the purāṇas and jyotiḥśāstra: astronomy

The Purāṇas and Jyotiḥśāstra: AstronomyAuthor(s): David PingreeSource: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1990), pp. 274-280Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/604530 .

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THE PURANAS AND JYOTIHSASTRA: ASTRONOMY

DAVID PINGREE

BROWN UNIVERSITY

This article examines the origins of the puranic and jyotisa cosmologies, showing which of the elements in each were influenced by Babylonian and Greek ideas, and how the jyotisis adapted to their own system what puranic ideas they could while rejecting all others. The key jyotisa text, the Paitdmahasiddhdnta, is paradoxically preserved in an upapurana, the Visnudharmottara- purdna. It is further shown that a movement to reconcile the cosmology of the astronomers with that of the puranas began in the late seventeenth century, perhaps in an attempt among Indian intellectuals to close ranks against the perceived threat to their traditions posed by Islamic and European astronomy.

THERE EXIST IN A NUMBER of puranas, as Kirfel' has demonstrated, two descriptions of the universe having a common source. In this common source the earth,

prthivT, with its seven concentric pairs of continents and oceans,2 is a horizontal disk in the center of a vertical universe enclosed in the brahmanda. That universe contains seven lokas above3 and seven patdlas below.4 The first three of the upper seven constitute the Vedic triad-the bharloka being the surface of the earth, the bhuvarloka the region between the earth and the sun, and the svarloka the region between the Sun and Dhruva, the pole-star. From the center of the earth rises mount Meru,' which acts somewhat as does the Vedic aksa or axle that connects heaven and earth (which occurs only as a simile for Visnu!),6

though the name Meru (or rather, Mahameru) appears first in Vedic literature only in the Taittiriydranyaka (1.7.1.2); for Meru in the puranic text is the axle around which the wheels carrying the celestial bodies rotate. It also serves the function, as do Anaximenes' "higher parts of the earth," of explaining the dis- appearances of the Sun, the Moon, and the naksatras.

Above these circle the Saptarsis7 Ursa Maior presumably because that constellation, as was noted in the Babylonian omen series, Eniima Anu Enlil, never disappears from the night sky. The cakras of these jyotTmsi are rotated by chords of wind that bind them to Dhruva, which is located on the tail of the starry Sisumara or Dolphin.8 Dhruva is also a late concept; it first appears in the prescriptions for the marriage ceremony given in the grhyasatras,9 though there only as an unmoved star, not as one pole of the axis about which the other celestial bodies revolve.

The concepts of Meru and Dhruva serve to date this cosmology to the middle of the last millennium B.C. at the earliest. Indeed, the early Pali texts of the Buddhists refer to Himavat as the center of the world (Meru is substituted for Himavat only in the Mahd- vastu),1t and state that the cause of day and night is the circling by the Sun and the Moon about Sineru (Sumeru).1l A firmer terminus post quem for the puranic text is found in a passage that occurs only in the Visnupurdna among representatives of version 1,12

but is in all of the bearers of version II of Kirfel's text;'3 this passage refers to the five year yuga of Lagadha's Jyotirveddnga with some of its characteris-

W. Kirfel, Das Purdna vom Weltgebdude (Bonn, 1954), I 7-12 and II 9-13 (henceforth cited as Kirfel, Purdna).

2 Kirfel, Purdna, I 4; II 1, 6-36; and II 6. See also W. Kirfel, Die Kosmographie der Inder (Bonn and Leipzig, 1920), 56-127 (henceforth cited as Kirfel, Kosmographie).

Kirfel, Purana, I 7, 7-14; II 6, 134-35; and II 9, 20. See also Kirfel, Kosmographie, 128-30. For the Vedic lokas see

J. Gonda, Loka (Amsterdam, 1966). 4 Kirfel, Purdna, 1 5 and II 7. See also Kirfel, Kosmogra-

phie, 143-47. Kirfel, Purdna, I 2, 3-12, and II 2, 15-47, etc.

6 Kirfel, Kosmographie, 7.

Kirfel, Purdna, I 7, 2-4 and 5 c-d, and 11 13, 106 and 108 c-d.

8 Kirfel, Purana, I 9; 1 12, 24-29; 11 10; and 11 12. 9 A. A. Macdonell and A. B. Keith, Vedic Index, 2 vols.

(rpt. Varanasi, 1958), 1: 405-6. '1 Ariguttaranikdya, etc., cited by Kirfel, Kosmographie,

182; cf. p. 184. " Jdtaka cited by Kirfel, Kosmographie, 190. 12 Kirfel, Purdna, I 8, 29-122. 3 Kirfel, Purtdna, II 9, 85-111; cf. 11 13, 126-30.

274



PINGREE: The Purdnas and Jyotihsdstra: Astronomy 275

tic parameters, such as the ratio, 3:2, of the longest to the shortest length of daylight in the year; the astronomy of the Jyotirvedafiga was greatly influenced by ideas introduced into India from Mesopotamia, presumably through Iranian intermediaries, in about 400 B. C.4 Another Mesopotamian theory that appears in this passage is that of the three paths of heaven to the north, the middle, and the south, which the Babylonians had associated with their gods Enlil, Anu, and Ea respectively. These paths and their elaborations appear in Sanskrit texts on celestial omens which are dependent on the Babylonian series Eniima Anu Enlil as three vrthis or paths;'5 in the puranic texts they are the ndgavrthi to the north, a madhyamamarga in the middle, and the ajavithi to the south. But the same passage of the puranic text refers to the twelve zodiacal signs, and places the equinoxes and solstices at the beginnings (the ends, mistakenly, in version II) of Mesa and Tula and of Makara and Karkata. This points to a time after the introduction into India of Greek astrology in the second century A.D.17

The same late date-after about 150 A.D.-for

the whole puranic text is indicated by its placing the five planets between the naksatramandala and the saptarsiman~dala in the order established by the Greeks in the third century B.C., but introduced into India, again with Greek astrology, in the second century A.D.;18 this ascending order is: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, above which the puranic text adds the Vedic Svarbhanu or Rahu with his non- Vedic tail, Ketu, to account for the occurrences of solar and lunar eclipses."9 Not only is the text forced

by its theory of the Sun and the Moon (the Moon is above the Sun) to introduce external forces-Rahu and Ketu-to act as the causes of eclipses; it also cannot ascribe the waxing and the waning of the Moon to their true physical causes, and therefore introduces the idea that Soma, the Moon, is drunk alternately by the Devas and the Pitrs.20 The Purana text also devotes many verses to enumerating the beings who accompany the Sun's chariot in each of the twelve months;2' the first verse of this section in the version of the Visnupurina (2.10.1) gives the number of tracks on the Sun's wheel as 183, cor- responding to the 183 sidereal days in an ayana according to Lagadha's Jyotirvedafiga.

The terminus ante quem for the puranic text is pro- vided by the cosmographical afigas of the Svetambara Jainas-the Jambadvipaprajffapti, the Saryaprajfiapti, the Candraprafflapti, and the Jvabhigamasatra- which were put in their present form in the early sixth century A.D.; for they provide a greatly elaborated version of the puranic tradition.22 Some of the puranas which contain one or the other of the versions of the puranic cosmological text are probably as old as the fifth century, so that a date sometime in the third or fourth century A.D. for their common source seems quite likely; we shall see that this cosmology was known to Indian astronomers in about 400 A.D.

But another puranic tradition was also adopted by the astronomers-that of the kalpas, manvantaras, caturyugas, and yugas, which appear as the chrono- logical framework in the pahcalaksana core of the puranas2' as well as in the Sdntiparvan of the Maha- bhdrata (12.224) and in the Manusmrti (1.64-86). A date of about the second century A.D. for this chrono- logical system cannot be very far from the truth; the kappa, of course, occurs much earlier in the Buddhist tradition, including the Asokan inscriptions, but its duration is not in these early references specified.24

The basic parameter of the yuga system is the kaliyuga of 432,000 years; this is a number derived from Babylon, where it was regarded as the period of the kings who reigned before the Flood. In the Babylonian sexagesimal system of writing numbers, 432,000 is 2,0,0,0 (i.e., 2 x 603). In India this number was combined with the decimal system, with the idea

14 D. Pingree, "The Mesopotamian Origin of Early Indian Mathematical Astronomy," JHA 4 (1973): 1-12.

15 D. Pingree, "Venus Omens in India and Babylon," in Language, Literature, and History, AOS 67 (New Haven, 1987), 293-315.

16 See also Kirfel, Purdna, II 9, 55-57. 17For this introduction of Greek astrology into India see

D. Pingree, The Yavanajdtaka of Sphujidhvaja, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).

18 This order lies behind that of the planetary week-days mentioned first in India in Yavanajdtaka 77. 2-8. At about the same time as Yavaneivara made the prose translation of the Greek astrological text that is the basis for Sphujidhvaja's work, the Satavahana queen, BalagrT, in an inscription at Nasik (EI 8 (1905-6): 60-65) gives the order Moon, Sun, naksairas, and planets, in which only the sequence of the two luminaries differs from that of the puranic text.

19 Kirfel, Purdna, I 7, 5 a-b; 1 12, 16-23; 11 12, 2-4; and II 13, 107-9.

20 Kirfel, Purdna, 1 12, 1-15, and 11 11, 58-76. 21 Kirfel, Purdna, I 10, 1-21, and II 11, 1-36. 22 Kirfel, Kosmographie, 214-61 and 278-91. 23 W. Kirfel, Das Purdna Paicalaksana (Leiden, 1927),

12-14. 24 D. Pingree, "Astronomy and Astrology in India and

Iran," Isis 54 (1963): 229-46, esp. p. 224.



276 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)

of four ages, and with a theory of those ages' proportional decline, so as to produce the caturyuga of 4,320,000 years in which the four yugas are in the ratio 4:3:2:1. The kalpa was defined as 1,000 caturyugas or 4,320,000,000 years; and this period was divided, rather unsatisfactorily, among the 14 Manus. All of these numbers could be expressed in "divine years," of which each equals 360 human years; in this transformation the kaliyuga is 1,200 divine years, the caturyuga 12,000, and the kalpa 12,000,000.

From Lagadha's Jyotirveddtiga, Sphujidhvaja's Yavanajdtaka, and Varahamihira's Paicasiddhantika we know that other yugas were used for astronomical purposes in India. Thus, the Jyotirvedftiga, as we have noted above, uses a Vedic five-year yuga as a rough intercalation cycle; its parameters reappear in the first Paitdmahasiddhanta, whose epoch is 80 A.D.

and which is summarized by Varahamihira.25 A luni- solar yuga of 165 years is found in the Yavanajdtaka (79.2-10 and 14-20), whose date is 269/270 A.D. And the Romakasiddhanta summarized by Varahamihira26 has a yuga of 2850 years that is the smallest number of Hipparchan years of 6,5;14,48 days each that is also a multiple of the Babylonian nineteen year cycle (usually called "Metonic" in the West) and contains an integer number of days. In Greece earlier attempts had been made to find a magnus annus in which all the planets make an integer number of rotations; these efforts were ultimately inspired by a passage in Plato's Timaeus (39 B-D).

In about 400 A.D. someone in India who had access to Greek astronomical texts which were in many respects based on the work of Hipparchus and other Hellenistic astronomers,27 but whose planetary models in part represented Peripatetic reactions to the tradition of Greek mathematical astronomers since Apol- lonius,28 attempted to combine these Greek traditions with the cosmology and chronology of the puranas.

His efforts are embodied in the second Paitdmaha- siddhanta,29 which is fortuitously preserved for us in a purana or rather, despite its early age and incredible bulk, in an upapurana the Visnudharmottarapurdna (11.166-74).

The Visnudharmottarapurana is a compilation of many diverse elements, put together, it would seem, in Kasmira in the sixth or seventh century,30 perhaps during the reign of one of the early Karkota kings in the last three quarters of the seventh century when Kasmlra was powerful and prosperous. The first Kar- kota, Durlabhavardhana, as we know from Kalhana's Rajatarangini (4.4 and 6), was a devout worshipper of Visnu. It brings together many separate treatises on technical Qastras, such as grammar and lexicography, alankara and prosody, nataka and nrtta, g-ta and instrumental music, ?ilpa and citra, ayurveda and pakasastra, as well as more traditional puranic fare. The text on astronomy that the compiler chose to incorporate was the Paitdmahasiddhdnta, which is a prose work in the form of a dialogue between Bhrgu and Brahma. Its first chapter deals with military astrology in the form of omens similar to those developed in the last few centuries B.. from the Babylonian astral and terrestrial omens that had been introduced into India during the Achemenid period. The second chapter gives some basic information concerning the Greek astrology that had come to India through such translations as Yavanesvara's Yavanajdtaka of 149/150 A.D. The remaining seven chapters are devoted to the new astronomy in which Greek theories are modified to fit in with some Indian traditions. This new astronomy of the Paitdmahasid- dhdnta is the direct ancestor of the premier paksa of Indian astronomy, the Brahma, and was clearly known to and modified by Aryabhata, the author in the late fifth century (he was born in 476) of the two other early paksas, the Arya and the Ardharatrika. All later Indian paksas descended from these three, though the infusion of elements of Islamic astronomy beginning in the tenth century led to modifications of some of them in limited areas.

25 Paficasiddhantikd 12. For the history of jyotisa literature see D. Pingree, Jyotihldstra (Wiesbaden, 1981); Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit, series A, vols. 1-4 (vol. 5 in preparation) (Philadelphia, 1970-81); and "History of Mathe- matical Astronomy in India," Dictionary of Scientific Bio- graphy, vol. 15 (New York, 1978), 533-633. In these three works will be found supporting documentation for most of the statements made in the remainder of this paper.

26 Paicasiddhdntikd 1. 15. 27 D. Pingree, "The Recovery of Early Greek Astronomy

from India," JHA 7 (1976): 109-23. 28 D. Pingree, "On the Greek Origin of the Indian Planetary

Model Employing a Double Epicycle," JHA 2 (1971): 80-85.

29 D. Pingree, "The Paitdmahasiddhanta of the Visnudhar- mottarapurdna," Brahmavidyd 31/32 (1967-68): 472-510.

30 A lengthy discussion of the Visnudharmottarapurdna together with a list of its contents is given by R. C. Hazra, Studies in the Upapuranas, vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1958), 155-218. Hazra dates the work between 400 and 500 A.D.; Priyabala Shah, Visnudharmottarapurdna, vol. 1 (Baroda, 1958), xxvi, places its date between 450 and 650. But both of these dates are based on those of the texts incorporated in the upapurana, and therefore are only termini post quos.




The date of the Paitdmahasiddhdnta is pushed to the beginning of the fifth century not only by the fact that Aryabhata at the end of that century was able to draw upon it, but more importantly by the fact that in about 450 A.D. one of its characteristic parameters, the longitude of the apogee of the Sun computed for that date, was known at the Sasanian court at Ctesiphon. This means, as we shall see, that a text going further than the Paitdmaha itself in expounding the new astronomy, already existed and had been transmitted to Iran by the middle of the fifth century; the early decades of that century, then, constitute the last possible date of the Paitdmaha, which may well, then, have originated in the same intellectual ferment of the Gupta Empire that produced Kalidasa and so many others.

The author of the Paitdmaha, perhaps following the lead of the Greek computations of the magnus annus, adapts the puranic cosmological system to the prob- lems both of finding the mean longitudes of the planets and of determining the longitudes of the planets' apogees and nodes at any particular time. For a kalpa of 4,320,000,000 years is long enough that each of these elements can be positioned at Aries 0? at its beginning and endowed with an integer number of rotations during its course such that, for the Sun, the Moon, and the planets, their mean velocities are essentially correct, and, for the apogees and nodes, their longitudes within historical time are correct. Following its pretence to be based on a revelation made at the beginning of the kalpa, however, the Paitdmaha does not say how much time had elapsed from that beginning till the time when it was composed. Later texts inform us that the interval between the beginning of the kalpa and that of the current kaliyuga was a period of 432,000 years multiplied by 4567, or 1,972,944,000 years.

The mathematical problem faced by the author of the Paitdmaha in fitting the kalpa to the mean motions of the planets was simple. Given certain period relations which tell one that a planet makes x sidereal revolutions in y years, such as were common in both Babylonian and Greek astronomy and had already appeared in India in the Vasisthasiddhdnta and the Paulisasiddhdnta summarized in Vardhami- hira's Paicasiddhdntikd, he had to find by proportion how many rotations each planet makes in 4,320,000,000 years. He further faced the problem of securing an approximation to a conjunction of all the planets at the beginning of the current kaliyuga; and so had to find the number of rotations in a kalpa that had to be added to or subtracted from his initial values in order that each planet would make close to an integer

number of rotations in 1,972,944,000 years. This problem can be expressed as an indeterminate equa- tion of the first degree, and was brilliantly solved by the application of the algorithm of continuous frac- tions associated with the name of Euclid-the so- called kuttaka or pulveriser. The result is that the Paitdmaha can list the number of rotations that each planet makes in a kalpa-4,320,000,000 for the Sun; 57,753,300,000 for the Moon; 2,296,828,522 for Mars; 17,936,998,984 for Mercury's sTghra; 364,266,455 for Jupiter; 7,022,389,492 for Venus' sTghra; 146,567,298 for Saturn; 488,105,858 for the Moon's apogee; and 232,311,168 for the Moon's node-and be certain that these will produce reasonably accurate mean longitudes of the planets within his own time and for centuries thereafter. And he didn't have to make a single observation. For the apogees and nodes his task was even simpler. He had only to know where they should be in his own time, and to endow them with small integer numbers of rotations in a kalpa chosen so that they would have arrived at their proper positions at the beginning of the current kaliyuga but be moving so slowly that they would still be there three or four thousand years later.

You may have noticed that the numbers of rotations in the cases of the two inferior planets, Venus and Mercury, are those of their sTghras-that is, of their conjunctions with the Sun. This is because of cosmological considerations. The author of the Paitdmaha, of course, was adopting a Greek astronomical system that was based on the conception of the earth as a sphere within a panjara or cage of internesting planetary and stellar spheres. He was rejecting the puranic flat earth cosmology, though, as we shall see, preserv- ing what puranic elements he could. One thing that the puranas did have correctly was the ascending order of the five star planets from the center of the earth, though they misplaced the Sun, the Moon, and the naksatras below them in following an older cosmology of the first millennium B.C. In that exemplar of Greek astronomy or astrology whence the puranas had derived this order it was important to keep Venus below the Sun for, despite the actual order of the cakras, the puranic text groups the Moon, Mercury, and Venus together as moving fast, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn together as moving slowly;3' and in Indian astronomy, as in its Greek prototypes, the geocentric distances of the planets were regarded as inversely proportional to their velocities. Thus, the Moon which travels 13;10,35? per day is the closest to the earth,

3" Kirfel, Purana, 11 13, 97-98.




and Saturn which travels 0;2? per day is the furthest away. The mean velocities of the two inferior planets is the same as that of the Sun, so that to use that parameter would place all three at the same distance from the earth. And Venus' mean daily motion on its epicycle is 0;36? while the mean daily motions of the Sun and of Mars are respectively 0;59? and 0;31?, so that the use of this parameter would place Venus between the Sun and Mars-which, indeed, some Greek cosmologists did. But one can keep Venus below the Sun and above Mercury by using the sfghra motion, which for each of the inferior planets is the sum of the mean motion of the Sun and its proper motion on its sTghra epicycle; for the sighra velocity of Mercury comes to be 4;5,32? per day, that of Venus 1;36? per day, while the mean velocity of the Sun remains 0;59? per day. This was the solution adopted by the Indians; it also appears earlier in the Greek Keskinto inscription.

Given the theory of the inverse proportionality of velocity to distance and the number of rotations that each planet makes in a kalpa, it is easy to compute the actual distance of each of the planetary spheres from the center of the earth as the author of the Paitamaha instructs one to do, though he does not himself carry out the computations; one arrives at distances far different from those given in the puranic text. The Paitamaha's author makes two preliminary assump- tions: one is that a minute in the orbit of the Moon equals 15 yojanas (this results from the estimate that the Moon's horizontal parallax, which is the earth's radius seen at the Moon's distance, is 0;53?), and that each planet travels an equal number of yojanas in a kalpa-a number that is equal to the orbit of heaven. This last assumption, of course, is just the common sense deduction that the velocity of each planet measured in yoJanas per time unit is a constant for all the planets. Since there are 21,600 minutes in a circle, there are 21,600 x 15 = 324,000 yojanas in the orbit of the Moon. The Moon circles this orbit 57,753,300,000 times in a kalpa, so that in that period it travels 57,753,300,000 x 324,000 = 18,712,069,200,000,000 yojanas, which is the number given in the Paitdmaha for the circumference of the outermost sphere. If one divides this number by the number of rotations of any other planet in a ka/pa, one will find the circumference of that planet's orbit measured in yojanas; and then it is a simple matter to compute the radius of that circle, which is the distance of that orbit from the center of the earth. The circumference of the earth, as is implied by the computation from the horizontal parallax of the number of yojanas in a minute of the Moon's orbit, is, as is also stated in the Paitdmaha, 5,000 yojanas.

The celestial bodies in the Paitdmaha and all subsequent Indian astronomical texts, then, are arranged in a fashion different from the cosmology of the puranic text in every respect save the order of the five star planets. But the author of the Paitdmaha did not wish to depart altogether from the puranic cosmology. Therefore, in order to preserve something from that tradition, he turned to geography and to celestial mechanics. In geography he made mount Meru that point on the earth's surface through which the axis connecting Dhruva, the north pole, to its counterpart in the south passed, and asserted the existence of the city Lanka on the equator to the south of Meru such that the prime meridian passes over both. Later astronomers assert that the prime meridian passes also over UjjayinT, and add three cities on the equator at quadrants from Lafika-Romaka to the west, Siddhapura to the north, and Yamakot-T to the east. Varahamihira, in his Pawcasiddhdntika (15, 22-23), written in the middle of the sixth century, was the first to identify these four cities explicitly with the four cardinal peoples of the puranic text-the Bharatas, the Ketumalas, the Kurus, and the Bhadrasvas.32

On the subject of celestial mechanics the author of the Paitdmaha says nothing, but later astronomers generally attribute the daily rotations of the heavenly spheres to the force of the puranic pravaha wind which is wrapped around the axis extending from the south pole through Vadavamukha and Meru to Dhruva; and the motions of the planets on their epicycles are explained as being caused by Asuras or Demons stationed at their manda and slghra apogees tugging on chords of wind attached to the planetary chariots.

One further gesture that the author of the Paita-- maha makes toward Indian tradition is to justify the study of astronomy by quoting at the end of his work the final verse of Lagadha's Jyotirveddrga:

vedd hi yajidrtham abhipravrttah kdldnuparvd vihitd. ca yaidfah

tasmdd idam kdlavidhdnasdstram yo jyotisam veda sa veda sarvam

The Vedas went forth for the sake of the sacrifices; the sacrifices were established as proceeding regularly in time. Therefore, he who knows jyotisa, this science of time, knows all.

The same justification for the study of astronomy, that it is necessary for the proper performance of the

3 Kirfel, Purana, I 2, 33, and II 2, 47.




Vedic rituals, stayed alive in the tradition of the Brahmapaksa, and was popular again in the seventeenth century when astronomers, searching for a basis of their science in the writings attributed to devas or to rsis, rediscovered the Paitamahasiddhanta in the Visnudharmottarapurana. Thus, the earliest manuscript of the Paitamaha as an excerpt from the upapurana was copied in ?AKA 1563 = A.D. 1641; it is now known only from a nineteenth-century copy. Bhaskara in his Siddhdntasiromani (Grahaganita 1.1.9) had already summarized Lagadha's verse; Nrsimha in his Vdsandvdrttika, composed in Kag! in A.D. 1621, quotes Lagadha in his comments on this verse, though perhaps directly from the Jyotirveddiiga rather than through the Paitdmaha. But elsewhere (on Grahaganita 2.34-35) Nrsimha states that Bhaskara obtained his planetary parameters from the Brahma- siddhdnta preserved at the end of the second kdnda of the Visnudharmottara, and again (on Grahaganita 1.2.1-6) attempts to explain the disagreement between Pitamaha or Brahma in the Visnudharmottara (which, of course, belongs to the Brahmapaksa) and Brahma in the ?dkalyasamhitd (which belongs to the Saura- paksa) as due to scribal and other corruptions. In both cases Nrsimha is clearly discussing these texts because they were regarded as authoritative because of their ascriptions to a deity. Similarly, Kamalakara in the Siddhdntatattvaviveka (1.62) that he completed in KWiT in 1658, in defending the validity of the Saurapaksa to which he owed his allegiance, says:

ced visnudharmottaram eva mlarn brahmam puranam vadasiha tat tu

atantrikair naditam eva pirvam sandrsyate sarvajanaprasiddham

If you should say in this matter that the Brdhma's source is the Visnudharmottarapurdna, yet this is seen, as is well known to all people, to have been destroyed previously by non-tantrikas.

Others as well from among the astronomers of seventeenth century Kagi recognized the historical impor- tance of the Paitdamahasiddhanta. But rather than relating their statements, which add little to what I have already said, I turn to consider what the jyotisTs have to say directly concerning the puranic text that I discussed at the beginning of this paper. The first astronomer to attempt to deal exhaustively with the puranic cosmological tradition was Lalla, who wrote his S~i~yadhTvrddhidatantra in the middle of the eighth century. He devoted adhikdra 19 (bhuvanakosa) of that work and adhikdra 20 (mithydjniana) to this topic. In the bhuvanakosa he incorporates the flat

earth into the spherical cosmology by inserting the seven pdtdlas into the interior of the earth; the seven oceans and the six dvlpas beyond JambUdvipa in the southern hemisphere (the names that he gives to the oceans and dvTpas are closest to those found in the Vardhapurdna); the mountain ranges, peoples, and rivers of JambUdvTpa over the northern hemisphere rather than on a flat surface. Moreover, he turns the three Vedic lokas-bha, bhuvar, and svar-into, respectively, the inside of the earth together with its southern hemisphere, the northern hemisphere (that is, JambidvTpa), and Sumeru; and the four upper lokas in the puranic order-mahas, jana, tapas, and satya-into spheres filling the space between the naksatras and heaven, the Brahmandagola. That furthest sphere is surrounded by three great circles, the equator, the prime meridian, and the ecliptic. The diurnal rotation of these celestial spheres is still powered by the pravaha wind (?i4yadhTvrddhidatantra 18.3). This general solution to the problem of the incongruence of the puranic and the jyotisa cosmologies is repeated in many siddhantas subsequent to Lalla's.

In his twentieth adhikdra, however, Lalla systemati- cally refutes with physical arguments the many un- acceptable doctrines of puranic astronomy. These false notions include the ideas that solar and lunar eclipses are caused by Rahu, that the Moon is above the Sun, that Meru causes the darkness of night, that in the krsnapaksa the Moon is being drunk by the Gods, that the earth is flat, and that it is supported by a tortoise, elephants, or some other physical supports. Lalla's arguments against these false beliefs are based on inferences from observed phenomena, and are essentially correct; he lapses into an argument from authority only in the case of Rahu where, after proving that Rahu cannot be the cause of an eclipse, he states that it may be a concomitant because Brahma by his power causes the Sun to be near Rahu at the time of an eclipse. It is because of this concomitance, he believes, that the smrtis and the Vedasamhitas claim that an eclipse is caused by Rahu.

Lalla's is indeed a powerful refutation of the puranic errors in astronomy, and his arguments were often repeated e.g., by SrCpati in the eleventh century in his Siddhdntasekhara, by Bhaskara in the twelfth in his Siddhdntasiromani, and by Jianaraja in the early sixteenth in his Siddhantasundara. As far as the astronomers were concerned, that is where the matter rested. Even in the sometimes heated exchanges that took place in the seventeenth century between parti- sans of traditional Indian astronomy and those who sought to change it by introducing elements, including cosmological concepts, derived from the Islamic inter- pretation and transformation of Ptolemaic astronomy,




the astronomers did not retreat from their rejection of those puranic beliefs that Lalla had refuted. The opposition of some to the Islamic system was indeed largely based on an appeal to revealed texts; but they turned to the Paitdmaha and to the Suiryasiddhdnta for their authorities, and ignored the puranic text.

However, in the late seventeenth and early eigh- teenth centuries two texts were written on the relation- ship between the puranic cosmology and jyotihgastra that seem to reflect some deepening awareness of the threat to the traditional Indian sciences. One was composed by Kevalarama, the Jyotisaraya of the court of Jayasimha at Jayapura from about 1730 on. He had written such works as a Brahmapaksanird'sa in which he apparently refuted the school of astronomy that was started by the Paitdmahasiddhdnta, and a Drkpaksasdran- based on the lunar theory of the seventeenth century French astronomer, de la Hire. But he also composed a Bhdgavatajyautisayor bhuigo- lavirodhaparihdra or Removal of the Disagreement between the Bhdgavatapurdna and Astronomy Con- cerning the Sphere of the Earth. Unfortunately, I have

not as yet been able to secure a copy of this work, and so cannot say how Kevalarama, who was among the first in India to study modern astronomy, sought to resolve the ancient conflict between the pauranikas and the jyotis-is; but it will be possible in the future, I hope, to examine his arguments.

Some decades before this jyotisi wrote, a pauranika had written a short work in 18 verses defending the puranic cosmology against that of the astronomers, claiming that the latter is not true but simply a useful tool for computations. This is the same attitude that late Greek Neoplatonists had adopted towards Ptole- my's Almagest. The author of the Indian version of this denigration of mathematical astronomy, the Saurapaurdnikamatasamarthana or Reconciliation of the Opinions of the Saryasiddhdnta and the Puranas, was Nilakantha Caturdhara, the famous commentator on the Mahdbhdrata. What inspired him to write this work, and how representative his views were among Indian intellectuals of his time, are topics also awaiting further research.



the purāṇas and jyotiḥśāstra: astronomy

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