strange, infantile obsession. To actually fund institutions and individuals in this pursuit is a waste of meagre resources. But for a prime minister to believe and advocate a myth written or told over 3,000 years ago at an international convention of alternate energy is to officially endorse a Vedic prayer to the sun as a whole science of life is a general licence for a society to slip into mayhem.

The prime minster unexceptionally concluded his address at the ISA by quoting the Shanti Mantra from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya, which translates as “Lead me from darkness to light”. This is an aspirational sentiment.

The trouble is to believe that the light is ever at your back, in the past. Look back, if you must; but march forward. Certainly, for India, there is a lot of ground to cover.

C.P. Surendran is a senior journalist based in India.
http://gulfnews.com/opinion/thinkers/india-should-keep-scriptures-out-of-science-1.2186640

 

[Homo Sapiens]

It is not uncommon these days to find researchers in accredited institutions actively writing academic papers reinterpreting what is now popularly called “Vedic science.”

Vedic science
Vedic economy
Vedic GDP growth
Vedic medicine
Vedic technology
Vedic space travel
Vedic plastic surgey
-------------------------
-------------------------
-------------------------
-------------------------
---------------------------
----------------------------
Vedic India rocks.

 

[Taygibay]

You should have chats with GOP members of the US congress.

Climate denying Old Testament-based flat-earthers with eschatological inclinations
will show that Indians are not alone with that attitude.

And I might have spotted it elsewhere too ...
can't remember where exactly!

Anyhow, good day to you, Tay.

 

[Srinivas]

Why cry?

Indian civilization and India will surely rise !

Every fact in the scriptures will be established after debate and discussion.

 

[SrNair]

Vedic science
Vedic economy
Vedic GDP growth
Vedic medicine
vedic technology
Vedic space travel
Vedic plastic surgey
-------------------------
-------------------------
-------------------------
-------------------------
---------------------------
----------------------------
Vedic India was rocks.

We will do whatever we want in our country .
World accepts Yoga , so in time they will also accept our tradition

 

[manlion]

Why cry?

Indian civilization and India will surely rise !

Every fact in the scriptures will be established after debate and discussion.

facts like the sun revolves around earth on his chariot ?

 

[Nalini]

 

[Srinivas]

facts like the sun revolves around earth on his chariot ?

Read surya siddantha, Pdf available online.

 

[manlion]

Read surya siddantha, Pdf available online.

when was the Siddhanta wrtiten ?

Greek influence[edit]

It is hypothesized that there were cultural contacts between the Indian and Greek astronomers via cultural contact with Hellenistic Greece, specifically the work of Hipparchus (2nd-century BCE). There were some similarities between Suryasiddhanta and Greek astronomy in Hellenistic period. For example, Suryasiddhanta provides table of sines function which parallel the Hipparchus table of chords, though the Indian calculations are more accurate and detailed.[26] According to Alan Cromer, the Greek influence probably arrived in India by about 100 BCE.[27] The Indians adopted the Hipparchus system, according to Cromer, and it remained that simpler system rather than those made by Ptolemy in the 2nd century.[28]

As a newspaper quoted him, this is what Modi said: “Vedas consider the Sun as the soul of the world, it has been considered as a life nurturer. Today, for combating climate change, we need to look at this ancient idea to find a way,” Modi said in New Delhi.

2. Vedas say Sun moves around the earth on a golden chariot with his 7 horses

As the Veds Claim that the earth is static and so they tried to prove that the sun moves around the earth. The following statement from the rig Ved tries to clarify it:

1. "Sun is full of light and knows all the human beings, so his horses take him to sky to look at the world" (Rig Ved 1/50/1)

2. "O, Bright sun, a chariot named harit with seven horses takes you to sky" (Rig Ved 1/50/8) 3. "O, man, the sun who is most attractive, takes round of the earth, on his golden chariot through the sky and removes the darkness of the earth" (Yajur Ved 33/43)

https://asimiqbal2nd.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/errors-hinduism.pdf

 

[Srinivas]

when was the Siddhanta wrtiten ?

Greek influence[edit]

It is hypothesized that there were cultural contacts between the Indian and Greek astronomers via cultural contact with Hellenistic Greece, specifically the work of Hipparchus (2nd-century BCE). There were some similarities between Suryasiddhanta and Greek astronomy in Hellenistic period. For example, Suryasiddhanta provides table of sines function which parallel the Hipparchus table of chords, though the Indian calculations are more accurate and detailed.[26] According to Alan Cromer, the Greek influence probably arrived in India by about 100 BCE.[27] The Indians adopted the Hipparchus system, according to Cromer, and it remained that simpler system rather than those made by Ptolemy in the 2nd century.[28]



2. Vedas say Sun moves around the earth on a golden chariot with his 7 horses

As the Veds Claim that the earth is static and so they tried to prove that the sun moves around the earth. The following statement from the rig Ved tries to clarify it:

1. "Sun is full of light and knows all the human beings, so his horses take him to sky to look at the world" (Rig Ved 1/50/1)

2. "O, Bright sun, a chariot named harit with seven horses takes you to sky" (Rig Ved 1/50/8) 3. "O, man, the sun who is most attractive, takes round of the earth, on his golden chariot through the sky and removes the darkness of the earth" (Yajur Ved 33/43)

https://asimiqbal2nd.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/errors-hinduism.pdf

That is bullshit, every thing worth is influenced by foreign lands and every thing worth a ridicule is native.

Seen this kind of gimmicks many, not any more.

 

[manlion]

That is bullshit, every thing worth is influenced by foreign lands and every thing worth a ridicule is native.

Seen this kind of gimmicks many, not any more.

I am quoting the Indian PM's remark on Vedas in regard to Sun, vedas are considered the oldest and authoritative Hindu religious text, not some ambiguous Surya Siddhanta

7 Traversing sky and wide mid-air, thou metest with thy beams our days,
Sun, seeing all things that have birth.
8 Seven Bay Steeds harnessed to thy car bear thee, O thou farseeing One,
God, Sūrya, with the radiant hair.
9 Sūrya hath yoked the pure bright Seven, the daughters of the car; with these,
His own dear team, he goeth forth.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv01050.htm

 

[patman]

That is bullshit, every thing worth is influenced by foreign lands and every thing worth a ridicule is native.

Seen this kind of gimmicks many, not any more.

Dude don't talk to manlion , that dude is a next level troll . He literally claims a single Tamil kingdom ruled tamil nadu fire 50,000 years. Dude literally retold black Panthers origin story

 

[Srinivas]

Regarding your claim that in vedas or Indian scriptures that sun moves around earth, here is the explanation. Nothing written in the Indian scriptures like that.
==========================================================
Aitareya Brahmana (3.44) declares:

“The Sun does never set nor rise. When people think the Sun is setting (it is not so). For after having arrived at the end of the day it makes itself produce two opposite effects, making night to what is below and day to what is on the other side…Having reached the end of the night, it makes itself produce two opposite effects, making day to what is below and night to what is on the other side. In fact, the Sun never sets….”

Earth as Flat at Poles:

"Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together. The Sanskrit speaking sages d to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one. The Indians of the fifth century A.D. calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in 19th century England were convinced it was 100 million years."

"Sarva Dishanaam, Suryaham Suryaha, Surya."

Roughly translated this means, "There are suns in all directions, the night sky being full of them," suggesting that early sky watchers may have realized that the visible stars are similar in kind to the sun. A hymn of the Rig Veda, the Taittriya Brahmana, extols, nakshatravidya (nakshatra means stars; vidya, knowledge)."

"Two thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center. "

When we talk of gravity, Newton comes to our mind, but in the text Surya Sidhantha dated around 400 AD, Bhaskaracharya described it stated. "objects fall on the earth due to one force. The Earth, planets, constellations, moon and sun are held in orbit because of that one force".

Seven horses draw the chariot of Surya". Rg Veda 5. 45. 9



These seven horses are the seven colors compromising light. These seven colors become visible in a rainbow or when light passes through a prism.

Vedic literature used large numbers and employed modern decimal enumeration, compared with the primitive Greek and Roman arithmetic. The first recorded evidence of "Hindu" numerals is at least as old as the Ashoka's edicts, circa 250 B. C.

Not just astronomy, but other physical concepts appear in quite a developed form in ancient Indian literature. These include atomism, superposition of various sound notes, the division of time into very small units of the order of a 100,000th of a second, and so on.

The Laya Yoga Samhita stated that just as the beams of sunlight entering a room reveal the presence of innumberable motes, so infinite space is filled with countless brahmandas (solar systems). The atomic structure of matter was discussed in the ancient Vaisesika treatises. And in the Yoga Vashista it was stated, in a passage very similar to the foregoing: "There are vast worlds all placed way within the hollows of each atom, multifarious as the motes in a sunbeam."

Modern physics confirmed that the sun's rays travel in a curved way, but not in a straight line. Our ancestors told that the sun's chariot was drawn by seven horses tied by snakes. As the movements of the snakes are crooked and curved, so also the sun's ray. The phenomenon is described in a metaphysical poetic line bhujagana mita sapta turaga. The chapter on light says that there are seven colors in the white ray of the sun. Artharveda says that there are seven types of sun's rays, sapta surayasya rasmayah.
==========================================================

Regarding the seven horses, they are seven colors in sun light. It is a symbolic way to represent sun to a common man.

I am quoting the Indian PM's remark on Vedas in regard to Sun, vedas are considered the oldest and authoritative Hindu religious text, not some ambiguous Surya Siddhanta

7 Traversing sky and wide mid-air, thou metest with thy beams our days,
Sun, seeing all things that have birth.
8 Seven Bay Steeds harnessed to thy car bear thee, O thou farseeing One,
God, Sūrya, with the radiant hair.
9 Sūrya hath yoked the pure bright Seven, the daughters of the car; with these,
His own dear team, he goeth forth.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv01050.htm

 

[Nalini]

 

[Nalini]