Devasura

Ever since Indians of the Vedic era created poetry, prose and philosophy and recorded them for posterity in the Samhitas, Brahmanas and Upanishads, a profound and perennial question challenged them. A question whose answers remain to be perfectly grasped and applied by the modern world, despite all its advancements. What is valid knowledge? What is its true source? As the centuries rolled by in India, many a great philosopher tried to answer this. Let us hear what each of them had to say, sticking to chronology wherever possible. Let us see if their story of debate, disagreement and yet a subtle underlying similarity has anything to teach us. At the very earliest time, the Vedic philosophers reigned supreme in India’s intellectual sphere. They held debates among themselves, as we see in stories about the courts of Janaka and Ajatashatru. But it was always on the details of their system and not on epistemology. In their monopoly of philosophy, they held that the Monism of the U...

Abstract : It has become a general premise of indology that the poetry of the Samhitas, the ritualistic prose of the Brahmanas and the philosophical outpourings of the Upanishads, their development and content are chronologically and qualitatively exclusive of each other i.e. they represent successive stages of Vedic literature, history and philosophy. On closer look, the view fails to hold either in the concern of composition, compilation or even of concept. One safe path across this chronological obscurity is to search out the references to historical personalities, contemporary or reminiscent, contained within these texts. The line of teachers of Vedantic philosophy recorded in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad VI.5 offers a unique opportunity in this regard. Keywords: Tura Kavaseya, Upanishads, Aitareya, Kausitaki, Shatapatha, Kavasa Ailusa, Brihadaranyaka, Sudasa, Somaka, Sahadeva, Janamejaya, Rig Veda, Yajur Veda. The story of philosophy, no doubt, begins with the ...

Indians have always taken astronomy very seriously, we all know. There were always star gazers here in the recorded past. But was there ever a dedicated observatory? In 1988, the historian of science William H. Donahue published his article “ Kepler’s fabricated figures: covering up the mess in the New Astronomy ” in the  Journal of the History of Astronomy . He had studied and translated Kepler’s  Astronomia Nova  prior to this. That was when he had stumbled upon the fraudulent fabrications of astronomical data made by Kepler to prove his(as the world has been led to believe) heliocentric-elliptical orbit theory. Donahue has conclusively shown that Kepler could not possibly have made the observations of planetary orbital periods from the triangulation method he offered as proof. And yet, his planetary predictions were extremely- impossibly- accurate for the times. A hundred times more accurate than those of Copernicus. This was a clear case of manufacturing ‘...

My favorite philosopher? Hah! Kapila Kardama. Who else? Who was he? Why is he great?  He was a very ancient sage and philosopher of India. Son of Kardama muni and Devahuti. Descendant of Saptarshi Pulaha by some accounts. -Founded Samkhya (The 'enumeration'), the world's second oldest philosophy. -The world's first Empiricist. -World's first Atheist thinker. -Worlds first Reformer. -Established monasticism # PatronRishi  of Rebels. Imagine. The Bronze age. Only three civilizations exist- India , Egypt and Sumer. The other two and the rest of mankind has not matured enough yet to delve into philosophy.In that primitive era, we not only had philosophy, we were also beginning to engage in intense dialectic! When Vedic Advaitins(non-dualists) reigned supreme as Aryavarta's intellectuals, one man boldly challenged them ALONE! "I don't accept your Vedic position that all reality can be reduced to a singularity . Oh, I don...