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Browse all articles about Sanatan Dharma, Hindu philosophy, and ancient wisdom.
58 articles
The Manusmriti problem: what the text actually is, and how the British turned a smriti into a statute
Manusmriti 9.3 says a woman is not fit for independence. It is not an interpolation and there is no defence of it. The defence runs elsewhere: a dharmashastra is smriti, one of many, contradicted by the others, subordinate to shruti and overrulable. What made this one function like a statute was Halhed, Jones and the Anglo-Hindu courts.
Purusha Sukta: The Four Varnas From One Body, and the Two Ways That Hymn Has Been Read
Critics of caste do not cite the Gita. They cite Rigveda 10.90, where the four varnas come from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of the cosmic Purusha. The hymn will bear an organic reading. It has also been read as a ladder for two thousand years, by Hindu law-books and Puranas rather than by outsiders, and that half of the story cannot be skipped.
Narada Went from Palace to Palace and Found Krishna in Every One
Narada went to Dvaraka expecting to find a gap. In each of the sixteen thousand palaces he found a complete Krishna doing something no other Krishna was doing. The rasa dance has the same structure at a smaller scale. Neither passage is about cloning, and the question the Purana is actually raising is harder than that.
The Delhi Iron Pillar Does Rust. The Real Explanation Is Better Than the Myth.
The pillar's buried section carries up to fifteen millimetres of rust, with cavities and pits, and the exposed shaft has a thin film of its own. R. Balasubramaniam published the mechanism in Corrosion Science in 2000: about a quarter of one per cent phosphorus, and a crystalline phosphate layer that alternate wetting and drying builds against the metal. What the Gupta smiths achieved was a process, not a secret ingredient, and the same tradition produced wootz steel and the zinc distillation furnaces at Zawar.
How Do You Learn Surgery When You Are Not Allowed to Cut a Body?
Incision on gourds. Drainage on a wax-coated plank. Puncture on a lotus stalk. Bandaging on a linen doll. And for anatomy, a corpse softened in water for seven days and taken apart with a brush, never a knife. The Sushruta Samhita is the oldest surviving answer to how a surgeon acquires the hand before touching a patient.
The Paper Trail: How Indian Numerals Came to Be Called Arabic
The digits we use are Indian, and the medieval writers who carried them west said so openly, in their book titles and their prologues. Severus Sebokht in 662, al-Khwarizmi around 825, the Codex Vigilanus in 976 and Fibonacci in 1202 each named India. Following that paper trail explains where the words algorithm, cipher and zero came from, disposes of the myth that medieval Europe feared zero as diabolical, and shows the credit went missing not in Baghdad or Bugia but in modern European textbooks.
Brahmagupta Got Division by Zero Wrong. The Tradition Argued About It for Five Hundred Years.
Brahmagupta's Brahmasphutasiddhanta is the first surviving book to give arithmetic rules for zero, and one of those rules is simply wrong. Mahavira gave a different wrong answer two centuries later. Bhaskara II named the result khahara, reached for an image of Vishnu to describe it, and made a fresh mistake of his own in the same passage. Modern mathematics still refuses to answer the question all three tried to settle.
Bhaskara II and the Planet That Is Never Actually Moving at Its Average Speed
In 1150 Bhaskara II needed a planet's speed at an instant, not its average across a day. He named the quantity, computed it with a relation between arc and sine, and saw it vanish at a turning point. Those are ingredients of a derivative. They are not calculus, and the accurate version is the stronger one.
Rahu Is a Lunar Node: How Hindu Astronomy Predicted Eclipses While Keeping the Demon
Open a panchanga and Rahu has a longitude to the arcminute. Open the Bhagavata Purana and he is a severed head chasing the Sun. Aryabhata wrote in 499 CE that eclipses are shadows. All three are the same tradition, and the friction between them is more interesting than the mockery suggests.
Inside the Surya Siddhanta: The Machine That Predicted Where the Planets Would Be
Strip away the frame story and the Surya Siddhanta is a computational manual: integer revolution counts, two epicyclic corrections, a sine table, and a fixed order of operations. Here is how it works, what its numbers are when you recompute them, and how to test any figure attributed to it.
Brahmagupta Said the Earth Pulls Things Toward It. That Is Not the Same as Discovering Gravity.
Brahmagupta really did write that it is the nature of the earth to attract, and al-Biruni really did carry the report west around 1030. Both quotations here have been checked against the printed translations, page numbers included. What the passage contains, and what it does not.
The Altar Had to Be Exactly the Same Size: How Ritual Geometry Got Its Problems
A falcon-shaped altar and a wheel-shaped altar must cover exactly the same ground. That single ritual requirement generated the problem set of the Sulbasutras: square to circle, rectangle to square, and the doubling that needs the square root of two, which Baudhayana gives correct to five decimal places without a line of proof.