You might have recognized the names of some
of the Greek natural philosophers.
They were individuals with quirky theories,
and we have records about them.
But they weren’t the only people making
knowledge back in the day.
India had major urban centers, centralized
administrative states, and complicated metaphysical
traditions long before the Greeks had anything
big—
just goats, which are small.
And olive trees, which are bigger than goats but still small.
And a few gods and goddesses doing normal
stuff like cheating on each other.
In Indian scriptures, thousands of gods and
demons made perpetual war, destroying and
recreating reality itself!
Ancient Indian thinkers didn’t give rise
to the same natural philosophy as
the Greeks.
India presents a convenient counterpoint to Greece because knowledge-making in india was
indeparable from a long religious tradition, sponsored by the state,
and focused on applications.
At the same time, both regions exchanged ideas
with each other and the wider world.
Today we’ll dive into a couple of major
aspects of Indian natural philosophy, underlying
philosophy–philosophy, and math.
Oh, and we’ll talk about everyone’s favorite
large mammal—the elephant!
[Intro Music Plays]
Ancient India was home to several schools
of thought, including what would become Hinduism,
its more austere rivals Buddhism and Jainism,
and a super-fatalistic faith called Ajivika
that isn’t around anymore.
The most important Hindu texts were the Vedas.
The word “veda” literally means “knowledge.”
These sacred texts are passed along orally,
even today.
But they had also been written down for centuries
by the time Alexander the Great invaded western
India in 326 BCE.
Science and religion were entangled in both
Greece and India.
True, the Greek natural philosophers began
to break with a mythological tradition, or
at least repurposed it, proposing new ways
of thinking about nature.
Even so, we can never neatly separate out
science from religion: they mutually affect
one another.
In India, “knowledge” systems were essentially,
well, vedic.
The Vedas were written in a sacred language,
Sanskrit, which was standardized around the
time of the first Greek natural philosophers.
The greatest Sanskrit scholar, Panini, wrote
a book on grammar listing almost four thousand rules!
These covered phonetics, meter, semantics,
etymology—everything about the language
and how it should be used.
In fact, Panini’s theory of how words are
formed was so advanced that it was directly
studied into the twentieth century!
So you can say that the first science in India
was linguistics.
And this tradition of memorizing the Vedas
and trying to understand words eventually
led to the study of acoustics and musical
tones.
But is studying a language, which is a very
human thing, the same kind of knowledge-making
as studying fire or gravity?
Yes, totally!
Linguists make hypotheses, take careful observations,
and put together testable theories about how
languages change.
They might be frustrated by the seeming randomness
of their subjects… but then again, so are
quantum physicists, and medical doctors!
Some parts of the Vedas concerned math and
astronomy.
But mostly they concerned gods and rituals.
The Vedas taught that the cosmos is clearly
ordered, as is human society.
What happens in the reality you perceive is
the result of a complicated ethical algorithm
running in the background—so you have to
sacrifice a lot of animals and stay in your
social position.
Thus the Vedas functioned not only as a basis
for a whole language, but as a way of teaching
people how society should be: a mirror of
an orderly cosmos.
And so we arrive at the present year: 321
BCE…
It’s not actually 321.
But it was, at one point.
At that time, in Greece, Aristotle had been
dead for only one year.
Over in Babylon, in what is now Iraq, Aristotle’s
former boss Alexander the Great had been dead
for two years.
But in eastern India, a young adventurer named
Chandragupta Maurya was very
much alive: that year he became emperor of
nearly the entire subcontinent.
Alexander had only recently invaded India,
wisely choosing not to start beef with the
powerful kingdom of Magadha.
When Alexander died, India consisted of a
lot of small kingdoms.
Maurya, inspired by the model of Alexander
and coached by a brilliant older adviser,
led a coup in Magadha.
From there, Maurya conquered the weaker kingdoms
one by one, forging them into a powerful state
called —wait for it, what name did he name it?
who knows!— it's the Maurya Empire.
The dynasty that Maurya founded lasted from
322 to 180 BCE.
It sponsored research into astronomy, hydraulic
engineering, and forestry.
Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka 
became one of the most powerful and culturally
influential rulers of India, as well as a
serious convert to Buddhism.
He outlawed hunting and other unnecessary
acts of violence towards animals, opened public
hospitals, and spread Buddhism as far as Athens!
When the Buddhist monk Faxian 
visited India from Jin Dynasty China, starting
in 399 CE, he favorably compared the two empires:
both were civilized societies where Buddhism
could flourish.
Increased travel between states brought increased
trade in goods as well as ideas.
Under the Maurya Empire, more than half of
the arable land in ancient India was irrigated,
producing two harvests a year.
That sustained a lot of people… and required
a lot of planning.
Thus Indian states developed whole government
departments to supervise the building and
maintenance of irrigation systems.
They controlled a vast system of canals and
sluices, funded by taxes.
Breaching a dam was punishable… by death!
The centralized Maurya Empire—like the Egyptian,
Sumerian, and Chinese ones—was a “hydraulic”
state: its control of water allowed harvests
stability, keeping large populations alive.
To control nature, the people running these
big states needed to know lots of things about
the lands, plants, animals and especially
rivers they controlled.
And most especially about the people who owed
them taxes.
First rule of history: nobody ever, ever liked
paying taxes.
Another key to running a big state in India
was the elephant.
Training hundreds of war elephants was important
to continued military power.
So the Mauryas created a forestry department,
because elephants lived in the forests, and
made the slaying of elephants punishable by,
you guessed it, death.
Forestry management and regulating land and
water would eventually develop into sciences
in their own right.
The Mauryas’ administrative or “useful”
science, such as their pioneering work in
land management, was not the same as the abstract
theorizing of the Greek natural philosophers.
The Greeks left behind their names, thanks
to their writings and their cults—I mean—schools.
The work of those who maintained early hydraulic
states tended to be anonymous.
A debate about the relative merits of applied
versus pure science—knowledge of the immediately
useful versus the abstractly true—is still
raging today.
Just compare a scientist applying for a grant
to study, say, lichen versus an engineer working
on computer guidance for missiles…
But useful and abstract systems are not diametric
opposites, and they were never fully separate.
India had been open to Persian and Chinese
influences before Alexander.
The Chinese had already introduced alchemy—or
systematic questioning about what is stuff—to
Indian thought.
But India definitely became more Greek-ish
when a bunch of Greeks–some trained by Aristotle
himself—pranced in talking about elements
and perfectly circular star-paths.
Astronomy was important to all of the ancient
states.
This is because, alongside their war-making
and tax-taking, states were also religious
institutes, which cared about astrological
schedules.
Because, if you’re a god, you can fly around
the heavens, you have houses in different
parts of the sky, and you want to be worshipped
when you’re in the right house.
In India, as all over the ancient world, “religion”
and “science” were not separate ideas
in the way we might think of them today.
Practicing astrology meant carefully observing
stars and planets—and thus also practicing
astronomy.
People who knew a lot about the night sky
made up a high-status professional class.
These stargazers were part-priest, part-astronomer,
and part-mathematician.
As astronomers, they divided the solar year
into months, crafting calendars to regulate
religious ceremonies.
They developed a calculation for adding a
leap month when necessary to keep the religious
calendar in sync with the solar one.
And they investigated the moon’s cycles,
as well as constellations.
As mathematicians, they came up with names
for very large numbers—such as 10 to the
40th—related to the very long cosmic cycles
in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
In fact, astronomy and related math really
took off in ancient India.
Let’s take a closer look with ThoughtBubble:
During the Gupta Empire, which lasted from
319 to 605 CE, families of professional astronomer–mathematicians
passed down their teachings about the stars.
And they competed with each other: six regional
schools of thought all fought for state patronage.
This period also saw the rise of the siddhantas
or “the solutions,” meaning high-level
astronomy textbooks.
Two of the major siddhanta writers were Aryabhata and Brahmagupta.
They were both brilliant polymaths,
but unfortunately they disagreed about astronomy.
Which was really too bad, because these guys
would have made a team of unbeatable geniuses.
Written around 500 CE, Aryabhata’s book
of solutions includes a place-value system,
decimal notation, the familiar numbers that
we call “Arabic” today, the number zero,
and the irrational number pi calculated to
four places.
And Aryabhata famously posited that the earth
rotates… daily… on its axis.
This idea was a major breakthrough in astronomy:
Egyptian, Greek, and earlier Indian thinkers
argued that the sky rotates around the earth.
Aryabhata figured out that the apparent “movement”
of the stars is actually caused by the rotation
of the earth itself.
But Brahmagupta thought that a rotating earth
defied common sense: just look at the birds,
all not flying off into the heavens!
Meanwhile, in his own siddhanta, Brahmagupta
calculated the circumference of the earth
with astonishing precision, and he worked
with negative and irrational numbers.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
Indian mathematicians were working on many
topics that writers in Greece were not.
But the most advanced branch of natural philosophy
in ancient India was more founded in Vedic
teachings.
Ayurveda, literally life-knowledge,
or the science of life, began with oral traditions
about sacrificial animals.
By the sixth century BCE, it was a standardized
system of medicine and way of answering the
question what is life?
Ayurvedic approaches to diseases and cures
were rational.
There were reasons for every choice.
Good physicians didn’t believe in strictly
divine cures, but practiced medical judgment
based on years of study and then more years
of experience.
The influential medical textbook Charaka Samhita,
for example, calls for physicians to apprentice
with a master, then get royal permission to
treat patients.
It also lists 300 bones, 500 muscles, 210
joints, and 70 vessels in the human body.
This was written some time before 200 CE.
And today’s med school students complain
about organic chemistry!
Ayurveda, which is still around today, is
so complex and important that we’re devoting
another episode to it, alongside ancient European
medicine.
For now, just note that, Indian medicine and
surgery was probably the most advanced of
any contemporary ancient civilization.
Rich in people and faiths, India was not a
single culture even under the highly successful
Mauryas and Guptas.
But certain features of ancient Indian natural
philosophy stand out.
The ancient Vedas—literally, the knowledges—influenced
a wide variety of thinkers across a large
geographic region.
There were no sharp breaks with Vedic ways
of knowing—although Buddhism, and influences
from China and Greece, added new layers of
philosophy on top of the Vedic one.
And the Maurya and Gupta states were wealthy
and well-administered, known for their skilled
artisans and able to control vast plains in
order to feed teeming cities.
As ancient states exchanged goods and proto-scientific
ideas, Indian ideas spread far and wide: we
have accounts of Ayurvedic physicians, or
vaidyas, working in eighth-century
Baghdad, then one of the largest cities on
earth and a center of knowledge production.
Next time—we’ll travel to The Americas to ask questions like, "When are we? What is time? And how to we measure it?"
Crash Course History of Science is filmed
in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it’s made with the help of all
this nice people and our animation team is
Thought Cafe.
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