VCA: Introduction

In the year A.D. 1068 a group of workmen labored to erect an earthen mound about sixty feet high in the Anglo-Saxon village of Cambridge, northeast of London. On top of this mound they built a stone tower that dominated the small collection of thatched houses huddled alongside the river Cam. This tower served as a fortress to protect and consolidate this part of the kingdom, which William the Conqueror had won just two years before.

At this time the Western, or European, civilization, which is so important in the world today, was just beginning to emerge from the debris of previous cultures and societies. Science as we know it today was unheard of, and the Christian Church was in the process of solidifying its position in the previously pagan territories of northern Europe. The writings of the ancient Greeks and other early civilizations were largely lost, and would not be reintroduced into Europe from Arab sources for some three hundred years. Universities already existed in southern European countries; in Britain some two hundred years would pass before the founding of Oxford and then Cambridge.

In A.D. 1000, about sixty years before the erection of the stone tower on the Cam, an Arab scholar named Alberuni completed a book on India (AL). Alberuni lived in the kingdom of Ghaznia, in the court of one King Mahmud-a Muslim king who specialized in raiding the northwestern territories of India, such as Sind and the Punjab. Alberuni was a well-known scholar of his time who read Plato in the original Greek and who had also studied Sanskrit. He was apparently employed by King Mahmud to study the Hindus, in much the same way that the United States government now employs scholars to study the Russians and the Communist Chinese.

Alberuni's access to source material in Sanskrit was limited. He had access to the body of Indian astronomical literature called jyotisa sastra, and he also had access to a number of Puranas, such as the Matsya Purana and the Vayu Purana. He mentions the Srimad-Bhagavatam, or Bhagavata Purana, but apparently he never saw a copy of it.

In this body of literature, Alberuni was mainly interested in information relating to the Indian view of the universe and the observable material events taking place within it. Indeed, the most striking feature of Alberuni's book is that nearly half of it is concerned with Indian astronomy and cosmology.

One important division of the jyotisa sastra consists of works on mathematical astronomy known as astronomical siddhantas. These include works of historical Indian astronomers, such as Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, and Varaha Mihira, some of whom were nearly Alberuni's contemporaries. They also include ancient Sanskrit texts, such as the Sūrya-siddhanta, that were said to have been originally disseminated by demigods and great rsis. These works treat the earth as a small globe floating in space and surrounded by the planets, which orbit around it. They are mainly concerned with the question of how to calculate the positions of the planets in the sky at any desired time. They contain elaborate rules for performing these calculations, as well as much numerical data concerning the distances, sizes, and rates of motion of the planets. However, they say very little about the nature of the planets, their origin, and the causes of their motion.

The calculations described in the astronomical siddhantas were well understood by Alberuni, and it seems that at that time there was considerable interest in Indian astronomy in the centers of Muslim civilization. He was also familiar with the Greek astronomical tradition, epitomized by Ptolemy. However, Alberuni found the cosmology presented in the Puranas very hard to understand. His account of Puranic cosmology closely follows the Fifth Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam, and the Puranas in general. When dealing with this material, Alberuni frequently expressed exasperation and complete incomprehension, much as many people do today, and he naturally took this as an opportunity to criticize Hindu dharma and assert the superiority of his own Muslim tradition.

In this book we will discuss the cosmology presented in the Fifth Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam and try to clarify its relationship with other prominent systems of cosmology, both ancient and modern. We have begun with this historical account to show that bewilderment with the cosmology of the Bhagavatam is not a new phenomenon caused by the rise of modern science. The same bewilderment also affected Alberuni, even though in his society the earth was regarded as being fixed in the center of the universe.

Many Indian astronomers of earlier centuries were also unable to understand Vedic cosmology, and they were led to openly reject parts of it, even though their own religious and social tradition was based on the Puranas. For example, Bhaskaracarya, the 11th-century author of the siddhantic text Siddhanta-siromani, could not reconcile the relatively small diameter of the earth, which he deduced from simple measurements, with the immense magnitude attributed to the earth by the Pauranikas, the followers of the Puranas (SSB1, pp. 114-15). Likewise, the 15th-century south Indian astronomer Paramesvara stated that the Puranic account of the seven dvipas and oceans is something "given only for religious meditation," and that the 84,000-yojana height of Mount Meru described in the Puranas is "not acceptable to the astronomers" (GP, pp. 85, 87).

Vaisnavas of past centuries also discussed the relationship between the Fifth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam and the jyotisa sastras. An example of this is found in the Bhagavatam commentary of Vamsidhara, a Vaisnava who lived in the 17th century A.D. In this commentary, Vamsidhara discusses the apparent conflict between the small size of the earth, as described in the jyotisa sastras, and the large size of Bhū-manḍala, as described in the Fifth Canto. His analysis of this apparent conflict is discussed in Appendix 1.

There are evidently serious disagreements between the cosmological system of the Puranas and the world models that human observers tend to arrive at using their reasoning powers and their ordinary senses. The cause of these difficulties is not simply the rise of modern Western science. They have existed in India since a time antedating the rise of modern Western culture, and to some they may seem to be based on an inherent contradiction within the Vedic tradition itself.

The long-standing perplexity that has attended the subject of Vedic cosmology indicates that these disagreements are very deep and difficult to resolve. However, the thesis of this book is that the disagreements are not irreconcilable. The apparent contradictions can be resolved by developing a proper understanding of the nature of space, time, and matter, as described in the Srimad-Bhagavatam, and a corresponding understanding of the Vedic approach to describing and thinking about reality.

In Chapter 1 we begin our account of Vedic astronomy by discussing the astronomical siddhantas. We give evidence indicating that these works form an integral part of the original Vedic tradition. To accept these works and reject Puranic cosmology, as some Indian astronomers have done, is to start down the path of modern scientific materialism, which ultimately leads to the total rejection of the Vedic literature. But to reject the astronomical siddhantas as anti-Vedic means to lose the Vedic tradition of rigorous mathematical astronomy. This plays into the hands of the modern Western scholars who wish to reject the Vedas and Puranas as mythological, and who interpret the astronomical siddhantas as products of Greek scientific genius that were borrowed and falsely dressed in Hindu garb by dishonest brahmanas. (In Appendix 2 we address some of the arguments of these scholars and show that they are seriously flawed.)

Our thesis is that the astronomical siddhantas and the Puranic cosmology can be understood as mutually compatible accounts of one multifaceted material reality. Modern Western science is based on the idea that nature can be fully described by a single, rational world-model. However, the Srimad-Bhagavatam points out that no person of this world is capable of fully describing the material universe "even in a lifetime as long as that of Brahma" (SB 5.16.4). Thus the Vedic approach to the description of nature is based on the strategy of presenting many mutually compatible aspects of one humanly indescribable complete whole.

The old story of the blind men and the elephant epitomizes this approach. Each blind man observed a genuine aspect of the elephant, and a seeing man could understand how all of these aspects fit together to form a coherent whole. Even a blind man, after carefully studying the reports coming from the seeing man and his fellow blind men, could begin to understand the nature of the whole elephant, although he could not directly sense it without obtaining a cure for his blindness. We suggest that in our attempts to understand the material universe, we are comparable to a blind man feeling a particular part of the elephant.

According to this analogy, the astronomical siddhantas present the cosmos as it appears to similar blind men of this earth, and literatures such as the Bhagavatam present the world view of beings with higher powers of vision. These include demigods, rsis, and ultimately the Supreme Lord, who alone can see the entire universe. These higher beings can directly see both the aspects of the universe presented in the Bhagavatam and the aspects presented in the astronomical siddhantas. To these higher beings it is apparent how all of these aspects fit together consistently in a complete whole, even though we can begin to understand this only with great effort.

We note that with the development of modern physics, scientists have at least temporarily been forced to abandon the goal of formulating one complete mathematical model of the atom. According to the standard interpretation of the quantum theory introduced by Niels Bohr, atomic phenomena must be understood from at least two complementary perspectives rather than as a single, intelligible whole. These perspectives-the wave picture and the particle picture-seem to contradict each other, and yet they are both valid descriptions of nature. They are facets of a coherent theory of the atom, but they cannot be combined within the framework of classical physics. To unite them and show their compatibility, one must go to a higher-dimensional level of mathematical abstraction, which is very difficult to comprehend.

In developing an understanding of Vedic cosmology as a multifaceted description of reality, it will be necessary to free ourselves from the rigid framework of Cartesian and Euclidian three-dimensional geometry, which forms the basis of the modern scientific world view. We will attempt to do this in Chapter 2, where we will discuss space, physical laws, and processes of sense perception, as presented in the Srimad-Bhagavatam. In Chapters 3 and 4 we will give an account of Puranic cosmology and show how the ideas developed in Chapter 2 can be applied to resolve apparent contradictions within the Vedic tradition and between the Vedic cosmology and the world of our ordinary sensory experience. Here a key idea is that the universe as described in Vedic literature is higher-dimensional: it cannot be fully represented within three-dimensional space.

In our discussion of Vedic cosmology we will be forced to interpret the texts of the Srimad-Bhagavatam and other Vedic literature. This is inevitable, since even a literal interpretation is based on underlying assumptions made by the reader-assumptions that may differ from those of the author of the text, and that the reader may hold without being consciously aware of them. In making such interpretations we will try to adhere to the following rule given by Srila Prabhupada: "The original purpose of the text must be maintained. No obscure meaning should be screwed out of it, yet it should be presented in an interesting manner for the understanding of the audience. This is called realization" (SB 1.4.1p). We also note that Srila Prabhupada advocated in SB 5.16.10p that we should accept the cosmological statements in the Srimad-Bhagavatam as authoritative and simply try to appreciate them. We will therefore adopt the working assumption that even though these statements may seem very hard to comprehend, they nonetheless do present an understandable and realistic description of the universe.

In Chapter 5 we address the question of whether or not there is any empirical evidence supporting the higher-dimensional picture of the universe that we derive from the Srimad-Bhagavatam. It turns out that there is voluminous evidence along these lines, although practically none of it is accepted by the scientific community.

In Chapter 6 we return to Vedic cosmology and discuss a number of controversial topics, including gravitation, the moon flight, the scale of cosmic distances, and the nature of stars. In Chapter 7 we survey the modern scientific evidence regarding the theory of the expanding universe. Here we not only find that this theory is flawed, but we also find evidence indicating that Newton's laws of motion fail on the galactic level. Finally, in Chapter 8 we present brief answers to a number of common questions.

The material presented in this book constitutes a preliminary study of Vedic cosmology and astronomy. To properly answer the many questions that arise, much further research will have to be done. This will include (1) careful study of cosmological material in a wide variety of Vedic literatures, (2) study of Vedic geographical material, (3) careful analysis of the theories of Western scholars about the history of Vedic astronomy, (4) study of ancient astronomical observations, (5) study of dating and the Vedic calendar, (6) study of empirical evidence relating to Vedic cosmology, and (7) the careful analysis of modern cosmology and astronomy. It is our hope that these studies will culminate in the development of a Vedic planetarium and museum that can effectively present Krsna consciousness in the context of Vedic cosmology. This, of course, was Srila Prabhupada's plan for the planetarium in the Temple of Understanding in Sridhama Mayapura, and similar planetariums can be set up in cities around the world.

In this book we will use the terms Vedic and Puranic interchangeably. Although modern scholars reject this usage, it is justified by the verse itihasa-puranam ca pancamo veda ucyate in Srimad-Bhagavatam (1.4.20). According to this verse, the Puranas and the histories, such as the Mahabharata, are known as the fifth Veda. References to Sanskrit and Bengali texts are of three forms: A reference such as SB 5.22.14 means that the quotation is from the 14th verse of Chapter 22 of the Fifth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam. A reference such as SB 5.21.6p means the quotation is from Srila Prabhupada's purport to verse 6 of Chapter 21 of the Fifth Canto. And a reference such as SB 5.21cs means the quotation is from the Chapter Summary of Chapter 21 of the Fifth Canto. AL or ML after references to the Caitanya-caritamrta indicate Adi-lila or Madhya-lila. For books not divided into verses and purports, we cite the code identifying the book, followed by the page number (see the Bibliography).