India's real treasure

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India's real treasure

By Vasu Murty

 

"India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of

European languages," wrote American scholar Will Durant in Our

Oriental Heritage. According to Durant: "She was the mother of our

philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics;

mother of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the

village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India, in

many ways, is the mother of us all."

 

 

For thousands of years, India has enjoyed music, orchestral bands,

dance, song, stage acting and all the other fine arts. Contemporary

Indian historian A. Kalyanaraman writes that in comparison to other

parts of the world, slavery was virtually nonexistent. There did

exist various forms of indentured servitude, but none as brutal as in

the West.

 

Kalyanaraman further insists that the whole of Southeast Asia

received most of its culture from India. India gave the world rice,

cotton, sugarcane, spices and chess. Indian philosophy and

metaphysics can be found in Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Emerson,

Thoreau and Schopenhauer.India has much to offer the West, especially

its spiritual heritage.

 

"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita," wrote Ralph Waldo

Emerson on Hinduism's most sacred text. "It was the first of books;

it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but

large, serene, and consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which

in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same

questions that exercise us."

 

"What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light

of a higher and purer stratum," wrote Henry David Thoreau in Journal.

 

In chapter 16 of Walden, Thoreau exclaims: "In the morning I bathe my

intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-

gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed and in

comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny

and trivial."

 

Megasthenes journeyed from the Greco-Roman world to India during the

Third Century BC. He served as an ambassador to the court of

Chandragupta, where he had been sent by the King of Taxila. His

accounts describe a great deal of political freedom and equality in

ancient India, where social mobility was acknowledged.

 

The Vedas describe numerous sages who were of low birth, but were

considered by their virtue to have been raised to the highest status.

The Greek Megasthenes observed: "The law ordains that none among them

under any circumstances be a slave; enjoying freedom, they shall

expect the equal right to it which others possess . . . All Indians

are free and not one of them is a slave. The Indians do not even use

aliens as slaves; much less a countryman of their own."

 

The earliest moral and legal codes (Dharma-sastras and Niti-sastras)

originated in India, as did the earliest representative institutions

(Sabha and Parishad). A western text, India: Yesterday and Today,

also reports that "the four orders . . . of Hindu society . . . were

classes in the western sense rather than castes in the Indian manner."

 

The Vedic Manu-Samhita, which Srila Prabhupada called the religious

law book for mankind, is comparable to Mosaic Law or the Sharia.

 

"Long before Columbus" era, India had a reputation throughout the

world for its opulence. "The part of India known as Malabar," wrote

Marco Polo, "was the richest and noblest country in the world." Hindu

historian A. Kalyanaraman writes that Egypt traded ivory, precious

stones, gold and sandalwood with India, while Rome traded Indian

spices—mostly cinnamon and cassia. The Puranas mention sandalwood

from Malaysia. Ancient India's epic poem, Mahabharata, even compares

the women of the Mediterranean with the goddesses of the higher

worlds.

The Rig Veda, one of four Vedas, refers to metallurgy. The Vedas also

refer to mining iron ore, copper, brass and bronze. By the Sixth

Century AD, India was far ahead of Europe in industrial chemistry.

The Hindus were masters at calcination, distillation, sublimation,

steaming, making anesthetics, soporific powders, metallic salts,

compounds and alloys. India was producing steel during the era of

Alexander. Centuries later, steel would be introduced to Europe by

the Muslims.

 

The Vedas mention herbal medicines. They also discuss various

afflictions and symptoms, and prescribe cures, depending on whether

the disease is chronic and acute, and contagious or non-contagious.

Jivaka (sixth century BC) was adept at surgical operations such as

trepanation of the skull and abdominal openings to cure hernia.

 

Panini's classical work on grammar, Ashtaadhyaani, contains a

comprehensive list of parts of the human anatomy as well as rare and

common diseases. He further described ligaments, lymphatics, nerve

plexus, adipose and vascular tissues, and mucous and synovial

membranes with astonishing accuracy. Susruta dealt with surgery,

obstetrics, dieting, baths, drugs, infant feeding, personal hygiene,

and medicinal education. He also understood the process of digestion

and the functions of the stomach and liver.

 

A remarkably accurate account of prenatal human development—from

fertilization to birth—is given in the third canto of Srimad-

Bhagavatam.

 

In 1550 Bhavamisra detailed the circulation of blood in a book

written on anatomy and physiology, a century before the West. Susruta

described cataract surgery, hernia, cesarean section, the dissection

of cadavers, and the use of skin grafts to repair a torn ear.

Rhinoplasty (fixing a broken nose) was a common practice. A drug

called sammohini was used as an anesthetic. Ancient Indians were

experts in plastic surgery until the 18th century. They knew the

importance of taking a pulse. They were aware as far back as the

sixth century BC that mosquito bites transmit diseases.

 

Square roots and cube roots and the Pythagorean theorem are mentioned

in the Sulbha Sutras of Bodhayana (700 BC). Bodhayana also calculated

the areas of triangles, circles, and trapezoids and determined pi

3.14136 when measuring and constructing altars. Aryabhata (Fifth

Century AD) drew up a table of sines and provided India with a system

of trigonometry more sophisticated than that of the Greeks. Ancient

mathematical texts such as the Jyotisha Vedanga dealt with geometry,

fractions, quadratic and cubic equations, algebra, permutations, and

combinations.

 

In the West, we have been taught to call our base-ten system of

numeration (which replaced Roman numerals) Arabic numerals. India

gave the world the base-ten numerical system, our modern numerical

script, and the concept of zero as a placeholder and numerically

recorded quantity. Indian mathematics came to the West through the

Arabs. The Arabs called mathematics "Hindisat," or Indian art.

 

Before Newton, Bhaskara (1150 AD) was well-acquainted with the

principles of differential calculus and the concept of infinity.

Astronomers such as Vachaspati (800 AD) anticipated the foundations

of solid coordinate geometry centuries before Descartes. They also

explained the movement of celestial bodies in terms of the earth's

rotation and motion about the sun. Charaka, a physician from the

Seventh Century BC, described the wave motion of light, had a

calendar of 12 lunar months, and classified stars into zodiacal

constellations.

 

India had rockets in the late 18th Century; they were even used in

military battles against the British. This generated interest in

rocket technology in England. The Indian people built "iron forts and

thousand pillared halls," and were described by observers as adorning

themselves in silk, wool, linen and cotton.

All this and more is India's gift to the world.