Window To Ancient India A Tryst With Ancient Science Philosophy Part Ii Languages Linguistic Systems And Indian Logic System Vis A Vis The Greeks

About the Book: The canvas of India’s history, literature, science, and culture spans not just centuries, but several millennia. This book provides a bird’s eye view of everything Indian or simply the proverbial ‘omnibus capsule’. For modern readers who have little time to read eclectic sources, the ‘omnibus capsule‘ hopes to provide a comprehensive compendium about India. Part I narrates the fascinating history of Board Games and Martial Arts in India. Race Games like Pachisi, Moksha Patam, and Ashtapada became channels for many popular games like Ludo, Snake & Ladders, and Backgammon. Pachisi was however appropriated by Alfred Collier, who took the game to England and called it ‘Royal Ludo’ and even earned a patent for it. One of the earliest war games was Chaturanga, the precursor of modern Chess. It traces the transmission of Chaturanga to the West via the Persians (Chatrang) and the Arabs (Shatranj), and its evolution into the contemporary form. It describes various kinds of derived chess games, like circular chess, four-handed chess, decimal chess, and chess with dice etc. The relationship between Chitra Kavya, a genre of Sanskrit poetry and the Knights Tour, is fascinating. The earliest mention of hand combat is to be found in the Buddhist text Lotus Sutra. Chua-Fa practised today can be traced to the original 18 Luohan Hands of Boddhidharma. The book covers 14 different forms of martial arts practised in India. Martial Arts to Performance describes how Kalaripayattu continues to influence contemporary dance forms. About the Author: Satish Joglekar is an engineer from IIT Bombay, with a Master’s in computer science. He has worked with several software companies for more than 30 years which included a long stint at Bell Laboratories, USA. Satish is trained in Hindustani classical music and has intense interest in history, non-fiction literature, and travel.

India is not merely a land of mystery and wonder, but a land also of culture and of high thinking. Philosophy nourished there at least before the time of Homer; and the same problems which afterwards engaged the minds of Grecian philosophers, and which engage the minds of modern thinkers, had ages before occupied the attention of Indian sages. To this ancient philosophy of India the little volume before us forms a very good introduction. The treatise consists of three parts; the first being a brief outline of the history of Indian philosophy; the second treating of the connection between Greek and Indian Philosophy, and the third discussing Hindu Monism. Six great systems of philosophy flourished in India during the millennium before Christ, in which the problems of existence are discussed with an acuteness and wealth of illustration that have never been excelled. And the influence of the mental life of the Hindus, in those far-off times, affected the thinking of the Greeks, and through them the thinking of the modern world. The Ionic doctrine of elements, the Eleatic idea of the unity of existence, the Heraclitic conception of becoming, and the Pythagorean theory of numbers as the principle of existence, according to our author, had their origin in the speculations of the Hindu philosophers. Not that the connection between India and Greece in the earliest times is supposed to have been direct. Our author rather suspects that the earliest Greek thinkers became acquainted with Hindu thought through Persian sources, and he suggests that the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers may have had its origin in a misunderstanding of a Hindu word. That word is Samkhya, number, which forms the name of a Hindu system of philosophy, because that system was believed to contain a complete enumeration, or number, of the principles of existence. Misunderstanding this application of the term, Pythagoras made number itself the principle of the universe; and countless philosophers have since wasted their energies in trying to understand what he could have meant. The doctrine of metempsychosis also came into Greece, not from Egypt, where it did not prevail, but from India, where it originated in the effort to explain the phenomenon of apparently innocent suffering. The Hindu believed that suffering must always be a punishment of sin; but he saw men suffering who seemed not to have been guilty of any sins in this life; hence he inferred that they must be suffering for the sins committed in another life. We mention but one more idea for which Professor Garbe supposes Greece to have been indebted to India, and that is the idea of the Logos, which was current in the Stoic philosophy as denoting the rational law and order of the universe, borrowed from this source by Philo and the Hellenists, and appropriated by the author of our fourth Gospel. The corresponding Hindu term is Vach, voice, word, which appears as the consort of Prajapati, the Creator, who, in union with it, or Tier, for the word is feminine, accomplishes his creation. We have reproduced these few ideas from the work before us merely in order to give the reader a taste of the interest attaching to it. - The Reformed Church Review [1897]

The author has in this work clearly marked the principal stages of Indian logic in the vast period of about two thousand years beginning from 640 and has traced how from Anviksiki the science of debate Indian logic developed into the science of knowledge Pramanasastra and then into the science of dialectics Prakarana of Tarkasastra.The treatment of the subject is both historical and critical. The author has traced some Greek influence on indian logic. For instance he has shown how the five membered syllogism of Aristotle found its way through Alexandria Syria and other countries into Taxila and got amalgamated with the Nyaya doctrine of inference.The book is one of the pioneer works on the subjects. It has drawn on original sources exhaustively. Besides the preface introduction, foreword and table of contents the work contains several appendices and indexes.

To understand modern science as a coherent story, we must recognize the achievements of the ancient Hindus and this book tells their stories through painstaking research of historical and scientific sources. The ancient Hindus invented our base-ten number system and zero that are now used globally, carefully mapped the sky and assigned motion to the Earth in their astronomy, developed a sophisticated system of medicine with its mind-body approach known as Ayurveda, mastered metallurgical methods of extraction and purification of metals, including the so-called Damascus blade and the Iron Pillar of New Delhi, and developed the science of self-improvement that is popularly known as yoga. Their scientific contributions impacted noted scholars globally: Aristotle, Megasthenes, and Apollonius of Tyana among the Greeks; Al-Biruni, Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Labban, and Al-Uqlidisi, Al-Jahiz among the Islamic scholars; Fa-Hien, Hiuen Tsang, and I-tsing among the Chinese; and Leonardo Fibbonacci, Pope Sylvester II, Roger Bacon, Voltaire and Copernicus from Europe. In the modern era, thinkers and scientists as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Carl Jung, Max Mueller, Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Schroedinger, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Henry David Thoreau have acknowledged their debt to ancient Hindu achievements in science, technology, and philosophy. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the largest scientific organizations in the world, in 2000, published a timeline of 100 most important scientific findings in history to celebrate the new millennium. There were only two mentions from the non-Western world: (1) invention of zero and (2) the Hindu and Mayan skywatchers astronomical observations for agricultural and religious purposes. Both findings involved the works of the ancient Hindus. Ancient Hindu Science is well documented with remarkable objectivity, proper citations, and a substantial bibliography. The style of writing is lucid and elegant, making the book easy to read. This book is the perfect text for all students and others interested in the developments of science throughout history and among the ancient Hindus, in particular.

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