You might have recognized the names of some of the Greek natural philosophers.
They were individuals with quirky theories, and we have records about them.
But they weren’t the only people making knowledge back in the day.
India had major urban centers, centralized administrative states, and complicated metaphysical
traditions long before the Greeks had anything big—
just goats, which are small.
And olive trees, which are bigger than goats but still small.
And a few gods and goddesses doing normal stuff like cheating on each other.
In Indian scriptures, thousands of gods and demons made perpetual war, destroying and
recreating reality itself!
Ancient Indian thinkers didn’t give rise to the same natural philosophy as
the Greeks.
India presents a convenient counterpoint to Greece because knowledge-making in india was
indeparable from a long religious tradition, sponsored by the state,
and focused on applications.
At the same time, both regions exchanged ideas with each other and the wider world.
Today we’ll dive into a couple of major aspects of Indian natural philosophy, underlying
philosophy–philosophy, and math.
Oh, and we’ll talk about everyone’s favorite large mammal—the elephant!
[Intro Music Plays]
Ancient India was home to several schools of thought, including what would become Hinduism,
its more austere rivals Buddhism and Jainism, and a super-fatalistic faith called Ajivika
that isn’t around anymore.
The most important Hindu texts were the Vedas.
The word “veda” literally means “knowledge.”
These sacred texts are passed along orally, even today.
But they had also been written down for centuries by the time Alexander the Great invaded western
India in 326 BCE.
Science and religion were entangled in both Greece and India.
True, the Greek natural philosophers began to break with a mythological tradition, or
at least repurposed it, proposing new ways of thinking about nature.
Even so, we can never neatly separate out science from religion: they mutually affect
one another.
In India, “knowledge” systems were essentially, well, vedic.
The Vedas were written in a sacred language, Sanskrit, which was standardized around the
time of the first Greek natural philosophers.
The greatest Sanskrit scholar, Panini, wrote a book on grammar listing almost four thousand rules!
These covered phonetics, meter, semantics, etymology—everything about the language
and how it should be used.
In fact, Panini’s theory of how words are formed was so advanced that it was directly
studied into the twentieth century!
So you can say that the first science in India was linguistics.
And this tradition of memorizing the Vedas and trying to understand words eventually
led to the study of acoustics and musical tones.
But is studying a language, which is a very human thing, the same kind of knowledge-making
as studying fire or gravity?
Yes, totally!
Linguists make hypotheses, take careful observations, and put together testable theories about how
languages change.
They might be frustrated by the seeming randomness of their subjects… but then again, so are
quantum physicists, and medical doctors!
Some parts of the Vedas concerned math and astronomy.
But mostly they concerned gods and rituals.
The Vedas taught that the cosmos is clearly ordered, as is human society.
What happens in the reality you perceive is the result of a complicated ethical algorithm
running in the background—so you have to sacrifice a lot of animals and stay in your
social position.
Thus the Vedas functioned not only as a basis for a whole language, but as a way of teaching
people how society should be: a mirror of an orderly cosmos.
And so we arrive at the present year: 321 BCE…
It’s not actually 321.
But it was, at one point.
At that time, in Greece, Aristotle had been dead for only one year.
Over in Babylon, in what is now Iraq, Aristotle’s former boss Alexander the Great had been dead
for two years.
But in eastern India, a young adventurer named Chandragupta Maurya was very
much alive: that year he became emperor of nearly the entire subcontinent.
Alexander had only recently invaded India, wisely choosing not to start beef with the
powerful kingdom of Magadha.
When Alexander died, India consisted of a lot of small kingdoms.
Maurya, inspired by the model of Alexander and coached by a brilliant older adviser,
led a coup in Magadha.
From there, Maurya conquered the weaker kingdoms one by one, forging them into a powerful state
called —wait for it, what name did he name it?
who knows!— it's the Maurya Empire.
The dynasty that Maurya founded lasted from 322 to 180 BCE.
It sponsored research into astronomy, hydraulic engineering, and forestry.
Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka became one of the most powerful and culturally
influential rulers of India, as well as a serious convert to Buddhism.
He outlawed hunting and other unnecessary acts of violence towards animals, opened public
hospitals, and spread Buddhism as far as Athens!
When the Buddhist monk Faxian visited India from Jin Dynasty China, starting
in 399 CE, he favorably compared the two empires: both were civilized societies where Buddhism
could flourish.
Increased travel between states brought increased trade in goods as well as ideas.
Under the Maurya Empire, more than half of the arable land in ancient India was irrigated,
producing two harvests a year.
That sustained a lot of people… and required a lot of planning.
Thus Indian states developed whole government departments to supervise the building and
maintenance of irrigation systems.
They controlled a vast system of canals and sluices, funded by taxes.
Breaching a dam was punishable… by death!
The centralized Maurya Empire—like the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese ones—was a “hydraulic”
state: its control of water allowed harvests stability, keeping large populations alive.
To control nature, the people running these big states needed to know lots of things about
the lands, plants, animals and especially rivers they controlled.
And most especially about the people who owed them taxes.
First rule of history: nobody ever, ever liked paying taxes.
Another key to running a big state in India was the elephant.
Training hundreds of war elephants was important to continued military power.
So the Mauryas created a forestry department, because elephants lived in the forests, and
made the slaying of elephants punishable by, you guessed it, death.
Forestry management and regulating land and water would eventually develop into sciences
in their own right.
The Mauryas’ administrative or “useful” science, such as their pioneering work in
land management, was not the same as the abstract theorizing of the Greek natural philosophers.
The Greeks left behind their names, thanks to their writings and their cults—I mean—schools.
The work of those who maintained early hydraulic states tended to be anonymous.
A debate about the relative merits of applied versus pure science—knowledge of the immediately
useful versus the abstractly true—is still raging today.
Just compare a scientist applying for a grant to study, say, lichen versus an engineer working
on computer guidance for missiles…
But useful and abstract systems are not diametric opposites, and they were never fully separate.
India had been open to Persian and Chinese influences before Alexander.
The Chinese had already introduced alchemy—or systematic questioning about what is stuff—to
Indian thought.
But India definitely became more Greek-ish when a bunch of Greeks–some trained by Aristotle
himself—pranced in talking about elements and perfectly circular star-paths.
Astronomy was important to all of the ancient states.
This is because, alongside their war-making and tax-taking, states were also religious
institutes, which cared about astrological schedules.
Because, if you’re a god, you can fly around the heavens, you have houses in different
parts of the sky, and you want to be worshipped when you’re in the right house.
In India, as all over the ancient world, “religion” and “science” were not separate ideas
in the way we might think of them today.
Practicing astrology meant carefully observing stars and planets—and thus also practicing
astronomy.
People who knew a lot about the night sky made up a high-status professional class.
These stargazers were part-priest, part-astronomer, and part-mathematician.
As astronomers, they divided the solar year into months, crafting calendars to regulate
religious ceremonies.
They developed a calculation for adding a leap month when necessary to keep the religious
calendar in sync with the solar one.
And they investigated the moon’s cycles, as well as constellations.
As mathematicians, they came up with names for very large numbers—such as 10 to the
40th—related to the very long cosmic cycles in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
In fact, astronomy and related math really took off in ancient India.
Let’s take a closer look with ThoughtBubble:
During the Gupta Empire, which lasted from 319 to 605 CE, families of professional astronomer–mathematicians
passed down their teachings about the stars.
And they competed with each other: six regional schools of thought all fought for state patronage.
This period also saw the rise of the siddhantas or “the solutions,” meaning high-level
astronomy textbooks.
Two of the major siddhanta writers were Aryabhata and Brahmagupta.
They were both brilliant polymaths,
but unfortunately they disagreed about astronomy.
Which was really too bad, because these guys would have made a team of unbeatable geniuses.
Written around 500 CE, Aryabhata’s book of solutions includes a place-value system,
decimal notation, the familiar numbers that we call “Arabic” today, the number zero,
and the irrational number pi calculated to four places.
And Aryabhata famously posited that the earth rotates… daily… on its axis.
This idea was a major breakthrough in astronomy: Egyptian, Greek, and earlier Indian thinkers
argued that the sky rotates around the earth.
Aryabhata figured out that the apparent “movement” of the stars is actually caused by the rotation
of the earth itself.
But Brahmagupta thought that a rotating earth defied common sense: just look at the birds,
all not flying off into the heavens!
Meanwhile, in his own siddhanta, Brahmagupta calculated the circumference of the earth
with astonishing precision, and he worked with negative and irrational numbers.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
Indian mathematicians were working on many topics that writers in Greece were not.
But the most advanced branch of natural philosophy in ancient India was more founded in Vedic
teachings.
Ayurveda, literally life-knowledge, or the science of life, began with oral traditions
about sacrificial animals.
By the sixth century BCE, it was a standardized system of medicine and way of answering the
question what is life?
Ayurvedic approaches to diseases and cures were rational.
There were reasons for every choice.
Good physicians didn’t believe in strictly divine cures, but practiced medical judgment
based on years of study and then more years of experience.
The influential medical textbook Charaka Samhita, for example, calls for physicians to apprentice
with a master, then get royal permission to treat patients.
It also lists 300 bones, 500 muscles, 210 joints, and 70 vessels in the human body.
This was written some time before 200 CE.
And today’s med school students complain about organic chemistry!
Ayurveda, which is still around today, is so complex and important that we’re devoting
another episode to it, alongside ancient European medicine.
For now, just note that, Indian medicine and surgery was probably the most advanced of
any contemporary ancient civilization.
Rich in people and faiths, India was not a
single culture even under the highly successful Mauryas and Guptas.
But certain features of ancient Indian natural philosophy stand out.
The ancient Vedas—literally, the knowledges—influenced a wide variety of thinkers across a large
geographic region.
There were no sharp breaks with Vedic ways of knowing—although Buddhism, and influences
from China and Greece, added new layers of philosophy on top of the Vedic one.
And the Maurya and Gupta states were wealthy and well-administered, known for their skilled
artisans and able to control vast plains in order to feed teeming cities.
As ancient states exchanged goods and proto-scientific ideas, Indian ideas spread far and wide: we
have accounts of Ayurvedic physicians, or vaidyas, working in eighth-century
Baghdad, then one of the largest cities on earth and a center of knowledge production.
Next time—we’ll travel to The Americas to ask questions like, "When are we? What is time? And how to we measure it?"
Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it’s made with the help of all this nice people and our animation team is
Thought Cafe.
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