Volume 9, 2021

EN:

This paper explores the origins of the Indian medical nosology involving the three doṣas from the perspective of its formulation into three or four distinct types. The essay compares similarities in passages from three different literary sources: Pāļi texts of early Buddhism, early Sanskrit medical literature, and Greek texts from the Hippocratic Corpus and the Anonymus Londiniensis. The study reveals that the tridoṣa-theory, common to āyurvedic literature from an early time was based on the adoption and then adaption of ideas nourished by an intellectual exchange with the Greek-speaking world.

EN:

Starting from the late medieval period of Indian history, Islamicate and Sanskrit astral sciences exchanged ideas in complex discourses shaped by the power struggles of language, culture, and identity. The practice of translation played a vital role in transporting science across the physical and mental realms of an ever-changing society. The present study begins by looking at the culture of translating astronomy in late-medieval and early-modern India. This provides the historical context to then examine the language with which Nityānanda, a seventeenth-century Hindu astronomer at the Mughal court of Emperor Shāh Jahān, translated into Sanskrit the Persian astronomical text of his Muslim colleague Mullā Farīd. Nityānanda's work is an example of how secular innovation and sacred tradition expressed themselves in Sanskrit astral sciences. This article includes a comparative description of the contents in the second discourse of Mullā Farīd's Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī (c. 1629/30) and the second part of Nityānanda's Siddhantasindhu (c. early 1630s), along with a critical examination of the sixth chapter from both these works. The chapter-titles and the contents of the sixth chapter in Persian and Sanskrit are edited and translated into English for the very first time. The focus of this study is to highlight the linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and communicative) aspects in Nityānanda's Sanskrit translation of Mullā Farīd's Persian text. The mathematics of the chapter is discussed in a forthcoming publication. An indexed glossary of technical terms from the edited Persian and Sanskrit text is appended at the end of the work.

EN:

The article analyses an argument given in Jñānarāja's Siddhāntasundara (ca. 1500) on the shape of the earth according to the Purāṇas. The argument involves the use of the word gola, 'ball, globe,' in the Purāṇas, a Purāṇic statement about the mountain Meru being north of everywhere, and a Purāṇic comparison of the earth to a mirror. The article concludes that Jñānarāja breaks with the Purāṇas as well as the traditional commentaries on these texts, and further suggests that we might have to rethink the dictionary definition of gola.

EN:

The British Library, London, holds a unique manuscript copy of a Sanskrit text entitled Sarvasiddhāntatattvacūḍāmaṇi (MS London BL Or. 5259). This manuscript, consisting of 304 large-size folios, is lavishly illustrated and richly illuminated. The author, Durgāśaṅkara Pāṭhaka of Benares, attempted in this work to discuss all the systems of astronomy – Hindu, Islamic and European – around the nucleus of the horoscope of an individual personage. Strangely, without reading the manuscript, the authors Sudhākara Dvivedī in 1892, C. Bendall in 1902 and J. P. Losty in 1982, declared that the horoscope presented in this work was that of Nau Nihal Singh, the grandson of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore, and this has been the prevailing notion since then. The present paper refutes this notion and shows – on the basis of the relevant passages from the manuscript – that the real native of the horoscope is Lehna Singh Majithia, a leading general of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

EN:

At one time, the Jainas in India and the Greeks in abroad held that unity was not a number. This paper provides an insight for the first time into the thoughts offered by the Jainas as to why unity was not a number for them.

EN:

The unpublished seventeenth-century Kannaḍa-language mathematical work Gaṇitagannaḍi is transmitted in a single palm-leaf manuscript. It was composed by Śaṅkaranārāyaṇa Jōisaru of Śṛṅgeri and is a karaṇa text cast as a commentary on the Vārṣikatantrasaṅgraha by Viddaṇācārya. Gaṇitagannaḍi's unique procedures for calculations wer introduced in an earlier paper in volume 8 (2020) of this journal. In the present paper the procedures for calculations of the mean and true positions of planets are described.