महासलिलम्- Mahasalilam: A Vedanga Text on Astral Sciences (Vrddhagargiya Jyotisa 24" Anga)

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Back of the Book Mahasalilam is the most ancient and significant section of the Vrddhagargiya Jyotișa, composed in the prose style of the Vedic Brahmaņa texts offering a majestic account of all aspects of Jyotisa pertaining to the "Maghadi" period of the Maitrāyanīya Aranyaka Upanisad (c.1800-1600 BCE). Mahāsalilam refers to itself as the Jyotişänga and through the present edition Prof. Iyengar has clearly demonstrated that it indeed "deserves to be identified as the primary source of Vedānga Jyotișa, separate from the canonical Vedas proper". This premier edition of Mahasalila will surely be of immense value not only for students and scholars of the history of sciences in India but also for the traditional scholars of Vedas, Purāņas and the ancient Sastras.

About the Book A question that often arises is about positive sciences of India before the Common Era and their links with the Vedas. As an answer, the present monograph brings out for the first time. the Mahasalilam part of the Vrddha-gärgiya Jyotișa, critically edited from eleven hitherto unpublished manuscripts collected from libraries in India and abroad. Salila is the name of the primordial state of dark-matter denoted as andham-tamah, out of which all creation including the celestial bodies emerged. The Mahāsalilam in prose, introduces observations and quanti-fication in terms of numbers, through a set of nearly one hundred questions and explanations, in a style that is archaic and original as emanating from the Vedic world view. Foundational concepts of astral sciences that over centuries evolved into full-fledged Indian astronomy and astrology can be traced to this source in seed form. Earliest description of the five planets in terms of their brightness, six monthly lunar eclipse period, classification of comets, a theory of rainfall, instant of full moon as pürnatithi, astronomical background of the Vedic sannāyya, are here. The Prajapati-Rohini-Soma legend is explained in new light, leading to Soma as primal Time, moon being a proxy. The synchronization of the five-year solar cycle with the sixty-seven sidereal lunar cycle is given. The text belongs to the maghādi era (c 1800-1600 BCE) when the summer solstice started with the maghā nakşatra, centuries before the śravisthādi winter solstice calendar of Lagadha.

About the Author Professor R. N. Iyengar B.E., M.Sc (Eng)., Ph.D., (b. 1943) is renowned for his contributions to Earthquake Engineering, Mathematical Modeling and Structural Dynamics. As faculty at the Indian Institute of Science from 1969 till his retirement in 2005 as KSIDC Chair, has published 250 technical papers, reports, general articles and books. He is FNAE, FIASC, FNASI and Sr. Fellow AvH Foundation, Germany. He was Schmidt Chair Professor at the Florida. Atlantic University, USA (1995); Director of CBRI-CSIR (1994-2000); Raja Ramanna Fellow, DAE (2005-10). He is currently Director of the Centre for Ancient History & Culture at the Jain University. Brought up in a family of Sanskrit scholars lyengar received initial training in Sanskrit studies in the traditional way. This propelled him to become an avid reader of ancient texts in the original. He brought out the Paräśaratantra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise on astronomy and natural sciences, with text, translation and notes in 2013. He edited Näradaśilpam, a medieval period text on Architectural Civil Engineering available only in manuscript form with introduction, translation and notes. He has published more than thirty papers on IKS topics in learned journals. He has authored books in English and in Kannada on the life and teachings of Saint Sri Rädhakışņa Swamiji.

Some of the honours: Visvesvaraya Award for Senior Scientists (1995); Sen Memorial Lecture award (1996); Technology Day Award (2001); VASVIK Award (2013); Asthana Vidwan Award (2015) Datta Peetha, Mysore.

Foreword The first comprehensive study in modern times of the development of Bharatiya Jyotișa was published in Marathi in 1896 by the great scholar Shankara Balakrishna Dikshit (Dikshit 1896). The first volume of his two-volume work, Bharatiya Jyotiḥśāstra Athavā Bharatiya Jyotişācā Prācīna Ani Arvācīna Itihāsa, was devoted entirely to the developments during the "Vedic and the Vedanga periods". The second volume dealt in detail with the development of Jyotişa during the "Siddhantic period" starting around 500 CE with the works of Aryabhața and Varahamihira. However, Dikshit's account of the pre-Siddhantic period was rather sketchy. It was of course based on the vast store of astronomical observations and ideas that are contained in the Vedic corpus and the Mahābhārata, supplemented mainly by the all too brief text Arca-Yajuşa-Jyotișa of Lagadha (a combined text of about 50 verses), often referred to as the Vedanga-Jyotisa, which happened to be the only text of the Vedanga period that had been edited and published in the nineteenth century.

Preface The discipline of Astronomy as a field of intellectual pursuit, firmly evidenced starting from Aryabhața (5th cent CE) and passing through a long list of stalwarts like Varähamihira, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara-1, Vațeśvara, Muñjala, Bhaskara-II, Nilakantha, Madhava, Kamaläkara and many others must have had an equally interesting origin, even if this were to be obscure and ancient. The Brahmanda, Vişnu, Vayu, Linga Purăņa texts do carry snippets of sky observations and the Earth-Meru-Dhruva model of the ancient period, carried in the collective memory of the community at large. The heritage of intellectual tradition of India is undeniably too ancient. But a question that often arises is about verifiable evidences of scientific thinking and achievements before the Common Era and about their links with the Vedas. Once Vedas are brought in, as though by a reflex, Vedānta, yoga, philosophy, religion, and rituals come to the forefront. However, the Vedic tradition itself classifies knowledge as parā-vidyā and apara-vidyā, the latter being the sciences of the physical world available to the five senses and the intellect, while the former parā is beyond. The large Vedic corpus of Samhita, Brahmaņa, Aranyaka, Upaniṣads as available today, contain and reflect both the above vidyās in differing proportions with varied hues and colours. The Vedāngas, as ancillaries to the Vedas carry on the knowledge stream more or less in the same way, perhaps tilted towards the apara-vidyā till we come near the Common Era when works appear on physical and natural sciences as forerunners of modern science where observation, reasoning and verifiability hold strong ground. Hence, in academic discourses about status of positive sciences in ancient India before CE, it is necessary to recognize existence of a mixed mode world view gradually yielding to clearly demarcated perceptions about this world and the other.

Introduction The Vedas, the most ancient known literature of India, carry interesting astronomical information of historical importance. The Samhita, Brahmaņa, Aranyaka, texts of all the four Vedas (Rk, Yajus, Sama and Atharva) describe the visible sky, seasons, lunar and solar phenomena and a variety of natural events including felt effect of axial precession of earth in either figurative or matter-of-fact language. Many of the Vedic rituals derive inspiration for their concept, design and execution from natural phenomena described in the above texts. A particular topic that is often invoked, discussed and pondered upon by Vedic seers is Time, both the abstract and the concrete, in its various implications. This preoccupation with Time is closely related with rtam, the natural rhythm associated with the visibility cycles of celestial bodies, and their spatial location in the sky as seen from earth. That Time is continuous like a flowing river but experienced in terms of discrete elemental units such as nimeșa, muhūrta, ahoratra, pakşa, māsa, rtu, ayana, samvatsara, yuga is stated in several Vedic texts. It is very likely that the major rituals in the Vedas were originally designed to measure or distinguish between time periods. whereas some rites were prescribed to be observed on specific dates, predicted possibly in advance.