I was reading about this cat, named Panini (no, not the tasty italian bread. see here).
He was in fact a brilliant mind, a student of the Vedas, and perhaps one of the most innovative people in the whole development of knowledge. He lived about 400 B.C., and noticed that the version of Sanskrit used in the ancient shastras or poetry of the ancients, differed slightly from the version spoken in common use in his day. He decided to set out the rules of Sanskrit grammar.
(“Sanskrit” means “complete” or “perfect” and it was thought of as the divine language, or language of the gods.)
Astadhyayi is his main work, and it describes a scientific theory of phonetics, phonology and morphology, giving formal production rules and definitions to completely describe Sanskrit grammar.
Keep in mind that the earliest known Sanskrit script is Ashoka’s from (250 BC), while Panini lived around 400 BC. He must have had vast portions of the Vedas, not to mention his own tome, memorized!
The more I learn about this period in Indian history, the more fascinated I become. I’ve read an abridged version of the Mahabharata twice, and I’m reading the Bhagavad Gita now. The Gita is the dialog between Arjuna and Krishna that takes place before the great battle of Kurukshetra. The Gita is actually one of several significant accretions onto the original tale of the Mahabharata, which is itself a grand epic, with its own internal stylistic consistency, value system and tone. The Gita was added much later, at least several centuries after the composition of the Mahabharata, and modifies the values implicit in the story itself and make explicit some other beliefs, in some ways consistent with the teachings of the Vedas, and in some ways refinements, extensions or even contradictions of them.
The Gita is in some way like the New Testament of Hinduism, but the Vedas and Upanishads are in some ways like the Old Testament. They relate to one another, and claim to be consistent, but one supercedes the other. The similarity holds in that Lord Krishna represents a named, benevolent, omnipotent deity, distinct from the abstract, more distant, equally omnipotent deity of Brahman. Krishna is more personal, taking on many avatars throughout creation, for many reasons, one of which is to help instruct mankind.
The Vedas form the background and underlying religious law of the Mahabharata, and are a universe unto themselves.
All this leads me to wonder about the conventional wisdom of historians, who, lacking specific evidence of cultural exchanges between India and Greece about this time (say, 400 BC – 300 BC), conclude that the march of Alexander’s army to the Indus in 327 BC was the first interaction between these people. Its preposterous.
Curiously, India attained political unity for the first time under Chandragupta (322-298). Meghasthenes, a Greek traveller is known to have visited India around this time. He wrote an account of his travles “Indica” available to us only in fragments.
Meghasthenes or others, perhaps centuries earlier, could clearly have brought Indian ideas back to ancient Greece, or for that matter, introduced the Indians to some Greek notions.
Greek philosophy does have a fine pedigree of its own, going back to Thales of Miletus (around 640 BC), with a first flowering of the Eleatic philospophers in the sixth century BC.
At the very least, exchanges could have been made indirectly. Let’s not forget the ancient Mesopotamians, the Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians, all of whom were known to both the Greeks and the
Its astounding to me that many ancient manuscripts of Indian sciences and astronomy have still not been explored. How can that possibly be?
But its fascinating to contemplate an imaginary exchange between Pythagoras, say, and Panini, or to trace the roots of the development of Algebra by the Arab philosopher and mathematician, al-Khawarzmi, or the development of astronomy via al-Beruni, the Arab astronomer who translated many classical Indian texts into Arabic around 1200 AD.