Staal - Sanskrit of Science JIP

FRITS STAAL
T H E S A N S K R I T OF S C I E N C E *
1. I N T R O D U C T I O N
In his Einleitung in der Grammatik der vedischen Sprache of 1874, Theodor Benfey observed:
that the Indians, the greatest grammarians of the world, have left us, on the one hand, (in the Vedas) the most wonderful language without a grammar based upon it, and on the other, the most wonderful grammar without a language upon which it is based.
In the "Introduction" to his Sanskrit Grammar of 1889, William Dwight Whitney expressed a similar view about Indian grammar, but he used more extreme terms. He did not regard Pfinini's grammar as "wonderful" (wunderbar) but as a:
highly artful and difficult form of about four thousand algebraic-formula-like rules in the statement and arrangement of which brevity alone is had in view, at the cost of distinctness and unambiguousness.
According to Whitney, the Sanskrit of Pfinini is a "grammarians' Sanskrit," which is "a thing of grammatical rule merely, having never had any real existence as a language." The idea that Sanskrit is an artificial language is still current though Sanskritists know better. Not everyone realizes that PSJlini's grammar is based upon linguistic usage, and is therefore descriptive in origin even though it turned over time into a prescriptive grammar. But everyone knows that, by and large, Pfinini's grammar accords with Sanskrit usage and vice versa. At present, Sanskritists accept that ordinary Sanskrit, Pfinini's object language, is a real language but they do not agree about the artificiality of Pfinini's grammar itself. Hartmut Scharfe (1961:1396) referred to Pfinini's metalanguage as an artificial language ("Kunstsprache"). Albrecht Wezler (1969:119) showed that Pfinini's grammar is couched in an artificial technical language which need not always accord with normal Sanskrit. George Cardona (1976: 169, 201) has criticized both views by invoking Kfityfiyana and arguing that the metalinguistic use of cases, for example, is in accordance with normal Sanskrit usage. I shall not follow the details of
Journal of Indian Philosophy 23: 73--127, 1995. 9 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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this discussion because I think that Cardona is literally right but misses the point. The relevant question about an artificial language is whether it is appropriate for the purpose for which it has been designed and whether it works. In order to appreciate that point, we have to study the notion of artificial language itself and adopt a wider perspective. Artificial languages include the computer languages that most of us are using in word processing almost every day when typing on our keyboard. One of the originators of the notion of artificial language was the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-- 1716). Leibniz was dissatisfied with natural languages such as the Latin he used in most of his writings, still the language of science in the seventeenth century before mathematical languages took its place. According to him, Latin would be a better means of communication if we were to omit from it all differences of gender, number, tense, person and mood. Leibniz would have preferred Japanese san to the English distinction between Mr and Mrs. He quotes empirical evidence in support of his view: a Dominican priest from Persia, whom he had met in Paris and who spoke with great fluency a broken Latin in which such distinctions were entirely neglected, was completely intelligible to anyone who took the trouble to listen to him (Mates 1986: 179). Leibniz' story tells us that he was a tolerant man and some of his other writings support that conclusion. But Leibniz had something more important in mind than merely straightening out Latin. Throughout his life he pursued the idea of creating a universal, philosophical language in which the structure of human thought would be perfectly represented and which would be an ideal language not only for communication but also for science. He did not have something like Esperanto in mind. Such languages existed in his time, and he was interested in them, as he was interested in several natural languages, including Chinese. He had a logical language in mind, the kind of language that Aristotle had set up for predicates, later logicians for propositions, and that led, via Leibniz' own contributions when they were understood and assimilated two centuries later, to the logical and computer languages of to-day. Leibniz referred to his ideal language, which was never realized though he wrote numerous preliminary studies for it, as lingua philosophica, lingua rationalis or lingua universalis. I shall later (in Section 5) comment on Leibniz' artificial language as a language of communication and first concentrate on its value as a language of science. In this respect, Leibniz was obviously inspired by mathematics, the language of the universe as Galileo had expressed it. Leibniz himself made important contributions to this subject -- the best known being the
THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE
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infinitestimal calculus, invented earlier but published later by Newton -- and he regarded progress in mathematics as largely due to improved notations, that is, to the development of mathematical languages. He wanted his universal language to express all our thoughts as felicitously as the languages of algebra and geometry express our thoughts about numbers and magnitudes. He provided empirical evidence in support of that view in a comment on the alleged intelligence of mathematicians. He observed that when mathematicians deal with things other than mathematics, they are not smarter than anyone else. He concluded that their apparent intelligence is due not to themselves but to the mathematical language they have learnt. The fact that Leibniz did not create the ideal language he was advocating should not be held against him. On the contrary, it shows that he was serious. The task is not only large but also difficult and no one else has achieved it yet. Leibniz was not a starry-eyed visionary but a practical man. He had a project for making adequate medical care available to everyone long before Hillary Clinton, but also designs for a better wheelchair, a better clock, and a mechanism to help a coach wheel go over obstacles more easily (Mates 1986: 183). Untike Newton or Descartes, he studied notations carefully and experimented with them. He sought the opinion of Jakob and Johann Bernouilli and other mathematicians. He believed that signs that express the nature of things would diminish the labor of thought but was at the same time concerned that they should follow each other in linear sequence as in ordinary language and be set up in a line like ordinary printing type. No other mathematician has introduced as many symbols that are still in use to-day as Leibniz did (Cajori 1929, II: 180--96). The history of science in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe confirms Leibniz' view of the importance of notations and artificial languages, it will take a little time to illustrate this, but it will assist us later. I shall start with a simple example from Newton (1642-- 1727), based up on what historians of science such as C. Truesdell and David Park have unearthed about it. Newton's second law of motion is now taught to children in algebraic form as: (1)
f = ma,
which is read as: force is the product of mass and acceleration, where acceleration is change of motion which may also be expressed as the quotient that divides velocity by time. Newton formulated it in Latin:
rnutationern rnotis proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae, et fieri secundum linearn rectarn qua vis illa irnprimitur
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FRITS STAAL The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed, and it takes place along the right line in which that force is expressed (transl. Truesdell 1968: 88).
Newton never wrote this law in the form of an equation. Nowhere in his published works, correspondence or private mathematical papers did he write out in the algebraic notations of his time (which were not very different from our own) the fundamental laws attributed to him (Park 1988: 183). The mathematical methods used in Newton's Principia are cumbersome and obsolete; the only equations found there relate to the properties of geometric figures (Park 1980: 140, note 9). They are not very different in character from Euclid's expressions in the Elements composed more than two millennia earlier. Newton's Latin is simple in that it omits almost entirely, like other scientific languages and just as Leibniz had advocated, gender, person, mood and other complex forms of the verb. However, it is conceptually more complex than it appears to a modern reader who reads formulas into it. Newton expressed the principles of his Principia by drawing figures, employing tables and abbreviations, but without using the simple equations that we have been taught in school. He worked without formulas; he thought about scientific problems. The economist John Maynard Keynes, a lifelong student of Newton, writes: His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuouslyin his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. . . . I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret (Keynes 1951: 312). These powers of concentration did not prevent Newton from making mistakes. His theories of fluids are largely false and his work is replete with ambiguities and problems. He was unclear about the notion of force itself as many historians of science have pointed out (Truesdell 1968: 92). It was Leonhard Euler (1707--1783) who clarified many of these problems: in the laws of motion, he disengaged the notion of velocity from that of momentum (the product of mass and velocity) and introduced equations almost identical to the one I have just quoted. That was sixty years after the Principia. All the formulas that modern physicists call "Newton's equations," were introduced by Euler, Daniel Bernoulli and other later mathematicians. "It is true that we, today, can easily read them into Newton's words, but we do so by hindsight" (Truesdell 1968: 167). Euler's equations were further improved by Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-
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1813). In his Mdcanique analytique of 1788, everything is cleared up and looks tidy, elegant and simple, but natural language, French in his case, has given way to mathematics. Newton's genius had been that he could think creatively without writing equations. He made use of obsolete Euclidian methods, a thing no one else had been able to do so effectively: We gaze at it with admiring curiosity, as on some gigantic implement of war, which stands idle among the memorials of ancient days, and makes us wonder what manner of man he was who could wield as a weapon what we can hardly lift as a burden (Whewell 1857, II: 128 quoted in Park 1988: 210). It took a century before Newton's work was made fully intelligible and others could do science without being a genius (Park 1988: 249). That formulas and equations were not used is not because they did not exist, but their manipulation was felt to be extraordinarily difficult and progress was exceedingly slow. In his expression of the laws of motion, Newton could have used the differential expressions he had created himself, but he did not do so, perhaps, as has been suggested, because he wanted them to be easily accessible, perhaps because it was too difficult even for him. What we now call "solving an equation" was regarded in E u r o p e for almost two thousand years as the construction of a geometric figure. Euclid had used letters to refer to points, lines and figures and Aristotle used them for logical terms (an excellent practice abandoned by the schoolmen), but only in the sixteenth century did the French mathematician Francois Vi~te or Vieta begin to refer to numbers not only by means of numerals' but also of letters, thus originating algebra which had existed earlier in Diophantos of Alexandria and in India. The use of the plus and minus signs, "+" and ..... , and the expression of multiplication by simple concatenation of the factors were introduced in E u r o p e in the fifteenth century. There was resistance against symbols on the part of philosophers such as Hobbes (to whom we shall return) and scientists, not excluding Newton. I have spent some time on formulas and equations because we shall return to them in the context of Indian mathematics but also because they illustrate what Leibniz had in mind when he sought to construct an artificial language for science that would enable anyone familiar with it to make contributions to its advancement. He demonstrated through his own contributions that progress at least in the so-called exact sciences depends on the construction and development of special notations and artificial languages, either in part or -- as was his own view -- entirely. In the Western tradition, Babylonian science had been the product of
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very few people (Neugebauer 1957:91). What is usually called "Greek mathematics" consisted of "the fragments of writings of about 10 or 20 persons scattered over a period of 600 years" (page 190). In the seventeenth century, progress was limited to Galileo, Kepler, Newton and a few others, but a century later it began to be widely assimilated because others created the increasingly flexible mathematical languages that led to what is now called modern science, an expression in which, in English, the term "science" refers primarily to the so-called "exact" sciences that developed then. As a result of these developments, the Western notion of "science" is confused. French "science," spelled the same but pronounced differently, and other continental terms like German "Wissenschaft" or Dutch "wetenschap," include the human and social sciences. The same holds for Japanese gaku. But in English there is confusion about human sciences, humanities, letters and even arts. In German and Dutch, the terms Geisteswissenschafien and geesteswetenschappen are used although no one agrees or even knows what Geist or geest refer to. The French incorporate these same disciplines among the sciences humaines, which in German or Dutch suggest anthropology, in French a "science sociale." I shall use the terms "science" and "scientific" in the widest sense. The separation of the senses, after all, is recent. The current dogma of "the two cultures" of sciences and humanities, for example, is not based on rational analysis but derives from Wilhelm Dilthey and other nineteenth century German romantic metaphysicians (Staal 1989 = 1993, Chapter 29). To sum up -- the notion of artificial language cannot be properly understood when it is only looked upon as a variety of language of which we determine the nature by measuring its degree of deviation from natural or ordinary language. The proper domain of artificial languages is science and the development of such languages is closely related to the development of science. That implies, for our field, that the question of artificial Sanskrit is of paramount importance for the study of Indian science. This is another reason for taking "science" in a wide sense, for the recent Western distinction between sciences and humanities has no counterpart in India. We have made a detour, but are now in a position to return to Sanskrit. I shall distinguish between two kinds of Sanskrit: artificial Sanskrit and scientific Sanskrit. I call artificial Sanskrit any artificial language intentionally created to deal with scientific problems or a scientific problem area and based upon, but deviating in some important respect or respects from ordinary, natural Sanskrit. By "deviation" I don't mean something relatively simple, like the
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introduction of neologisms or even symbols, but some kind of structural deviation, syntactic in a manner that will become clear later. Abbreviations, to which we shall return, constitute a mild form of artificiality or an intermediate form between "natural" and "artificial." I call scientific Sanskrit any Sanskrit used for the expression of scientific statements or truths. The term, or its German counterpart, "wissenschaftliches Sanskrit," was used for the first time, as far as I know, by Hermann Jacobi in an article of 1903 entitled "Uber den nominalen Stil des wissenschaftlichen Sanskrit" which we are entitled, in view of our discussion of a moment ago, to translate as: on the nominal style of scientific Sanskrit. The term "wissenschaftliches Sanskrit" is also used in the similar title of a 1955 book by Peter Hartmann -- both publications to which we shall return. I am not familiar with any species of artificial Sanskrit that is not scientific but the opposite holds: there are kinds of scientific Sanskrit that are not or are hardly artificial. An example seems to be the language of medicine, but I know very little about it and leave it to others to determine to what extent this is true. We shall now take a closer look at three Indian sciences: logic, mathematics and grammar, and at three kinds of scientific Sanskrit that display varying degrees of artificiality: logical, mathematical and grammatical Sanskrit. 2. LOGICAL SANSKRIT I use '~logical Sanskrit" to refer primarily to the Sanskrit of Nyfiya and Navya-Nyfiya. Because of my limitations, I do not refer to Buddhist logicians who contributed substantially to the development of Indian logic and without whom Navya-Nyfiya could not have arisen. As far as I know, the development of the logical language through these various traditions has never been described in linguistic terms, but Dignfiga's Hetucakra would certainly occupy an important place in that development. As elsewhere, logical ideas may have been suggested by linguistic structures. According to Kunjunni Raja (1963b: 85, 192--3), for example, an early stage of the Buddhist apoha doctrine occurs in the grammarian Vyfid.i, who did not apply it to words but who held that in the noun phrase '~the blue pot," bhte excludes all pots that are not blue and pot excludes all blue things that are not pots. I defer to experts on Buddhist logic to decide on the truth about such matters. The powers of expression of logical Sanskrit are primarily due to an expansion of existing structures of Sanskrit syntax, especially nominaliza-
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tion, a feature of the commentatorial or bhdsya style that has often been described. Apart from nominal composition and suffixes that express abstraction such as -td and -tva, Louis Renou (1956: 133) emphasized its counterpart: "rar6faction des formes personelles du verbe," a feature that would have delighted Leibniz. In the article on scientific Sanskrit already mentioned, Jacobi (1903) refers to nominalization as a means of expression for abstract thought which in Sanskrit has developed "to a more terrifying degree" (in erschrekenderem Grade) than anywhere else. Verbal support is reduced to generalities such as asti "is", dr.@ate "seems", ucyate "is said" or, as Renou illustrates it, perhaps more justly, to d~rayate "rests on", sarnpadyate "becomes", sarnbhavati "is possible", etc. Foreshadowed by the Nirukta, the first stage of the bhds.ya style is Patafijali's Mahdbhg~s.ya, still close in some of its passages to what must have been the spoken language. I am not referring to the object language that is being described and that is by definition ordinary Sanskrit, but to the metalanguage of the linguistic discussion, which is sometimes very lively, especially in the Introduction or Paspa~d. That liveliness has been well captured by Kshitish Chandra Chatterji in his translation (second edition of 1957). The culmination of the commentatorial style is philosophical Sanskrit, in Kumfirila Bhatta and others, especially gafikara, "l'apog~e du genre" as Renou put it. In subsequent developments, the language becomes heavier and increasingly rigid. In the end, the verb has disappeared and nominal composition reigns supreme. The resulting structures are not only distant from anything that could have been used in ordinary conversation, they are also unlike anything found in other Indo-European languages, Latin and German included. Renou writes: Le bhds.ya ~ son apogee -- surtout le bhdsya philosophique -- a Ot~ une rOussite achevde dans la voie de l'abstraction, de la condensation, et cela dans des conditions d'autant plus extraordinaires que rien, dans le subtrat linguistique ~l~mentaire, n'y pr@arait
The bhdsya style at its peak -- in philosophy, particularly -marks a success of abstraction and condensation under conditions that are especially surprising because they were entirely unforeseen in the original linguistic substratum (Renou 1956: 144).
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Jacobi speaks of "new formations" (Neubildung) and a "totally changed sentence construction" (gdnzlich veriinderte Satzbildung). He adds that the impression of "unnaturalness" (Unnatiirlichkeit) made upon us was not experienced as such by Sanskrit speakers since even poets use that style, e.g., ~nandavardhana or ~riharsa. As for more specific features, e.g., that the logical subject is expressed by the genitive, this occurs not only in other Indo-European languages but also outside Indo-European. Jacobi ends his article with an example from Japanese taken from Chamberlain's Handbook of Colloquial Japanese: the nominative particle ga was originally a genitive particle. Peter Hartmann has drawn attention to a feature of Sanskrit nominal composition that illustrates another linguistic structure characteristic of a different type of language. In ordinary Sanskrit, as a Latin, word order is determined by endings and is therefore, in essential respects, free. If there is a preferred order it is preferred on stylistic, not on grammatical grounds (cf. Staal 1967). But within nominal compounds, endings have disappeared and the order of the constituents is fixed: rf~padhdtu, the Buddhist element of form, is not the same as dhdtur@a, the title of a work on verbal roots. Within longer compounds, the semantic structure of the ordered units becomes increasingly similar to that of Chinese where word order is fixed and syntactic functions of constituents are expressed not by endings but by their position within the sentence (Hartmann 1955:207 sq.). In Indian logic, the importance of the order of constituents within nominalized expressions is illustrated by two definitions of vy@ti from Gafigega's Tattvacintdmani: (2)
sddhydbhdvavadavr.ttitvam"non-occurrence in the locus of what is other than the sddhya," sddhyavadanydv.rttitvam "non-occurrence in what is other than the locus of the sddhya."
I have elsewhere and long ago provided a logico-syntactical analysis of how logical relationships in Nyfiya are expressed by nominal composition in Sanskrit and discussed several such features (Staal 1965a, 1966). I shall mention a few of them here since they are relatively common in the bhdsya style in general. We start with a sequence of three forms, used to express the idea of a blue pot: (3) (4)
ghato nilah ghatasyanilatvarn
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FRITS STAAL
ghatanilatvarn
In Nyfiya, (3) may be used by itself but (4) is more common and either form may be translated as "the pot is blue." (5) is a nominal phrase, embedded in more complex sentences or clauses, e.g.: (6)
ghatanilatvam siddham or ghatasya nilatvarn siddharn "the blueness of the pot has been established" or "it has been established that the pot is blue"; ghatanilatvdt or ghatasya nilatvdt "because the pot is blue"; ghatanilatve'pi or ghatasya nilatve'pi "even though the pot is blue," etc.
What do expressions like (3)--(5) contribute to the analysis of concepts? Something similar to predicates or functional expressions in Western logic such as: (7) B(p)
read as "p is B" or "(there is) B of p." The difference between the expressions (3)--(5) and (7) resides not in function or meaning but in linguistic form. "B(p)" uses letter symbols which may be replaced by other expressions, like ghata "pot" by pata "cloth." "B(p)," furthermore, may be expanded into "not B(p)," "B(p) and C(q)," "B(p) implies C(q)," etc., but the resulting expressions belong to a well-formed artificial language, the language of logic. The compound in (5), or "p's B," is a sasthitatpur~a because the implied case relationship is the genitive. I shall not enumerate, let alone analyze, all types of compounds but provide a few examples illustrating how other case relationships may be implied. Most of these have been taken from Jacobi 1903, Hartmann 1955 or Renou 1956, but I have supplemented them with related forms postulated to account for the nominalized forms that are embedded in sentences. A philologist may wonder whether all these forms have been attested. The answer is, no, but in each group of three or four, at least one form comes from a text. The others have been constructed and all I can say is that texts are finite but language is infinite. Speakers of a language make up grammatical sentences that have never been uttered before and are not attested from books. I am a native speaker of Dutch, no longer fluent in any language, certainly not Sanskrit. For final judgments on the grammaticalness of these expressions one may have to consult a Sanskrit speaker. In the following examples, the first denotes the analysed form in which
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the word order is more or less free. In nominalization, the order of constituents sometimes changes. There are numerous rules, e.g., the subject is expressed by the genitive when the rest of the phrase is nominalized. That implies, for example, that the objective genitive becomes part of the compound:
(8)
Accusative rnarigalam sam@tim sddhayati matigalasya sarndptisddhanatvam sarn@timafigalasddhanatvarn

"the introductory benediction accomplishes the completion";
(9)
Instrumental rasdh svadabdena nivedyante rasdndrn svadabdaniveditatvarn or sva~abdena rasaniveditatvam svadabdarasaniveditatvarn

"feelings are called by their own name";
(10)
Dative bhaktir jfidndya kalpate bhakter flTdnakalpand or jnayaya bhaktikalpand j~dnabhaktikalpand

"love is conducive to knowledge" (cf. St. Augustine: non intratur in veritatem nisi per charitatern);
(11)
Ablative tad anyasmdd utpadyate tasya anyotpattih, or anyasmdt tadutpattih anyatadutpattih.

"that arises from something else";
(12)
Locative tamah prthivydrn antarbhavati tamasah prthivyantarbhdvah, or prthivyd m tamontarbhdvah prthivitamontarbhdvah.

"darkness exists in earth."
In linguistic terms, what happens in all these cases is that a structure consisting of at least two stems, each provided with an ending, say, S1--E~ and $2--E2, is replaced by a simpler structure where the two stems are linked and followed by one new ending, E3, as in:
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(13)
Here, we may substitute for $1, El, $2, E2, $1, $2 and E 3, respectively, ghata, sya, nila, tvam, ghafa, nila and tvam, for example. I wrote "at least two" because the system is recursive,i.e., it can be extended indefinitely to the left, to the right or in both directions. An example of left-recurrence(from the Manikana: Staal 1966: 194--5) is:
]alddivydpakaprthivitvdbhdvapratiyogiprthivitvavati
"possessing earthness which is the counterpositive of the negation of earthness pervading water, etc." The structure of this expression may be made visible by means of different kinds of parentheses and brackets, e.g., as: [{([{(jalddi)vydpaka}prthivitva]abhdva)pratiyogi}pr.thivitva]vati or, more intuitively accessible, by means of a "tree": (14) possessing"
//~prthivitva //~ //~
"earthness"
pratiyogi "counterpositive"
abhdva "negation"
/ / / ~ prthivitva ,, ///~ vydpaka "pervading
ddi "etc" ]ala "water"
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There is no upper bound to the length of compounds and these structures are constructed in accordance with the rules of Sanskrit grammar; in other words, they are grammatical. But they strike us as increasingly artificial and can hardly be called natural. Even when used by poets and pace Jacobi, they are artificial although the degree of their artificiality varies. Since their artificiality does not pertain to the level of grammatical competence, something else must be at stake. In fact, such artificiality generally pertains to the level of performance which is related to the use speakers make of their grammatical competence and connected with, e.g., style or psychology. There are different degrees of performativeness (to coin an almost artificial English nominalization) as is illustrated by the following three examples from English that exhibit the syntactic structures called left-recursive, rightrecursive and self-embedding, respectively: (15) The hummingbird's wing's motion's rapidity is remarkable; Remarkable is the rapidity of the motion of the wing of the hummingbird; The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable.
Though all three forms are grammatical, opinions vary on the acceptability of the first two. The third is not only unintelligible but also unacceptable and certainly artificial (Miller 1964: 36). The artificiality of logical Sanskrit and of the bhds.ya style in general do not exceed the bounds of grammaticality. But even restricted artificiality is of scientific value and may be used to good logical effect. The most distinctive example is the expression of a reason or cause with the help of the ablative ending of the abstract noun, -tvdt. It is such a common sign of logical discussion that Suregvara ridiculed it in his description of pandits "trying to catch each other in the snares of expressions, culminating in -tvdt" (tvdcchiraskavacojdlair mohayantftaretaram: Naiskarrnyasidd,hi II 59 quoted in Hacker 1950: 1923). Logical Sanskrit has gone further in the direction of abstraction than the bhds.ya style of the other ~dstras, although several of the latter have adopted the Navya-Nyfiya style after the thirteenth century. I have elsewhere represented Navya-Nyfiya expressions by formulas the elements of which correspond, one-by-one, to elements of the Sanskrit originals (see, e.g., Staal 1988, Chapters 1--3, 5 and 6). Ingalls, one of the first scientists to pay attention to these formal expressions, referred to them as "clichds": Navya-Nygtyanever invented the use of symbols.It invented instead a wonderfully complex
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system of clichds, by whichit expresses a great deal that we would never think of expressing without symbols . . . The clich6s of the Navya-Nygtya,if they are cumbrous in comparison . with the symbolsof modern logic, are certainlysuperior as a logicalinstrumentto the language of ordinary discourse (Ingalls 1951: 2). This description fits the wider context of the history of algebraic expressions. Johannes Tropfke (1921, II: 4--8) distinguished three periods: (1) 'tin der ersten Periode herrscht das Wort": ordinary language is extended but the extensions are still within the bounds of grammar. This period includes Greek mathematics until the first centuries A.D. and European and Arab medieval mathematicians until Regiomontanus in the fifteenth century. (2) In the second period, abbreviations for often used expressions are introduced on a large scale; but those abbreviations are still used within the syntax of ordinary language. Tropfke's chief Western example is Diophantos of Alexandria (third century A.D.). The medieval mathematicians knew Diophantos (he was commented upon in Arabic in the tenth century), but the level he attained was reached for a second time only in the fifteenth century and after Regiomontanus. (3) At that time, almost immediately, the third period was entered: new symbols and notations began to be used in combination with each other and outside ordinary sentences and syntax. The first florescence occurred in the work of Vieta whom I have already mentioned. The next steps were taken in quick succession, reaching Descartes, Leibniz, Newton and many others, culminating in Euler and Lagrange. The third period of Tropfke is the period of what I have referred to as artificial language. If we interpret Ingalls' evaluation in terms of this synopsis, it is clear that Ny@a and Navya-nyfiya, even though their language is artificial, are almost entirely confined to the first period of development; they touch the second vary rarely and only barely. I would not go so far as saying that NavyaNyfiya got stuck, but it certainly made little progress in the direction of an artificial language such as Western logic evolved. That may sound ominous but for logic it happens not to be a bad result. Logic, after all, uses artificial languages not exclusively in order to study things that go beyond ordinary language, like most of mathematics and other sciences, but also to deepen notions that are already employed, albeit in a confused manner, within ordinary language. The philosophical relevance of logic, whether Indian or Western, lies almost entirely there. Bertrand Russell has formulated the distinction I am referring to in his usual perspicacious manner for mathematics at the outset of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy:
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Mathematics is a study which, when we start from its most familiar portions, may be pursued in either of two opposite directions. The more familiar direction is constructive, toward gradually increasing complexity:from integers to fractions, real numbers, complex numbers; from addition and multiplication to differentiation and integration, and on to higher mathematics. The other direction, which is less familiar, proceeds, by analysing, to greater and greater abstractness and logical simplicity; instead of asking what can be defined or deduced from what is assumed to begin with, we ask instead what more general ideas and principles can be found, in terms of which what was our starting-point can be defined or deduced. It is the fact of pursuing this opposite direction that characterises mathematical philosophy as opposed to ordinary mathematics (Russell 1919:11). What Russell calls "mathematical philosophy" is to a large extent what is nowadays referred to as logic. Its relation to natural languages is amply illustrated by later chapters in Russell's book. Chapter XV, "Propositional Functions," deals with the words all and some; Chapter XV!, "Descriptions," considers the word the in the singular; and Chapter XVII, "Classes," is concerned with the in the plural. One might conclude that logic must be an exceedingly provincial discipline if it deals with such seemingly trivial words of the English language which in many other languages do not even exist. This is especially obvious in the case of the definite article the, which occurs neither in Latin or Sanskrit nor in Japanese or most other languages of the world. As for all and some, they do occur in Sanskrit but their uses are much more restricted than they were, for example, in ancient Greek. Aristotle, therefore, was in a position to construct a logic of all and some or what in logical terms is referred to as quantification, the part of logic that is least well-developed in Nyfiya or Navya-Nyfiya and led to its thorniest difficulties. Gafigega rejected almost all the definitions of vy@ti because of problems of quantification. Most of the contributions of Nyfiya and Navya-Nyfiya are concerned, as Ingalls indicated, with the refinement and clarification of ordinary Sanskrit and its philosophical implications. The analysis of the idea of a blue pot by the three expressions (3)--(5) is a first step. In Navya-Nyfiya, the next step is to analyze the expression as: (16)
nilatvavi~istaghatah., "a pot qualified by blueness."
This corresponds no longer to the predicate "B(p)" (7) because it introduces a relation which holds between two terms, one an individual ("pot") and the other an abstract ("blueness"). It may be written in a Western notation as: (17)
Q(p, b).
But since a pot is also qualified by pot-hess and blue by blue-ness, a further Nyfiya step develops the analysis as follows:
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(18)
nilatva-vigistha-nila-r@a-vdn ghatatva-vigistha-ghat.ah,
"pot qualified by pot-ness possesses blue color qualified by blueness."
Here the process is repeated and Matilal (1968: 15) saw a hint of recursiveness which he tried to capture by: (19) Q(Q(Pot Pot-ness) Q(Blue-color Blue-ness)).
However, this is not well-formed because relations are introduced into relations and the only ready remedy would be something like Russell's theory of types. In my review (1971:200 = 1988: 250) I circumnavigated this difficulty by introducing restricted-variables where no student of Indian logic has followed me, as far as I know. These may not be the only or final solution but they stand in close correspondence to the Sanskrit originals. As for vi~esana, "qualification," in general, it performs some of the jobs that articles take care of in English. As a translation into Sanskrit of the English expression "a pot," ghatavigesa will do in many cases. Many idiosyncracies of languages express generalities that other languages express by other idiosyncracies. Russell's logical analysis of the is based upon but not confined to English. It belongs, from a linguistic point of view, to tmiversal semantics. The contributions of the Nyfiya, whatever the limits of its artificial language, are contributions to the same area where Western logic and linguistics have started cooperating recently, a domain that was opened up for the first time not by Indian logic but by Indian linguistics. We have seen that the nominalized expressions of Indian logic may be embedded in more complex expressions, as exemplified by (6). Yet, the resulting language is still Sanskrit and not an artificial language. This may explain that the strength of Indian logic lies more in analysis ("mathematical philosophy" in Russell's terms) than in construction ("ordinary mathematics"). In Europe, logic developed early but linguistics developed late and not without being influenced by Indian developments. In India, it was the other way round: linguistics developed early and logic late. The earliest logical investigations in India pre-date the classical Nyfiya and are due to grammarians such as Patafijali (Staal 1988:36--41 and literature cited there). We shall briefly touch upon this in the section on "Grammatical Sanskrit."
3. M A T H E M A T I C A L SANSKRIT
I have omitted from Johannes Tropfke's synopsis, quoted at the end of the previous section, numerous references to Indian mathematics most of which he assigns to the second period of development of algebraic expressions,
89
the period during which systematic use is m a d e of abbreviations. This characterization is apt, as we shall see, but before we take a look at mathematical Sanskrit and before the reader takes notice, I must m a k e a confession. Unlike the logical Sanskrit of the previous and the grammatical Sanskrit of the next sections, topics at which I have at least sniffed before, mathematical Sanskrit is new to me. To be a beginner may have a few advantages, but the disadvantages are m o r e serious. My only excuse is that Indian mathematics cannot be omitted from any discussion of the Sanskrit of science. I have no choice but to include it. Let me start with an observation that only a beginner will care to make. The first problem that a student of the literature on Indian mathematics faces is that most authors explain their subject matter with the help of the familiar equations of m o d e r n mathematics. D a t a and Singh in their Source B o o k of the History o f Hindu Mathematics (vols. I--II: 1935--1938), for example, begin their section on quadratic equations (II: 5 9 - - 7 5 ) with a definition in m o d e r n terms: (20)
ax 2 + bx = c.
When they come to Brahmagupta, who lived in the seventh century A.D., they provide two rules from his Brahma-sphuta-siddhdnta (xviii.44 and 45): The quadratic: the absolute quantities multiplied by four times the coefficient of the square of the unknown are increased by the square of the coefficient of the middle (i.e., unknown); the square root of the result being diminished by the coefficient of the middle and divided by twice the coefficient of the square of the unknown, is (the value of) the middle (vargarn. caturgan, itdndm, r@dndm madhyavargasahitdndrn / m~lam madhyemonam, dvigunitavargoddhr,tarn. madhyal! ) -which they explain as: 4,/~-c + b 2 2a b
(21) and:
x =
The absolute term multiplied by the coefficient of the square of the unknown is increased by the square of half the coefficient of the unknown; the square root of the result diminished by half the coefficient of the unknown and divided by the coefficient of the square of the unknown is the unknown (vargdhatar@dndm avyaktdrdhakratisamyutdndm/yat padam avyaktdrdhonam tad vargavibhaktam avyaktah. ) which they explain as: (22) x =
,/ac + ( b / 2 ) z - - ( b / 2 ) a
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If we study the English translations (or the Sanskrit originals which I have added) without looking at these m o d e r n equations they are difficult to understand. That difficulty does not lie in the language, which is simple, but in the technical terms and in what is asserted about them. Once we look at the equations it becomes clear what the words mean. The formulas also tell us what the meanings of the technical terms are: the the the the absolute quantity (r@a): c unknown (avyakta) or the middle (madhya): x coefficient of the square (varga, krati) of the unknown: a coefficient of the unknown: b
All these identifications follow from (20) with which the authors started. Other technical terms are (ma "diminished," uddhrta "divided" and rntila "root." The term "coefficient" is generally omitted. The ambiguity about "middle" (or "unknown") and "coefficient of the middle" (or "of the unknown") poses a problem which Datta and Singh elucidate in a footnote: It will be noted that in this rule Brahmagupta has employed the term madhya (middle) to imply the simple unknown as well as its coefficient.The original of the term is doubtless connected with the mode of writing the quadratic equation in the form: (23) ax e + bx + O = Ox 2 + 0 x + c .
At this point, our suspicion can no longer be suppressed. Are we being misled into construing something that is not there? I accept the yardstick of contemporary science -- although it is certain to change - - and I am willing to believe that what was in Brahmagupta's mind is mathematically equivalent to what is expressed by such formulas as (20)--(23), but "mathematical equivalence" is not a simple concept and it is equally clear that those very formulas are our constructs and were not in his mind. If they were, he would not have expressed them in words, used two rules and two terms instead of one. In sum, we must apply what Truesdell wrote about "Newton's equations" (above, page 7) and say: it is true that we, today, can easily read such formulas into Brahmagupta's words, but we do so by hindsight. What was in Brahmagupta's mind, why did he give two rules and confuse "unknown" and "middle"? It is possible to get closer to an answer by studying other sections of the Source Book (pp. 30--35 and 69--71 of Volume II). We learn that a notion of equation was present but either the
91
two sides were written below each other or only one side was written; moreover, the unknown was not expressed and coefficients were not referred to in general and by letter symbols, but in particular cases and by numerals. For example, the equation we express by the formula: x 2 + 55x = - 250 was written as: (24)
yd va l yd 55 r(t O yd va O yd O ra 250
o r as:
(25)
55
250
In (24), yd (from ydvat -- tdvat) and r~ (from rOpa) suggest the notion of an equation. Datta and Singh's "absolute term" comes from Cotebrooke 1817:185 who had translated r~ as "form, species, absolute number". The dot above 250 indicates that the number is negative. In (25), the absolute term appears with the others, the numerals are placed in "celts" and only the coeffiicients are written; what they are coefficients of is implied. In both cases, the order from left to right is from higher to lower powers. Thus, in the case of a quadratic equation, the highest power is 2 and the coefficient of the "unknown" to the power 1 stands in the middle. This system enables its users to find the two solutions (and sometimes only one). In this system, unknown quantities, but not their coefficients, were referred to by letters, but indirectly: the letters indicate the position of the powers, not variables. The equations seem to imply the notion of variables, but the variables are not expressed by letters. I leave it to the experts to decide whether there were variables and conclude that Brahmagupta possessed a notation that was similar to the kind of equations that appeared in European algebra about a millenium later; but it was sufficiently dissimilar for him to describe the system in words, introduce two different rules and use two different terms to refer to what we call "x." How he arrived at his words is a problem I shall not address. This state of affairs, in which modern terminology obscures original intention and method, characterizes most of the publications about Indian mathematics I am familiar with. It is not uncommon in studies on the
92
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history of mathematics elsewhere as illustrated by Truesdell's c o m m e n t on Newton. In Nathan Sivin's Preface to Libbrecht's study of thirteenth century Chinese mathematics we read similarly: "As Dr. Libbrecht points out, m o d e r n transcription can obscure the point of a technique as well as reveal it" (Libbrecht 1973: xii). W e no longer possess the boards covered with dust on which computations were m a d e and after which astronomical computations were called "dust work" (dhfilikarman) or the beads or small balls (gulikd) of different colors which may have been used before written symbols (Hayashi 1994: 119, 125). If we wish to get an idea of the original notations, it is necessary to look at manuscripts or good editions if they exist. Datta and Singh do not give m u c h of an idea. They m a k e several references to "the lack of p r o p e r symbolism," for example, when they explain the subdivision of fractions into four or m o r e classes which does not make sense to us (I: 190--195), but all their own explanations make abundant use of m o d e r n algebraic notations and bristle with letters which admittedly do not correspond to any letters in the originals. A recent exception to the widespread silence about manuscripts' notations is the 1990 article by Hayashi, Kusuba and Yano, to which we shall return. A n early exception was G. R. Kaye who published facsimiles of a celebrated birch-bark manuscript of the seventh century (Hayashi 1994: 123) and writes about the practice of writing numerals in cells as in (25): The mathematical possibilities of this scheme do not appear to have been realised and the student must always be careful to interpret any group of figures from the context, and not from any similarity with other groupings. However there is a certain amount of consistency in the arrangements, as the examples exhibited below will show. The real purpose of the arrangements appears to be to prevent confusion by demarcating the numerical figures from the text itself. The text is often written almost independently of the figure groups, and a word may be arbitrarily divided by the cell arrangement, which may also cut into several lines of the text not necessarily connected with it. The economic necessity of utilising the whole of the writing surface of the birch-bark available seems to have been the determining factor (Kaye 1927: I, 22--23). Kaye's point about "economy" illustrates a c o m m o n feature of Indian manuscripts, not only the extremely rare birch-bark variety but the c o m m o n class of palm leaf manuscripts f r o m Southern India. His formulations evince sound philology but the "consistency in the arrangements" to which he refers is obviously what interests mathematicians who are used to manipulate multiple notations. After all, significant advances in mathematics such as Descartes' analytical geometry consist at least in part in demonstrations
93
of the equivalence of different mathematical languages -- those of geometry and algebra, in his case. I venture to guess that the truth about the mathematical content of such Indian texts will turn out to be relatively close to what Kaye has written but deviate from it in the direction of what precise significance a mathematician is able to assign to the alleged consistencies. From the simple examples we have so far considered it seems clear that Indian mathematicians during the first millenium A.D. employed abbreviations and artificial notations, often shorthand for practical methods, combined with descriptions in ordinary language. Their Sanskrit was not artificial Sanskrit and they used no other artificial language. "Cells" similar to (25) were also used for solving equations by Chinese mathematicians (Vanh6e 1913, 1931; cf. Needham 1959: 129--133). As far as I can see, their methods were different. Connections between India and China require more study not only from a historical point of view (even Needham wonders "whether Babylonian algebra could have been transmitted in seminal forms to lay the foundations for Indian and Chinese algebra on the one hand, and for the Hellenistic developments on the other": 1959: 113; Pingree 1978, 1989 and elsewhere has supported this for astronomy from Mesopotamia to India) but also because they could show precisely to what extent mathematics freed itself from ordinary language (Sanskrit or Chinese) and attained artificial independence. In order to find out what happened in India later we shall take a look at infinite series, a topic about which much recent information is available. As for their general background, I don't need to dwell on the well known fact that the ancient Indians, Vedic, Jaina, Buddhist and Hindu alike, were fascinated by very large numbers. Gurugovinda Chakravarti (1934) has provided a rich background of infinite or at least very long series from non-mathematical literatures, starting with the Vedas. In mathematics, Chakravarti attributed the origin of series to the Jaina Prakrit sedi which corresponds to Sanskrit ~(redhi. T. A. Sarasvati (1969) has demonstrated that there existed early diagrammatical representations for series. Interest in mathematical series developed in India because of the needs of astronomy which led to the study of spherical geometry as it had done earlier in Babylonia and Greece. But the Indians made a discovery that triggered a revolutionary development: trigonometry. The subject is not mentioned by Datta and Singh, but the basic ideas of plane trigonometry can be understood by non-mathematicians like most of us. One fundamental problem is how to relate angles and straight lines to curves. We start with the circle:
94 (26) A
FRITS STAAL
/y
GREEK
INDIAN
The Greeks introduced the study of chords such as AB in the circle on the left: it did establish relations between angles (a or ACB) and parts of the circumference (the arc AB via D) but it made their calculations unwieldly. The Indians made a practical discovery with far-reaching consequences:
The technique of the calculations is simplified if an arch is not represented by the subtending chord, but by half the chord subtending twice the arc. This line segment was afterwards given the Latin name of sinus (Dijksterhuis 1986: 275).
The circle on the right, adapted from Dijksterhuis, pictures the transition from the Greek calculus of chords to the Indian sine-goniometry. The arc AB is represented in the calculus of chords by the chord AB, in sinegoniometry by A E (sine) or EC (cosine). Nowadays, we understand by sine (cosine) the ratio between A E (EC) and the radius of the circle (AC). The terminologies merge when the length of the radius = 1. The angle ACB is also determined by the tangent, the ratio between A E and EC:
AE
(27) sinea= AC cosa=
EC
AC tga=
AE
EC
In Sanskrit, A E or EF, i.e., half the chord of double the arc, is called jyd, from bhujajyd. CE, i.e., the base of the right angle triangle CEil, is called
koti.
There is one more thing we need to know and everybody knows it: the relation of the circumference of a circle to its radius R is given by the expression:
(28)
2~R
where ~ is 3 , 1 4 1 5 9 . . . , with infinitely many decimals, not a rational number (that is, a number that can be written as a quotient between two
95
integers, i.e., as "a/b"), not even an algebraic number but a transcendent number. Since its transcendence was demonstrated only in 1882 (by the German mathematician C. L. F. yon Lindemann) it is irrelevant to the present context and I need define neither "algebraic" not "transcendental." The irrelevant transcendence of ~ illustrates again what we shall continue to observe: historians of mathematics write about ancient mathematics from the point of view of contemporary mathematics. Whether this should be so has been much debated in the history of science and we have no time to discuss it here. 1 believe to have shown elsewhere (Staal 1993) that we cannot but accept what historians of science like Joseph Needham have laid down:
To write the history of science we have to taken modern science as our yardstick -- that is the only thing we can do (Needham 1976: xxix).
Truesdell (1968: 145--146) formulates some of the reasons:

If s c i e n c e . . , is time-conditioned, social, arm institutional, like politics and moral philosophy, are such also the phenomena themselves? If purely mechanical perpetual motion and purely chemical transmutation of elements are impossible today, as we are now tauglit in school, were they perhaps possible in the times of L E O N A R D O and NEWTON?
Scientists of all ages seek objective truth and if we ignore that fact we are not talking about science. But as historians we must make clear why the ancient authors we study did not think about problems in the way we think about them. I must now explain why I mentioned infinite series and went off on a tangent to discuss the circle, trigonometry and the number 7c which seem to have nothing to do with them. The reason is that there exist interesting connections between both domains, as Mfidhava, Nilakantha and other Indian mathematicians discovered in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century and Newton, Leibniz and other European mathematicians about two centuries later. The fact of these early discoveries itself was a momentous discovery. It was foreshadowed by a brilliant article by the Englishman C. M. Wish of 1830, but he attributed the pertinent Sanskrit texts with characteristic scepticism to the beginning of the eighteenth century -- safely after Newton and Leibniz. The discovery of their earlier origin and much other new information came much later. Now the subject of a rapidly growing branch of scholarship in Sanskrit and the history of science, it was initiated in the 1940's by a series of publications due to Indian historians of Indian mathematics such as C. T. Rajagopal, K. M. Marar, A. Venkata~raman, T. V. V. Aiyar, T. A. Sarawathy (already mentioned) and many others.
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Many texts were edited by K. V. Sarma, who also provided historical and bibliographic information (K. V. Sarma 1972a and b; see also K. Kunjunni Raja 1963b). Some of these publications are listed in the notes to Pingree 1 9 8 1 : 4 9 - - 5 0 and 65--66. The basic connections between the two domains I mentioned are that there exist infinite series representing ~ and the trigonometric functions of (27). I shall first express two of these in m o d e r n terminology, one for zc and the other for the sinus: (29) er _ 1 - 1 + 4 3 1 5 1 q- . . ( - 1 ) " - 1 7 ' 1 2n - 1
Note the practicality of this series: it enables us to compute the value of with increasing accuracy in as many decimals as we are able to cope with.
( I ~ 3 a 5 o~ 7 a 2n--1
(30)
sina--a
3! +
5!
7! + ' " ( - 1 ) " - 1
(2n-l)!
where "x!" or "factorial x" denotes the product of the integer x and all lower integers. For example, 5! -- 5 X 4 X 3 2. In modern mathematics, further generalizations have been made and all such series are now derived from Taylor's infinite series expansions of functions. That again is irrelevant, but what is not irrelevant is that the connections between the infinite expansions of 3r and of the trigonometric functions are also related to the infinitesimal calculus. In Europe, the calculus was discovered -- by Newton and Leibniz -- as the result of attempts to study curves by approximations of infinitely small successions of straight line segments. In India, similar discoveries were made in a similar context and even earlier (Sengupta 1932). Hayashi (1994: 126) writes: Bhhskara II used a relationship equivalent to the differential d(sin 0) = cos 0 dO in his computations of the "instantaneous motion" (tdtkdliM gati) of the planets; perhaps the relationship had already been recognized by Munjala in the tenth century. Bh~skara II also used a kind of integration, the summation of infinitesimal parts, to compute the volume and the surface of a sphere in his astronomical work Golddhy@a ("Chapter on the Sphere") (Sengupta 1932). Bhfiskara II lived in the twelfth century but Mfidhava and Nilakantha went further. In her 1963 study of mathematical series, T. A. Saraswathy has shown how integration (sam. kalita) was introduced after Bhfiskara II. We shall return to the remarkable fact that many of these later discoveries were made in Kerala, Southwest India, in many respects rather isolated from the rest of the subcontinent. But first we shall turn to our main point
97
of interest: the language in which these discoveries were formulated. I shall discuss two illustrations, one fully and the other sketchily. Not being a specialist, I reproduce texts and translations as given in my sources without trying to improve upon either although I must confess that the translations strike me as rather free. I am confident that the experts interpret the texts, in basic respects, correctly. Our first illustration comes from the sixth chapter of the Karanapaddhati which begins with the following verse:
vydsdccaturghndd bahu~ah, prthaksthdt tripahcasaptddyayugdhrtdni / vydse caturghne krarna~as tvrnam svam kurydt tadd sydt paridhih, sus~ksmah //
A. K. Bag (1966: 99) translates: Four times the diameter (vydsa) is to be divided separately by each of the odd integers 3, 5, 7 , . . . ; every quotient whose order is even is taken away from the one preceeding it. Combined result of all such small operations, when subtracted from four times the diameter, gives the value of the circumference (paridhi) with progressively greater accuracy. If D is the diameter and sr D the circumference, this may be interpreted as: (31) :TrD = 4D -- 4D 1 3 1 5
-
4D
which is equivalent to (29). Our second illustration is based upon lines 9--16 of page 126 from a manuscript of the Tantrasam.grahavydkhyd in the Government Oriental Manuscript Library, Madras, Catalogue # R 2505, published by C. T. Rajagopal and M. S. Rangachari (1978: 97) in the following form:
vidvdns-tunnabalah kapi~anicayah sarvdrtha~ffasthiro nirviddhdriganarendraruhnigaditesvesu kramdt pahcasu / ddhastydd gun.itdd abhf.srdhanusah, kr.tvd'pi hatvdntimasydptam ~odhyam uparyuparyatha dhanenaivam dhanusyantatah. //
They translate: In the sequence of five numbers vidvdn, tunnabala, kapi~anicaya, sarvdrtha~ilasthira and nirviddhdtiganarendraruhnigadita, in this
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order, the first number is multiplied by the square of the given arc [in degrees] and divided by the square of 5400, and the quotient is subtracted from the second number. The result of the subtraction is next multiplied by the square of the given arc and divided by the square of 5400 and the resulting quotient is subtracted from the third number. The process of multiplication and division followed by subtraction is repeated till all the five numbers are gone through. The final result is then multiplied by the cube of the given arc and divided by the cube of 5400. If the quotient then resulting is subtracted from the given arc, what remains will be the required jya. Since -fya is sin a, Rajagopal and Rangachari interpret this as: R (32)
Rsina=s-
(+)3[u3-
(~)2{us-(s)
2 u.-
where s is the arc, c = 5400' and u 3 , . . . , ull are the five numbers in the opposite order, i.e., Ull -- vidvdn, etc. The expression on the right may be rewritten as:
S 3 S C 5 S C 7 S 9 S C 11
(33)
s - -5- u3 + -5- u5 - --5- u7 + ~

C
u9 - - ~
ull
This is a step in the direction of (30), but we have to interpret the numbers u first. They were given Sanskrit names based upon the kafapayddi notation current in Kerala and refer to numerical values in degrees of an arc, explained to the authors by Rama Varma Maru Tampuran, a member of the Cochin royal family. The meanings that may be assigned to the names are increasingly fanciful: "scholar," "force de frappe," "a multitude of monkey gods," "steadfast in virtues of all kinds" and "Narendra with wounded limbs known as R U C (lustre)." The kat.apayddi notation used in Kerala is one of four such systems known (see, e.g., Datta & Singh I: 69-72). It uses the consonants of Sanskrit to denote numbers in accordance with the verse (Kunjunni Raja 1963b: 123):
nahdv aca~ ca ~nydni sam.khydh, kat.apayddayah. / mitre ttipdntahalsam, khyd na ca cintyo halah svarah //
99
ha, fia and vowels not preceded by a consonant indicate zero; sounds starting with ka, t.a, pa and ya indicate numbers; in
conjunct consonants, the last consonant has value; vowels following a consonant need not be considered. This may be written out in tabular form: (34) CONSONANTS ka kha ga gha fla ca cha ja jha ta tha da dha na ta tha da dha pa pha ba bha ma ya ra la va ga sa sa ha la indicate NUMBERS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The system is decimal, with the units placed on the left. The la is characteristic of the Malayalam pronunciation of Sanskrit. Since a n u m b e r may be represented by three or four different syllables, the system allows different chronograms for the same number: e.g., bdlakalatrarn saukhyam "a young girl is happiness" and li~gavyddhir asahyah. "a decease of the penis is unbearable" both denote the n u m b e r 1,729,133 (Kunjunni Raja ibid note 2). Using this system, mathematicians may refer to numbers and at the same time tell a joke or construct a pleasant sounding verse that tells a story, for example, about the birth of Krs.na. Datta and Singh offer two comments: It must be noted here that the Hindu alphabetic systems, uvJike those employed by the Greeks or the Arabs, were never used by the common people, or for the purpose of making calculations; their knowledge was strictly confined to the learned and their use to the expression of numbers in verse (Vol. I, p. 64). (They were also used in prose.) The second point m a d e by Datta and Singh is concerned with the four existing varieties of the kafapayddi system. Although it is superior to others used earlier, e.g., by Aryabhata: It is probably due to this non-uniformity of notation that the system did not come into general use (Vol. I, p. 69). We shall return to these comments. However, the exercise from the Tantrasam.grahavydkhyd is far from completed. The u numbers, properly
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FRITS STAAL
explicated in combination with the s/c quotients, introduce the factorial expressions characteristic of (30), the infinite series expansion of sin a. To disentangle it in full would take up considerable space and the reader is referred to the original article. As for ~z, we have not finished because of the 1990 article by Hayashi, Kusuba and Yano, already mentioned. That publication does not only provide a theory about how Mfidhava might have arrived at the corrections for his series, it also gives, in its footnotes, a precise picture of how artificial notations were used. The notations themselves reflect "an ingenious method for expressing rational functions of a single variable" (Hayashi et al. 1990: 154). For example: (35) 4m2--4 4m 3 -- 4m is represented as l ~!i!~~ 4 ,
Here, the superscript circle denotes negative numbers as did the dot in the earlier tradition. The order fiom left to right is from higher to lower powers, as in (25). If we were to adopt expressions of the form of Datta and Singh's (23), we could write the quotient as: (36) 4rn 2 + 0m - 4 4m 3 + 0 m 2 - 4 m + 0
Three points about this notation are of interest. First, as Hayashi et al. observe, the notation cannot be used if more than one term of the same power occurs or if there is a multiplication of factors, e.g. in:
( 4 m 2 - - 4) + (4m + 1)
(37)
m(2m --1) (2m + 3)
Second, the notation was used either rather carelessly, or was considered very difficult, or both. I cannot say whether this is due to the copyist of the manuscript or the editor of the text, but it is remarkable that out of eleven cases of quotients quoted by Hayashi et al., ten had to be corrected. Third, the notation occurs in the context of ordinary language and did not lead to the construction of an artificial language. To sum up. The language of Indian mathematics is complicated because of the complex numerical systems, special names, artificial notations, technical terms and abbreviations which vary from area to area and, last but not least, because of the inherent difficulty of some of the topics treated. Two conclusions may be drawn: First, the language of mathematical Sanskrit is simpler than the nominalized Sanskrit of the logicians and other writers of the bh@ya style which
101
was in common use in other sciences at that time in Kerala and elsewhere. The mathematiciaan-astrologers were certainly familiar with that style. Nilakal?tha, for example, was very versatile and quoted from M/mfi.msfi, Dharmagfistra, the Vdkyapad[ya and other disciplines (Sarma 1977: xxxvi-xxxvii). Second, a separate artificial mathematical language, comparable to the mathematical language of equations in Europe, for example, did not come into being. We have seen that Newton wrote in simple Latin, not dissimilar to the kind of Sanskrit that Indian mathematicians use. But he could also write equations that were part of the emerging artificial mathematical language and did so in connection with infinite series. After a long deduction, interspersed with both Latin prose and special notations not unlike the notations in their Indian cells we have just contemplated, he writes about sin z as follows: (38)
Tandemqueprod# ("at length there comes") y=z-~z

1 3
+--z
1 120
1 7 1 9 z + z 5040 362880
(Newton 1670--1673 = Whiteside ed. 1969, III: 58--59). An expression such as (38) is not yet very genera1 and it may be far from perfect. Like its Indian counterparts, it uses large numerals rather than factorial expressions along with letters and is finite. But it belongs to a mathematical language that is no longer Latin or English and is on its way to becoming universal. Mathematical Sanskrit, on the other hand, in the forms we have considered, continues to be Sanskrit. 4. GRAMMATICAL SANSKRIT Sanskritists are familiar with grammar or linguistics, the "science of sciences" (gdstrdndm. ~dstram). Even those who never paid attention to the system of Pfinini or any other Indian grammatical system, know many of its basic concepts since all grammars of Sanskrit, including even Whitney's, derive from it and so does, indirectly, much of contemporary linguistics. The notions of root, stem, compound, past, perfect, prefix, suffix, sandhi, and even noun, verb, sentence, word, subject, object, etc. are notions about which most nonlinguists, including mathematicians and natural scientists, have only the foggiest of ideas but which to Sanskritists are like bread and butter, rice and ghee or gohan and tsukemono. My main purpose in this
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section is to analyze a familiar example of grammatical Sanskrit, determine its artificial nature, compare it to the others we have studied and draw conclusions. I cannot engage on such a comparison without taking the historical background into account. All Indian scientists, along with other writers of Sanskrit, studied grammar which had developed into a science almost a millenium before either logic or mathematics got off the ground. You will be surprised that I say this because the geometry of the Agnicayana and the altar constructions of the ~ulbasfitras belong to the beginning of the first millenium B.C. and predate Pfinini. But the achievements of these altarbuilders have little to do with the development of Indian mathematics from Aryabhata onwards and Pingree is right "that it would be a mistake to see in their works the unique origin of geometry" (1981: 5; a remark that does not invalidate anything written by Seidenberg although it is followed by a footnote that refers to him). The influence of grammar on logic and mathematics in clear. Pfinini's analysis of nominal composition as an unlimited recursive system (as illustrated by such terms as s.as.thitatpurusa: above, p. 82) paved the way for the systematization of nominalized expressions. Similarly, the grammarians' classification of sounds inspired notational systems such as the kat.apayddi. In that system, one numeral is represented by one of three or four consonants, thus enabling mathematicians to play with meanings and write verse. In that respect it was superior to its predecessor, Aryabhata's system, which led to meaningless and even unpronouncable forms such as cayagiyi~u~uchlr for 57.753.336, the number of revolutions of the moon in a yuga. In Aryabhata' system, each of the numbers 1--25 is expressed by a consonant from the traditional varga system of the Prfitigfikhyas which, like ritual geometry, predates Pfinini: (39) ka ca ta ta pa kha cha tha tha pha ga ja da da ba gha jha dha dha bha fia fia na na ma.
Here varga refers to "row," i.e., the first varga denotes the velars, the second the palatals, etc. In mathematics, varga also means "square" and varga/avarga (like ayuga/yuga in Vedic) are used to refer to "odd"/"even." In grammar, the 5 x 5 varga core has been extended in various ways with what are called the avarga sounds such as fricatives or sibilants, semivowels and vowels. One should not look upon the resulting array as the
T H E S A N S K R I T OF S C I E N C E
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beginning of linguistics or compare it to the haphazard ABC's of the West to which there is no rhyme or reason. Like Mendelejev's periodic system of elements in chemistry, the varga system results from centuries of analysis. During that development the basic concepts or phonology were discovered: consonants, vowels and semi-vowels, velars, dentals, retroflexes, nasals, voiced and unvoiced, place of articulation, etc. Western linguists did not even begin to make such distinctions until two millennia later but in the Prfitiifikhya literature all such terms were precisely defined. The Vfijasaneyi Prfitigfikhya, for example, a text that according to Paul Thieme (1937-1938) is in its present form later than Pfin.ini, goes back in substance to these early centuries and defines savarna "homorganic" as: (40)
samdnasthdnakarandsyaprayatnah "having the same place, producing organ and effort of articulation in the mouth" ( Vdjasaneyi-Prdtigdkhya 1.43)
Such a definition is to be taken seriously as a scientific statement. "Place" (sthdna) refers to "throat" (kant.ha), "palate" (tdlu), "teeth" (danta), etc. "Producing organ" (karana) means "tip of the tongue" (jihvdgra), "rolling back the tip of the tongue" (fihvdgraprativestana), "tip of the teeth" (dantdgra), "middle of the jaw" (hanumadhya), etc. "Effort of articulation" (prayatna) refers to "closed" (sprst.a), "semi-closed" (isatspr.st.a), "open" (vivrta), etc. Unlike the Western alphabets and the Indian mathematical notations of a milleninm later, which are inconceivable without writing even if only in sand, the varga system originated not in spite of that absence but because of it. Jean Filliozat noted that the Semitic writing systems are practical but not scientific and would have posed an obstacle to analysis as they did in the West (cf. Renou-Filliozat 1953: 668). The Prfitigfikhya literature was followed by a period not of stagnation but of intensive linguistic activity. During the same period, the science of ritual developed the notions of rule, meta-rule, rule-order, etc. 0Renou 1941-1942; 1963; Staal 1982). This activity explains that it is possible for Pfinini, in the fifth century B.C., to be almost as far removed from the Prfitigfikhyas as Kepler was from Ptolemy. Pfinini incorporated phonology but included other equally fundamental domains of grammar such as morphology, derivation, syntax and semantics. Unlike the Prfitig~tkhya literature, his grarmnar was not confined to the finite corpus of Vedic utterances, but treated Sanskrit as creative and infinite energeia in the sense in which that Greek term is associated with yon Humboldt or Chomsky. Through numerous improvements and generalizations, Pfinini turned
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phonology into a discipline that was both deeper and simpler than what it had been before. When he needs to refer to the sounds that in the old system make up a row, for example, he simplifies: he attaches a short u to the first sound: e.g., ku means verlars, cu palatals, .tu retroflexes, etc. This is done in accordance with a rule to which we shall revert in a moment. Another rule illustrates how earlier results were incorporated within the new system. Thus savarna is defined in terms that slightly differ from (40): (41) 1.1.9. tulydsyaprayatnam, savarnam "what is produced in the same place and with the same effort of articulation in the mouth is called homorganic"
Pfinini begins with a complete overhaul of the Prfitigfikhya classification of sounds. The first step toward the construction of an artificial language is the replacement of the two-dimensional varga system by a linear sequence, the ~ivasfttra, which enables Pfinini to refer to the sound classes of his own rule system: (42)
a i u N / r ! K / e o ~q / ai au C / ha ya va ra T / la N / fia ma fia na na M / jha bha iq / gha .dha dha S. / ja ba ga .da da ~ / kha pha cha tha tha ca ta ta V / ka pa Y / ga sa sa R / ha L / /
Here I have used capitals to indicate the indicatory sounds (anubandha), the metalinguistic hinges on which the system turns and that are among Pfinini's chief inventions. "Metalinguistic" means: belonging to the metalanguage of the grammar which has Sanskrit for its object language. The one rule we have so far considered (1.1.9) was a defining rule (sam.jfid), but most of those that follow are metarules (paribhdsd) because they are rules about rules. All of them may be referred to as s~tra. The use of the givasfitras is described by the following metarule: (43) 1.1.71. ddir antyena sahetd "an initial sound joined to a final (indicatory) sound (denotes the intervening sounds as well)."
. , Thus, aN denotes "a i u, " iK denotes "i u r . l" yalq denotes "ya va ra la" and aC denotes vowels. These notations do not remain isolated: they become the constituents of the new artificial language which is the goal of my exposition. But first we must look at some other rules. The metarule that explains the technical terms ku, cu, tu, etc. makes use of (42) and (43): (44) 1.1.69. anudit savarnasya cdpratyayah. "vowels, semi-vowels and consonants marked with a short u, when they are not suffixes, denote their homorganics (as well)"
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The expression aN may denote "a, i, u," as I mentioned before, or the class of all vowels and semi-vowels. This is possible because, as the reader may have noted, the indicatory marker "N" occurs in (42) twice. I shall not discuss whether this is a flaw or a particular merit of the system but refer to Patafljali and other commentators who give plenty of attention to such problems. They do not assume, incidentally, that Pfinini was perfect. They reject what he said if they have found that it does not work. We shall simply decide that "a, i, u" is not enough since we need all vowels and semi-vowels. The next technical expression of the rule, ud-it, means "marked with ut," where ut means (short) u in accordance with: (45) 1.1.70 taparas tatkdlasya "a vowel followed by t denotes its own length."
That means: "aT" denotes a, "fiT" denotes d, etc. Why do we need this? Because Pfinini does not only dislike wasting words but, pace Whitney, strives to arrive at generalizations -- a goal more significant in scientific terms than mere economy. It happens to be a fact about Sanskrit that most rules of the grammar that apply to vowels apply to them whether they are long or short. For example, in both internal and external sandhi, a + a, a + d, d + a and d + d, all become long d. To express this by four rules could not only be unwieldly; it would be unnatural for it would fail to express a generalization that captures a feature of the language. Pfinini, therefore, uses in his metalanguage a single vowel to express in his object language both its short and long forms and the extra long pluta to which most rules of the grammar apply as well. Thus he is in a position to say: a + a becomes d, and include all the four possible combinations of long and short. He generalizes further, because this lengthening applies also to other vowels: e.g., dadhi + indra -* dadhindra. The following rule puts it all together: (46) 6.1.101. akah savarne dirghah. "aK is lengthened when followed by a homogeneous vowel."
Although most rules apply to vowels long and short, a few apply to one variety only. These latter forms have to be separately marked. This accounts for 1.1.7, explains ut in (44) and therefore (44) itself provided we further take into account that pratyaya means "suffix." It is tempting to deviate at this point and draw attention to Kfityfiyana's objection to 1.1.70 (45), that "long" and "short" are merely habits of speech: some people speak fast and others slow. Patafijali retorts that this objection pertains to dhvani, "speech sound," not to the subject matter of linguistics which is sphot.a, the meaningful unit of expression. Patafijali's
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concept of sphota is different from Bhartrhari's sphoga of seven centuries later and certainly different from the mystical entity that some scholars have construed from the latter. It belongs to linguistics which is concerned with the user's language or competence of the language. Speakers' habits such as rapid or slow speech belong to the psychological domain of performance illustrated by the flying hummingbird (above, p. 85). I refer to Brough (1951) for a fuller treatment and mention this discussion to show that apparently simple rules of Pfinini's grammar may have important logical mad philosophical implications. Some such problems were taken up by Indian logicians but much later, as we have seen before. We are now ready for the construction of Pfinini's artificial language. In Sanskrit sandhi the vowels i, u, r and l are replaced by the semi-vowels y, v, r and l, respectively, when followed by a heterogeneous or heterorganic vowel. For example, dadhi + atra ~ dadhyatra, madhu + atra --" madhvatra, etc. Using (42), Pfinini's first step toward the expression of this fact about the language is to formulate it as: "iK is replaced by yaN. when a heterogeneous aC follows." But how is a sequence (iK) replaced by another sequence (yaN.)? The notion of "respectively" is implied here, because dadhi + atra does not become *dadhvatra. This implication is explicated by another metarule: (47) 1.3.10. yathdsamkhyam, anudedah samdndrn "reference to elements of the same number is in the same order."
We accordingly omit "respectively." But we may also omit "heterogeneous" because 6.1.101 (46) takes care of the homorganic cases; the remaining cases, therefore, are heterogeneous (or heterorganic). Pfinini's next step is to formulate his rule as: "iK is replaced by yaN when aC follows." Now, this form of expression is extremely common. Most sandhi rules, and many others, are of the form: (48) After A, in the place of B, substitute C, when D follows.
Pfinini captures this generalization by introducing an artificial expression that makes metalinguistic use of the cases of the Sanskrit of his object language. This is perhaps a natural move, as Cardona emphasized (above, p. 73) but in scientific terms a momentous step resulting in a metalanguage that is artificial. The starting point is the subject of the rule, i.e., the element which is substituted and therefore expressed by the nominative. The metalinguistic uses of three other cases are laid down by three metarules: (49) 1.1.49. sasthi sthdneyogd "the sixth (i.e., genitive) case ending is used for that in the place of which (something is substituted)";
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1.1.66. tasminn iti nirdis.te p~rvasya "when something is referred to by the locative ending, (the substitute appears) in the place of the preceding element"; 1.1.67. tasmdd ity uttarasya "when (something is referred to) by the ablative ending, (the substitute appears in the place) of the following." Applying these, Pfinini will formulate (48) in accordance with: (50) A + ablative ending, B + genitive ending, C + nominative ending, D + locative ending.
Applying this to the sandhi rule we have been discussing, where there is no restriction on the left so that there is no need for the ablative case, we arrive at: iK + genitive, yaN + nominative, aC + locative, which in Sanskrit becomes:
ikah yan aci

to which sandhi is applied, yielding the actual rule as it occurs in Pfinini's grammar: (51) 6.1.77. iko yan aci.
This is clearly an artificial expression. A Sanskrit scholar who has not studied Pfinini cannot understand it (I once had a student who thought it was Japanese). (51) may be expanded into more normal Sanskrit by a vrtti inspired by the Kddikd and similar commentaries and used by pandits: ikah sthdne yan (ddedah) aci pare "in the place of iK, ya.N (is the substitute) when aC follows." I have taken some time to present this familiar result because I believe that Pfinini reached here a level of artificiality that neither the logicians nor the mathematicians attained. He did not, like the logicians, create expressions through an increasingly complex and semi-artificial but basically natural development of ordinary Sanskrit. He did not, like the mathematicians, create artificial notations which stood separate and outside the language in isolated ceils. He created artificial constituents and a mechanism through which these constituents could be integrated into a new language, the metalanguage of his grammar. That metalanguage makes use of the caseendings of the object language, but their use is formalized. It is an artificial language which belongs to the third period of the history of algebraic expressions in Tropfke's synopsis (above, p. 86).
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Artificial notations of various kinds occur very early in the history of civilization. Many early notations were developed for numerals. I am not familiar with any earlier example of an artificial language and assume that what we witness here is its first creation. Students of Indian mathematics generally start with Western equations because that is how we think about mathematical problems now. I did not follow that procedure with regard to Pfinini because most of us do not think about Pfininian grammar in terms of equations. But there is an expression in modern linguistics that corresponds to Pfinini's (51) or rather to (48) or (50). It is called a context-sensitive rule and is written as: (52)
B -~ C / A _ _ D
which may be pronounced as: "B is replaced by C in the context A _ _ D" where A stands for "left context" and D for "right context" (Staal 1965b). (52) is equivalent to (48) or (50) but Pfinini did not express it in that manner because he did not use letters as variables. We have seen that Indian mathematicians used letters but probably no variables either (above, p. 91). In this respect, mathematician.s and linguists were similar. And yet, there is a crucial difference between them. That difference expresses precisely the nature and scope of the idea of artificial language and we need to focus attention on that notion once again. A language does not only consist of words. It uses words to make up sentences. The discussion on the relationship between words and sentences is a familiar topic of Indian linguistics, logic and philosophy to which the grammarians, Bhartrhari, the Naiygtyikas, the followers of the two schools of the Mimfim. sfi, and others contributed. Early grammarians like Vyftdi, Pfinini and Patafijali were conversant with these issues, it is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Pfinini's artificial language contains not only constituents on a par with abbreviations or special notations and corresponding to words such as iK, yaN. and aC, but also expressions corresponding to sentences such as iko yah. aci (51). It is sentences that turn the system into a language, that is, a particular system of one-dimensional, linear expressions. We should recall, at this point, that Leibniz demanded of an artificial language that it be linear (above, p. 75). He wanted it to be fit for type-setting but his requirement is tantamount to the fact that an artificial language is a language. These ideas and the mathematical work of the Bernouillis, Euler and others, led to the artificial languages of European mathematics. Indian mathematics did not evolve such languages but two millennia earlier, Pfinini's metalanguage was already such a language. Let us retrace our steps. In logic, India made substantial contributions.
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They are different from, but very roughly on a par with Aristotle who created that discipline in Europe. We may need to add some other logicians of classical and medieval Europe to make the comparison more adequate (Staal 1988: 37--41). I base these claims on my limited knowledge of the history of European logic, Nyfiya and Navya-Ny~ya, and it may have to be modified in the light of the Buddhist contributions of Nfigfirjuna, Dignfiga, Ratnakirti and others. There is little doubt, at any rate, that the clich6s of later logical Sanskrit are steps in the direction of artificial construction. Whatever our evaluation, we must accept that Indian logic did not produce a Frege, Tarski or G6del. I suspect that the reason is that Indian logicians did not evolve an artificial language. In grammar, the situation is different. Pfinini is still regarded as the greatest linguist of all times. There simply is no other candidate. No one else has constructed an almost complete grammar of a natural language using linguistic principles in a principled manner. The importance of Pfinini's artificial language for the development of linguistics in India is also not in doubt. Despite valuable work already done by Leibich, Birw6, Wezler and others, we still do not possess anything like a comprehensive history of Indian linguistics that tells the story of the development of the grammatical schools and the application of Pfininian and related methods and techniques to the study of other Indo-Aryan languages as well as non-Indo-Aryan languages such as Tamil or Tibetan, not to mention the connections with the Japanese kana syllabaries or the Korean script; but that it would be a success story is clear. That unwritten history is, by its very nature, only fully intelligible to Indologists and other Orientalists who are familiar with the object languages. The world, therefore, does not know that India experienced not only a creative period, an Achsenzeit or "axial age" as has been the fashionable term, in the wider philosophical, cultural and religious sense at the time of Buddha and the Upani.sads, but also, at about the same time, a scientific revolution in which Pfinini occupied the place of honor. It may be unfortunate that the world does not know that but it is fortunate that Sanskritists have made information about Indian grammar available and so contributed to the origin of Western linguistics (Thieme 1982/1983; Staal 1989 -1993, Chapters 4 and 5). I believe that I know the ultimate reason for those accomplishments: Indian grammarians evolved artificial scientific languages. In mathematics, we have a puzzle. India did not lack mathematical genius. Indian mathematics has not only a briliant history with contributions ranging from zero to algebra, it also produced discoveries on a par with those of Newton, the paragon of Western science, and other pacemakers of Europe's
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scientific revolution, people whose names are constantly on everyone's tips, unlike the names of Mfidhava or Nilakag.tha. And this does not only hold for mathematics, as we have seen, but also for astronomy, where a similar account could be given as I have tried to provide for mathematics. I shall mention only one example: Nilaka9.tha proposed a geometrical model for planetary movement which is similar to that of tycho Brahe (Michio Yano, personal communication). Professor Yano has authorized me to publish his sketch of Nilaka.ntha's model:
(53)
~
~
P nd. a l a ( e c c e n t r i c )
tc 3 cle
Here, the dighra "fast" epicycle revolves around Earth ("E"), the manda "slow" epicycle revolves around dighra points ("S") and the planets ("P") revolve around manda points (M"). The only difference with Tycho Brahe is that Nilakantha did not conceive of dighra points as indicating the Sun. These observations on Indian mathematics and astronomy take us to our final question which has two sides: why did the scientific revolution take place in Europe and not in India? Let me clarify the question. We are interested in quality, not quantity. I am not talking about differences in scale or balance. We need not consider topics in one civilization for which there are no counterparts in the other. It doesn't matter that physics is as unevenly distributed over the globe as is linguistics or that our information is spotty. Newton did many things, and much is known about him. Mfidhava did several things we know about, and I shall summarize most of what is known about his person later. For some of "Mfidhava" we may actually have to substitute Nilakal?.tha or someone
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else. The fact remains that Leibniz, Mfidhava, Newton, Nilakantha and others made the same discoveries, the Indians even earlier. And yet, India did not only fail to experience a scientific revolution; it did not even produce a scientific mini-revolution. We don't have much more than a handful of articles on the Indian side of our question but are flooded with publications on the European side which could fill a good-size library. Some of these books argue that there has been no such thing as the scientific revolution, others that the question is unimportant. After dipping in that ocean I have learned one lesson: granting that it took place, the occurrence of the European scientific revolution has not been satisfactorily explained and cannot be explained without adopting a comparative perspective, that is, unless scientific developmems outside Europe are taken into account. One scholar who has taken that lesson to heart long before me and with more results than I shall ever attain is Joseph Needham. I shall not try to evaluate what he has done (others have: see Staal 1993: 17--!9), but he is, by and large, concerned with China and has confined himself to technology and the natural and other so-called exact sciences. Our situation as Indologists is different because we deal not only with India but with a civilization where the first and perhaps chief scientific contributions have been in the area of the human sciences. I say "perhaps" because of the Kerala contributions in mathematics and astronomy which have changed that picture. Comparing the European scientific revolution with scientific developments elsewhere is no simple matter and we have to try to break it down into smaller pieces. If we try directly to compare Newton and Mfidhava we must recall that Newton's genius consisted, at least in part, in his power of concentration and the fact that he expressed his scientific thought through ordinary language, often without using the mathematical languages that became common later and that enabled non-geniuses to also contribute to the advancement of science. Mfidhava was similar probably in the first, and certainly in the second respect. His results were similarly expressed through ordinary language and not through the artificial language of mathematics. Newton was followed by a host of mathematicians who translated his results into equations, extended it in all directions, and thousands, later hundreds of thousands of scientists who were inspired by him or others and expanded our knowledge of the universe to a point where it has begun to resemble an expanding universe itself. Mfidhava was followed by a lineage of mathematicians who pushed the limits further, exactly how much it is difficult to say at the present state of our knowIedge.
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These are the facts and they are not belittled by extraneous considerations that continue to emerge from the prejudice of Western scientists and historians. I have heard it maintained, for example, that Asians stumbled upon some of the same results as Westerners, without any plan but by chance -as if that doesn't hold for most scientists. I have also been told that Asian belief systems are totally different from Western thought whatever Asians have come up with. I have discussed some of those problems elsewhere (Staal 1993: especially, "Newton's Lesson"). If we throw out bias and keep the comparison with logic and linguistics in mind, we are in a position to answer our question. The scientific revolution took place in Europe and not in India because Europe developed, in the domain of mathematics and the natural sciences, artificial languages which India developed only in grammar and reserved for internal consumption. Sanskrit, far from being an artificial language, was not artificial enough to trigger a scientific revolution.
5. S C I E N T I F I C E V O L U T I O N
IN C O N T E X T
We have seen that India experienced at an early date a scientific revolution in the human sciences. Artificial expressions for ritual relationships and an artificial language for Sanskrit grammar were constructed. Indian linguistics attained a measure of universality after more than two millenia when Sanskrit scholars had made it accessible and the outside world began to assimilate it. In the mean time, other Indian scientists adopted opposite strategies: logicians enveloped their discipline in heavily nominalized Sanskrit and mathematicians developed artificial notations outside Sanskrit which did not develop into a language. A little later, European scientists began to construct artificial mathematical languages for use in the natural sciences, but they began to replace natural languages. From that nucleus exploded the scientific revolution which became universal. Artificial languages are developed to express truth that natural languages are ill-equipped to deal with. But language is not only for the expression of truth and science does not exist in a vacuum. Languages, including artificial ones, also serve the purpose of communication. Leibniz' universal language was designed as a language for science -- the feature I have emphasized -- as well as communication. What role did communication play in the development of Indian science and in what social context did it take place? I shall address these questions briefly and haphazardly, mainly with reference to the Kerala astrologer-mathematicians. Partly similar observa-
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tions could perhaps be made about Indian logicians and grammarians but such questions have not been given the attention they deserve. 1 shall supplement my notes with even more scattered remarks and comments on European parallels or contrasts. We know little about the social status of the members of the mathematical community in India as a whole for there was no such things as a "mathematical community" -- which is also true of Europe (Staal 1993: 14--15) -but there are a few exceptions. The authors of the Vedic ~ulbasfitras, Baudhfiyana, Apastamba, etc., belonged to the originally small and isolated communities of Vedic Indians, the ancestors of the later brahmins who share their gotra names. They were, as we have seen, rather loosely connected with later developments. As for Aryabhata I (born 476 A.D.), there has been controversy about whether his name should be spelled with one or two "t" 's. It is more than a matter of spelling since bhata means "hireling," "mercenary" or "warrior" and bhaffa means "learned man." The latter reading is obviously appropriate for the designation of one of the world's great mathematicians, moreover, many other names of brahmin scholars end in -bhatt.a. However, metrical evidence supports "Aryabhata." There is additional semantic support: unlike a brahmin, a bhata is in contact with the outer fringes of society and beyond those frhlges with barbarians and other mlecchas including Greeks and Persians from whom one might learn, for example, about Aristarchos' theory of the heliocentric universe (cf. van der Waerden 1970). This accords with the fact that, according to Pingree (1970:50--53 ubi alia), part of Aryabhata's work influenced Northwest India, Iran and the early Abbasid caliphate. That Aryabhata was not a brahmin may also be inferred from the fact that he evinces no familiarity with the Vedic SulbasFttras. Many brahmins are not aware of these works but it would be far-fetched to assume that a mathematician of his caliber would not have ferreted out such information if it had been part of his own tradition. When we come to the Kerala astrologer-mathematicians who are in competition with the torchbearers of Europe's scientific revolution we are back in a well-defined community at the upper end of the social spectrum. The majority of creative scientists anywhere belong to a privileged class of leisure. In Kerala, privilege is circumscribed by the structure of the caste system. Excluding Mfidhava, who seems to have been an Embrandiri brahmin, most of tile Kerala astrologer-mathematicians were or were closely related to Nambudiri brahmins who used to be, and perhaps still are, the
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most orthoprax and exclusive brahmins of India (for the following see Anantha Krishna Iyer 1912; Innes 1951; Kunjunni Raja 1963b and 1980; Sarma 1972; Staal 1983). According to Kunjunni Raja, Mfidhava was a Nambudiri whose house name was Irifififirappali or Irafifiinavalli, "the two Nambudiri families now in Irifififilakkuda." According to K. V. Sarma, Mftdhava was an "Emprfin" or Embrandiri whose house name was Ilafifiipp~!i, also from Irififigdakkuda. I do not know who is right but there are more than two Nambudiri houses in Irinjalaku.dfi since Vfidhfila manuscripts come from the Ne.tumpi]!i and Kitafifiaggeri ouses (Sparreboom and Heesterman 1989: 5--6). Embrandiris are high caste Kerala brahmins but they originate from South Canara and are ranked as "foreign" (parade~in) a little below the Nambudiris whom they may assist in temple ritual and with whom they sometimes dine. Embrandiris have always been rare: according to Ananta Krishna Iyer, writing in 1912 about Cochin, there were 943 "at the last census." According to Innes (1951: 107), writing about Malabar in the Madras District Gazetteer, "Embrandiris are a peculiarly backward community, judged by Western standards." Innes, of the Indian Civil Service, would not have been in favor of placing Mgtdhava's ashes in Westminster Abbey next to the body of Newton. Mgtdhava's own family members would not have liked it either. The next well known authors and teachers in the mathematical pammpard, Parameivara, several Nflakan.thas, gafikaras, N~rfiyan.as and Citrabhfinu were all Nambudiris. If we pursue the lineages published by Kunjunni Raja and K. V. Sarma we come across many more Nambudiris and some names that suggest other high castes. The latter include Acyuta Pisgtrati whom Kunjunni Raja calls "the greatest non-Brahmin astronomer-mathematician of Kerala," and a few Vfiriyars and Varmas. The latter are members of royal families such as the Rfima Varma who explained the katapayddi numerals of the sinus expansion to C. T. Rajagopal and M. S. Rangachari. Though they scrupulously abstained from the Vedas and even from Vedfinta, some of these princes were accomplished authors of ~dstra literature. A recent Maharaja of Cochin, Rama Varma Parikshit Thampuran, published a subcommentary on the Siddhdnta-Muktdvali entitled Subodhini (Tripunithura 1956). There is historical and epigraphical evidence to suggest that the Nambudiris came from the North and settled in Kerala in the seventh or eighth century. By the ninth, they played an important role in the capital of the Cera or Kerala dynasty, Mahodayapuram (modern Koduflgallur, near
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Cochin), which boasted the possession of many cultural treasures including an observatory. After the collapse of centralized government in the twelfth century, the Nambudiri community became the only pan-Kerala power. They married daughters of local chieftains and many of the rulers of Kerala were sons of Nambudiris. Others became chieftains themselves like the Rajas of Ambalappula or Parur (Narayanan and Veluthat 1983). The Nambudiri caste is patrilinear. Within the caste as a whole, prior to 1933 legislation, only the eldest son was entitled to marry in the sense of contracting a Vedic vivdha. Most daughters remained spinsters and all younger sons entered sambandharn alliances with other high castes (princely families or Nayars, for example), most of them matrilinear. This implied that their son belonged to his mother's caste, could not dine or bathe with his Nambudiri father, who himself could not eat food prepared by his wife. l\his system strengthened close nonritual relationships with other high castes but kept the ancestral property of the Nambudiri family undivided since the younger brothers did not inherit. The resulting material prosperity of the brahmins "set many of them free for the pursuit of higher ideals in science, philosophy, and literature" (Narayanan and Veluthat 1983: 263). According to Kunjunni Rala (1983: 301), primogeniture "helped not only to preserve the landed property of the Nambudiris intact, but also to create a leisured class of intellectual brahmins free from the worries of day-to-day existence, who could thus devote their entire time and energy to the performance of religious rites and to the cultivation of literature and the fine arts." Among religious rights, the Nambudiris practised their own variety of Tantrism. Traditions of Vedic ritual were better preserved among them than anywhere else in India. Within the subcaste of vaidika or Vedic ritualists, the eldest son could perform the larger rituals provided his father had done so, and a younger brother only if his older brother had done it before him. Vedic ritual remained a purely Nambudiri pastime especially developed like the patronage of important temples -- among some of the landlord classes. Other brahmin families pursued professional skills that came to be recognized as their hereditary occupation (Narayan and Veluthat 1983: 272). Even outside these families, many individuals practised, promoted and patronized, often in close association with members of other castes, branches of Sanskrit and Malayalam learning including Kathakali, Kalarippayattu (martial arts) and other arts, sports, pastimes and games. To some of them, mathematics with its astrological uses and katapayddi chronograms must have posed an intellectual as well as literary challenge.
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When such activity took place in the larger houses, it was in the hands of the younger sons. They might spend the night in their wives' matrilinear houses where they were, especially among the Nayars, no part of a nuclear family in the American sense but (as anthropologists have called them) "visiting husbands." They ate at their father's home and spent most of their time there, especially if the compound was large as was often the case. Unlike the eldest son, who was fully occupied with the running of his estate and complex ritual schedule, the younger sons were free to cultivate, along with members of high non-Brahmin castes, non-Vedic sciences -- just as members of the second varna such as Mahfivira and Buddha had propagated non-Vedic teachings. The famous Nilakal). tha was such a younger son (Michio Yano, personal communication). The Nambudiris have always travelled widely within their own community to attend marriages, rituals, festivities, Kathakali performances, etc.; but they rarely leave Kerala. Even in the sixties and seventies, when I spent most time in that community, they could tell me precisely where outside the state Nambudiris were located. In Banaras there was one, in London two, and then there was the priest of the Badrinath shrine in the Himalayas, deputed each year by the Maharaja of Cochin for the duration of the summer season. One can barely imagine a Nambudiri writing to Benares or even Tanjore to discuss a mathematical problem, let alone going there to give a paper. And yet, there exists, in regions outside Kerala, in Sanskrit and other Indian languages, a considerable number of texts that proclaim themselves "Kerala Jyotisa." According to K. V. Sarma, who has provided a bibliography of this literature (1972: 185--196), it is a moot point to what extent these texts are actually indebted to Keralese astronomy (ibid. 185). He writes about them: Their high popularity outside Keralla is matched only by their practicallybeing unheard of in Kerala, the reason for which is obviouslythat, in a conservative society, one would scarcely go in for a low-rate alien imitation or improvisationwhen the full original is with oneself (ibid.) British contemporaries of Newton used similar phrases commenting on Leibniz and other continental scientists. I am not suggesting that the relationships are similar, but very little is known and these texts have hardly been studied. Sarma himself has written elsewhere (1954: v) that the parahita system of astronomical computation "has the widest vogue in Kerala, from where it spread to the Tamil area." The spread of knowledge from one area to another may be due to the
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distribution of manuscripts; but just as most non-Kerala manuscripts come from outside Kerala, most Kerala manuscripts remained within the state. Since many Tamil brahmins lived in Kerala and some of them were astronomers (e.g., Subrahmanya Sastri: Sarma 1972: 78--79), it is more likely that the tradition spread through the intermediary of such persons who may have shared in an oral tradition. Many Nambudiri traditions have remained oral to the present day. The older traditions must have been richer than we will ever know because there was no need for all knowledge to be written down in manuscripts, the main, almost only source of information to which we have access. Like other oral traditions, it was kept alive by being taught, practised and discussed within a small community that perhaps continued to write in sand and made use of other impermanent devices, but hardly needed a written language, let alone an artificial or universal language. Nambudiris refer to non-Nambudiri (e.g., Tamil) brahmins as "brahmin" and generally address each other by their house name. Some became widely known by that name: e.g. (among mathematician-astrologers), "Tfimaranallfir" or "Itakramaficeri." All members of other castes address Nambudiris as r "auspicious body." A visitor to a Nambudiri house will often be told: "Tirumeni is bathing." By habits such as bathing, tying the hair in a knot or wearing simple clothes (e.g., a towel) the Nambudiris would have presented a striking contrast with their costume, wig and perfume wearing European contemporaries. Our information about the personalities of Nambudiri mathematicians is limited especially in comparison with what we know about these European counterparts. I have known Nambudiris of various dispositions and temperaments and we should not indulge in empty generalizations. As persons, Nambudiris may be as different as were Newton and Leibniz and a greater contrast than that between those two is hard to imagine. Like the Nambudiris and the wandering scholars of the (Asian as well as European) middle ages and unlike Newton, Leibniz and other intellectuals of the seventeenth century travelled a great deal. Leibniz' most creative period fell between 1672 and 1676 when he visited England but spent most of his time in Paris where he rapidly became the centre of everyone's admiring attention, "at once an accomplished diplomat subtly skilful in promoting his ambitious political aims, and a vivacious young man of the world with an engaging zest for life and an infinite capacity for hard work" (Hofmann 1974: 1). Is that communicative ardor mirrored by Leibniz's idea of the advancement of science through the construction of a universal language? Whatever
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the answer, it seems to be at variance with Bhfiskara II's twelfth century definition of algebra: (56)
b~am. matir vividhavam, asahdyini hi manddvabodhavidhaye vibudhair nijddyaih. / vistdritd ganakatdmarasdm. ~umadbhir yd saiva bijaganitdhvayatdm upetd //
Analysis is certainly the innate intellect assisted by the various symbols, which, for the instruction of duller intellects, has been expounded by the ancient sages who enlighten mathematicians as the sun irradiates the lotus; that has now taken the name algebra (transl. Datta & Singh II: 1--2).
The expression is ambiguous but the emphasis seems to be on symbolism for duller intellects, another way of saying that creating mathematics without symbols requires genius. Did the Nambudiri mathematicians, who followed ,~ryabhata, continue that tradition and look down upon symbolism? They would in that respect resemble Newton more than Leibniz, but many Nambudiris have always had a great liking for poetry, puns and chronograms. It may apply to brahmins, or South Indian brahmins, in general. V. S. Naipaul has not only depicted Indian intellectuals' love of crossword puzzles, but also told stories of Indian scientists who were son of brahmin ritualists. India does not seem to have known the struggle that regard in seventeenth century Europe between "Rhetoricians" (who preferred ordinary language) and "Symbolists" (who preferred artificial expressions) and survives in contemporary debates between ordinary language philosophers and logicians. Nambudiri mathematicians may have failed to create an artificial mathematical language, but they preserved the classical Indian emphasis on form that characterizes ritual, grammar and all the sciences. No Indian intellectual at any time is likely to have adhered to the belief expressed by the Rhetorician philosopher Thomas Hobbes:
Symbols, though they shorten the writing, yet they do not make the reader understand it sooner than if it were written in words. For the conception of the lines and f i g u r e s . . , must proceed from words either spoken or thought upon. So that there is a double labour of the mind, one to reduce your symbols to words, which are also of the mind, another to attend to the ideas which they signify... (in: Cajori 1928, I: 427).
Such obsession with ordinary language blocks the understanding of an artificial language and, indeed, of science. Artificial languages are only successful if they replace natural language. If we had to translate the Schroedinger equation of quantum mechanics into ordinary language before
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we could understand it, no one would ever have an inkling of it. We can only understand quantum mechanics by learning its language. Although Newton practised symbolism less than some others he did not espouse Rhetorician ideas. But he was exceedingly uncommunicative -- in the words of Keynes (1951: 311), "in vulgar modern terms profoundly neurotic of a not unfamiliar type but -- I should say from the records -- a most extreme example. His deepest instinct were occult, esoteric, semantic -- with profound shrinking from the world, a paralyzing fear of exposing his thoughts...". I have never met a Nambudiri of that "not unfamiliar type," perhaps by definition for he would shrink away. The Nambudiris did not live in isolation from others, as we have seen, but individuals were free to withdraw and Nambudiri caste exclusiveness could be construed as an institutionalization of Newton's feelings. In that respect a comparison between the two holds good. Newton's most creative period, his annus mirabilis was during 1665-1666 when Cambridge was closed on account of the plague and he returned to his native village, Woolsthorpe, where he laid the foundations for most of his work in physics and mathematics. He continued in Cambridge at Trinity College, for more than a quarter century, thinking, reading, writing in his rooms and garden and experimenting in his small laboratory until, in 1696, when his powers were beginning to wane, he was called to London and became the most celebrated man of his age. No Nambudiri ever became so famous although Melpputtfir Nfirfiyana Bhatta (a pupil of Acyuta Pisfirati; see Kunjunni Raja 1958: Ch. VI) came close. Mfidhava was famous as golavid, "expert on spherical mathematics," but only among his followers. A Nambudiri life of withdrawal and study is perhaps suggested by the only portrait I know of a Nambudiri mathematician-astrologer: Nilakantha (Rajagopal and Vedamurthy Aiyar 1951). It is imaginary and depicts the master sitting in a small mand. apam gazing at a criss-cross patterned roof of rafters that looks like a circle inscribed in a square. The description intends to illustrate the discovery of Gregory's series, a generalization of the x-series of (29). I have barely touched upon many other features of communication. Before, during and after the scientific revolution, almost all European intellectuals engaged in frequent letter writing. Several mathematical discoveries are known from these letters. Newton was no exception though he held much back in his correspondence, but so did Leibniz and others. Correspondence led also to misunderstandings and lack of communication. Newton thought that Leibniz had taken more than six weeks to reply to one
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of his letters, using the time to alter the language of the information he had received and present it as his own invention. What happened in fact is that Newton's letter had been entrusted to a messenger who, not finding Leibniz at home, left it at an apothecary's shop where Leibniz picked it up much later (Hofmann 1974: 232--234, with more details). Printing from type had been known since the fifteenth century and though it was not sufficient, it certainly was the kind of condition without which the scientific revolution can hardly be imagined. But what about China, which had invented printing seven centuries earlier? I mention it because such contextual conditions may be necessary but are not sufficient. Also, the type of subjective imagination in which I am indulging in these paragraphs is an unreliable yardstick. Dawkins 1986 is right that the "Argument from Personal Incredulity" ("I cannot imagine it") never proves anything. His denunciation reflects a more general truth: most interesting scientific results concern things that are hard or impossible to imagine. The limits of our imagination may be the limits of our language, but they are not the limits of the universe, which is precisely the reason that we need artificial languages. Leibniz advocated a universal language, Euler and Lagrange put in mathematical language what Newton and others had discovered, developed it further and in so doing confirmed Galileo's hunch that mathematics was the language of the universe. That idea reverberated through the centuries and was still invoked by Einstein when he said that he could have done better physics if he had known more mathematics. In India, the same results were reached but no scientific language evolved, the notations were fun but did little to advance science which ultimately stagnated, took a last minute account of some Western advances, corrections and methods (Sarma 1972: 81) and ground to a halt. I have argued that the "natural"-scientific revolution arose in Europe and not India because artificial languages for mathematics and natural science developed in Europe and not India. In India, a scientific revolution occurred much earlier but it pertained to the human sciences and centered in Sanskrit grammar. This was also due to the development of an artificial language, but recognized only later as another universal science, viz., linguistics. Kuhn, Feyerabend and Foucault, not to mention the prophets of Postmodernism, have in their discussions of science and scientific revolutions increasingly emphasized non-scientific contexts. It is true that facts about communication and social context shed additional light on the occurrence of a scientific revolution. Our comparative study of the European and
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Indian cases suggests that the absence of any of these accessories (e.g., printing) may suffice to prevent the origin of a scientific revolution; but their combined presence is not enough to trigger it unless an artificial language is also developed. Such a language is more than a feature of context; it is closer to being a feature of science itself. I have tried to approach the problem of scientific revolutions from a scientific angle because science as a search for truth implies progress. All sciences did not develop in neat, progressive lines, there have been oppressive paradigms, culs-de-sac and much knowledge is undoubtedly lost, but there have also been breakthroughs which have increased not only our knowledge of facts but fundamentally deepened our insight. The Indian scientific revolution made a lasting contribution to our insight in language. The European scientific revolution did the same for our understanding of the universe and has been followed by discoveries penetrating the mysteries of life and the human brain. These processes have not been completed; they continue. Needham is right when he describes science as a "grand onwardgoing movement" from which there is (whether we like it or not) "no going back" (Needham 1976: xxvi--xxvii). 6. PHILOSOPHIC COROLLARIES One of our conclusions has been that revolutionary progress in science (e.g., new paradigms) often depends on the successful construction of artificial languages. Successful are languages that facilitate the expression of truths about the universe and generalizations of those expressions. The corollary of this conclusion is that ordinary language is inappropriate for such purposes. Natural languages were designed or selected for communication, not for understanding reality. An evolutionary account of the origins of natural language supports this corollary (see Staal, forthcoming). In Western philosophy, our corollary implies that the significance of "ordinary language philosophy" -- the philosophical currents that largely developed from the later Wittgenstein with G. E. Moore as a forerunner and J. L. Austin as a brilliant practitioner -- is of limited relevance. These philosophies do not help to understand reality -- sometimes they prevent it -- and are of little use in science. This is not merely implied by our conclusions; it has been patent for a long time. "Ordinary language philosophy" may have contributed to disciplines such as politics or the law, but even the supposition that it is fundamental to the human sciences is untenable since it is refuted by linguistics: the science of language, chief characteristic of the human animal, has from Pfinini to Chomsky and like other sciences, made
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progress mainly t h r o u g h the construction of artificial languages. That "ordinary language philosophy" is sometimes called "linguistic philosophy" is ironic for, after a brief flirtation, it has b e c o m e almost wholly aloof f r o m linguistics. W h y is it, then, that these philosophies, picking up where the seventeenth century "Rhetoricians" left off, are still cultivated in Britain, the U n i t e d States and other parts of the English speaking world? A n d why do hermeneuticians of the E u r o p e a n continent confine themselves to even m o r e restricted d o m a i n s of ordinary language and look u p o n the interpretation of texts as the p a r a d i g m for the understanding of reality? I have c o m m e n t e d on these questions and o n the widespread obsession with ordinary language elsewhere (e.g., Staal 1 9 8 9 = 1993 chapters 25C, 29, 30 and Excursus), but a simple and direct answer was given by B e r t r a n d Russell in his Preface to a 1959 "Critical A c c o u n t of Linguistic Philosophy and Study in Ideology" by E r n e s t Gellner - - the same Gellner w h o recently (1992) examined the intellectual b a n k r u p t c y of p o s t m o d e r n i s m . Russell wrote: When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum which could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy, which cares only about language, and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace (in: Gellner 1959: 15). In Indian philosophy, the implications of our corollary are different but lead to a final conclusion that appears to be universal. T h e t h e m e was set by an exclamation in the founding Editorial of this journal of 1970: "What w o n d e r s might n o t Raghunfitha have p e r f o r m e d if shown a B o o l e a n algebra!" F o u n d e r - e d i t o r B. K. Matilal d e v o t e d a b o o k to the discussion between two Indian traditions which he described in the following terms: There is a very well established philosophic tradition in India, which tries to maintain that reality lies beyond the reach of language and construction (i.e., discursive thinking). In other words, the real world is inexpressible in terms of concepts. There is also the opposite philosophic thesis which tries to show that reality is knowable and hence expressible in language. The structure of our knowledge reflects the structure of the real world. One side in the philosophic debate of these two opposing views is represented by the various forms of Buddhism, while the other side is represented by the non-Buddhist schools, chiefly by the Nydya-Vai~esika(Matilal 1971: 14). Matilal continued to w o r k within this perspective which is a d o p t e d by the majority of students of Indian philosophy. In his b o o k on Perception, for example, he analyzed the dispute between Nyfiya realism and Buddhist
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phenomenalism. A m o n g the characteristics of the Nyfiya, he mentioned that "perceptual knowledge is not always verbalized, but it is verbalizable." A m o n g those of Buddhist phenomenalism he included: "such knowledge is not verbalizable, for it is supposed to be entirely free from conception" (Matilal 1986: 5--6). It is clear, and Matilal would have agreed, that the two traditions encompass m o r e than the Nyfiya-Vaige.sika and "the various forms of Buddhism." First, there are transitions: Dignfiga, for example, was influenced by the grammarians who had already adopted a Vaiiesika-like position (Hattori 1968: 83--86). Second, even if the orientation of the one tradition is aptly summarized by the Vaigesika axiom "There is a direct correspondence between words and things" (Bronkhorst 1992; cf. Houben, forthcoming), the locus classicus of the so-called Buddhist traditions remains the Taittiriya Upanis.ad which on several occasions "indicates" (anachronistically through jahadajahallaksan, d) that absolute reality is:
ydto vaco n[vartante / @rdpya rndnasd sahd "that from which

words return, having failed to reach it with the mind." O u r final corollary is this. The two traditions b e c o m e not only consistent but c o m p l e m e n t each other as soon as we disambiguate their confusing references to the concept of "language." F o r it is equally true that words from natural languages return from reality empty-handed and that expressions from artificial languages capture some of its salient featurs. If the artificial language of the Nyfiya-Vaigesika did not go far enough or was inappropriate, like that of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, this does not mean that we must given up such languages and revert to the natural variety. Ordinary language has been primarily designed for ordinary communication between humans and not for expressing truth about reality. In this respect and pace Bertrand Russell, there is agreement between science and mysticism.
NOTE * This essay is based upon the text of a lecture given in three forms: "A~ificial Sanskrit" on April 19, 1994, at the International Institute for Buddhist Studies, Tokyo; "Scientific Sanskrit" on April 22, 1994, at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University; and "Language and Scientific Revolutions: Three Asian Sciences" on May 16, 1994, at the School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. I have not only been honored by Professors Akira YUYAMA, Yasuke IKARI and Abram DE SWAAN who invited me to deliver these lectures; I have also derived great benefit from comments and references given by members of their audiences. As a result, the reader will miss some of my blunders and nonsequiturs. There are many persons I would like to thank but for fear of omitting some -- what with the galaxy of Indologists now work-
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ing at Kyoto! -- I shall mention only Professors Minoru HARA and Ryutaro TSUCH1DA at Tokyo, Masaaki HATTORI, Yuichi KAJ1YAMA, Katsumi MIMAKI, Muneo TOKUNAGA and Michio YANO at Kyoto, Johan GOUDSBLOM and Henk VERKUYL at Amsterdam; and one publication: Hayashi 1994 (see Bibliography). After the text was completed for publication I read Pingree 1985 which reached conclusions similar to Section 4 almost a decade ago.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Anantha Krishna Iyer, L. K. (1912), The Cochin Tribes and Castes, Vol. II, Madras: Higginbotham & Co. -- London: Luzac & Co. Bag, Amulya Kumar (1966), 'Trigonometrical Series in the Karanapaddhati and the Probable Date of the Text,' Indian Journal of History of Science 1: 98--106. Benfey, Theodor (1874), Einleitung in die Grammatik der vedischen Sprache, G6ttingen: Abhandlungen der K6niglischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. Bronkhorst, J. (1992), 'Quelques axiomes du Vaiges.ika," Les Cahiers de Philosophie 14: 95--110. Brough, John (1951), 'Theories of General Linguistics in the Sanskrit Grammarians,' Transactions of the Philological Society 27--46. Reprint in: Staal 1972: 402--414. Cajori, Florian (1928), A History of Mathematical Notations, I--II, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cardona, George (1980), Pdnini. A Survey of Research, Delhi -- Varanasi -- Patna: Motilal Banarsidass. Chatterji, Kshitish Chandra (ed. and transl.) (1957), Paspagd to Pata~jali's Mahdbhdsya, Calcutta: A. Mukherjee & Co. Colebrooke, Henry Thomas (1817), Algebra with Arithmetic and Mensuration from the Sanscrit of Brahmegupta and Bhdscara, London: John Murray. Datta, Bibhutibhusan and Singh, Avadhesh Narayan (1935--1938), History of Hindu Mathematics. A Source Book, I--II, Lahore: Motilal Banarsi Das. Dawkins, Richard (1986), The Blind Watchmaker. Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design, New York -- London: W. W. Norton & Co. Dijksterhuis, E. J. (1986), The Mechanization of the Worm Picture. Pythagoras to Newton, transl. C. Dikshoorn, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gellner, Ernest (1959), Words and Things. A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Gellner, Ernest (1992), Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, London and New York: Routledge. Grattan-Guinness (ed.) (1994), Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences. London and New York: Routledge. Hacker, Paul (1951), Untersuchungen iiber Texte des friihen Advaitavdda: L Die Schiiler ~ar~karas, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH. Hartmann, Peter (1955), Nominale Ausdrucksformen im wissenschafilichen Sanskrit, Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Hattnri, Masaaki (1968), Digndga on Perception, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hayashi, Takao (1994), 'Indian Mathematics,' in: Grattan-Guinness 118--130. Hayashi, T., Kusuba, T. and Yano, M. (1990), 'The Correction of the Mfidhava Series of the Circumference of the Circle,' Centaurus 33: 149--174. Hayashi, T., Kusuba, T. and Yano, M. (1990a), 'The Parallel Passages on the Correction of
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FRITS STAAL

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

ghato nilah ghatasyanilatvarn

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

Accusative rnarigalam sam@tim sddhayati matigalasya sarndptisddhanatvam sarn@timafigalasddhanatvarn

Instrumental rasdh svadabdena nivedyante rasdndrn svadabdaniveditatvarn or sva~abdena rasaniveditatvam svadabdarasaniveditatvarn

Dative bhaktir jfidndya kalpate bhakter flTdnakalpand or jnayaya bhaktikalpand j~dnabhaktikalpand

Ablative tad anyasmdd utpadyate tasya anyotpattih, or anyasmdt tadutpattih anyatadutpattih.

Locative tamah prthivydrn antarbhavati tamasah prthivyantarbhdvah, or prthivyd m tamontarbhdvah prthivitamontarbhdvah.

//~prthivitva //~ //~

/ / / ~ prthivitva ,, ///~ vydpaka "pervading

ddi "etc" ]ala "water"

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

nilatvavi~istaghatah., "a pot qualified by blueness."

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

Truesdell (1968: 145--146) formulates some of the reasons:

7! + ' " ( - 1 ) " - 1

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

s - -5- u3 + -5- u5 - --5- u7 + ~

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

m(2m --1) (2m + 3)

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

Tandemqueprod# ("at length there comes") y=z-~z

ikah yan aci

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

ydto vaco n[vartante / @rdpya rndnasd sahd "that from which

THE SANSKRIT OF SCIENCE

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