Nalanda and pursuit of science
Symbol for passion of propagating knowledge,
understanding:
Professor Amartya Sen’s keynote address at
the 98th Indian Science Congress in Chennai on January 4
The subject of this talk is Nalanda and the pursuit of science, but
before I go into that rather complex issue, I must say something about
Nalanda itself, since it is still an obscure entity for most people in
the world. Since the university is being, right now, re-established
under a joint Asian initiative, the fact that Nalanda was a very ancient
university is becoming better known. But how does it compare with other
old universities in the world?
Nalanda - ancient
citadel of learning
* Established in India in
fifth century
*Re-established after nearly
900 years
* Destroyed in 1193
* Housed 10,000 students
* Buddhist foundation
* Chinese Tantric scholar Xi
Jing studied here
*Pursued scientific
tradition
* Researched in language,
competitive religion etc |
|
Professor
Amartya Sen |
What is the oldest university in the world? In answering this
question, one’s mind turns to Bologna, initiated in 1088, to Paris in
1091 and to other old citadels of learning, including of course Oxford
University which was established in 1167 and Cambridge in 1209. Where
does Nalanda fit into this picture? “Nowhere” is the short answer if we
are looking for a university in continuous existence.
Oldest European University
Nalanda was violently destroyed in an Afghan attack, led by the
ruthless conqueror, Bakhtiyar Khilji, in 1193, shortly after the
beginning of Oxford University and shortly before the initiation of
Cambridge. Nalanda University, an internationally renowned centre of
higher education in India, which was established in the early fifth
century, was ending its continuous existence of more than 700 years as
Oxford and Cambridge were being founded and even compared with the
oldest European University, Bologna, Nalanda was more than 600 years
old, when Bologna was born.
Had it not been destroyed and had it managed to survive to our time,
Nalanda would be, by a long margin, the oldest university in the world.
Another distinguished university, which did not stay in existence
continuously either, viz. Al-Azhar University in Cairo, with which
Nalanda is often compared, was established at a time, 970 AD, when
Nalanda was already more than 500 years old.
That is enough vaunting of age (as you know, in India we take age
quite seriously) and I hope you have got the point: we are talking about
the oldest university in the world by a long margin, that is, if we do
not insist on continuous existence.
The university is being re-started right now and since I happen to
have the difficult task of chairing its interim governing body, I am
finding out how hard it is to re-establish a university after an 800
year hiatus. But we are getting there. This meeting here gives me an
opportunity to recollect the pursuit of science in old Nalanda which
will inspire and guide our long-run efforts in new Nalanda.
I say long run, because mainly for cost reasons - indeed entirely for
cost reasons - we cannot start the science faculties immediately
(physical and biological sciences cost much more money than the
humanities and the social sciences do).
Scientific tradition
The recollection and more challengingly, assessment - of the
scientific tradition in old Nalanda are important right now, partly
because we have to start thinking about the long run (even as we try to
raise money for initiation and expansion), but also because a scientific
attitude and disciplined thought are important for the entire conception
of new Nalanda, including the teaching of - and research in - humanities
(such as history, languages and linguistics and comparative religion),
as well as the social sciences and the world of practice (such as
international relations, management and development and information
technology).
Chinese scholar
Let me identify a few questions about the pursuit of science in
Nalanda. First, was the old Nalanda sufficiently large to be a factor in
whatever pursuit it might have been championing? Was it not merely a
drop in an ocean of superstition and ignorance that some people see as
the characteristic feature of the Indian old world: you only have to
read James Mill’s History of India, which was obligatory reading for all
British civil servants sent off to run the Raj, to see how firm and
politically important this conception of the past was in keeping modern
India in check.
Nalanda was an old centre of learning that attracted students from
many countries in the world, particularly China and Tibet, Korea and
Japan and the rest of Asia, but a few also from as far in the West as
Turkey.
Nalanda, a residential university, had at its peak 10,000 students,
studying various subjects. Chinese students in particular, such as
Xuanzang and Yi Jing in the seventh century, wrote extensively on what
they saw and what they particularly admired about the educational
standards in Nalanda. Incidentally, Nalanda is the only non-Chinese
institution in which any Chinese scholar was educated in the history of
ancient China.
It is also important to recognise that while Nalanda was very
special, it was still a part of a larger tradition of organized higher
education that developed in that period in India - in Bihar in
particular. In addition to Nalanda, there were in the vicinity other
such institutions, such as Vikramshila and Odantapuri. Indeed, Xuangzang
wrote about them too, even though he himself studied in Nalanda. There
was a larger social culture to which Nalanda belonged and this is
important to recollect in thinking about the tradition of Nalanda.
Buddhist philosophy
The second question to ask is the difficult one about the room for
science in what was after all a religious institution. Nalanda was a
Buddhist foundation, as were Vikramshila and Odantapuri and surely the
central focus of these institutions were studies of Buddhist philosophy
and practice. The point to remember here is that by the nature of the
philosophy of the Buddha, whose focus of preaching was on enlightenment
(the name given to Gautama, viz the Buddha, itself means ‘enlightened’),
there was a basic epistemic and ethical curiosity in the tradition of
intellectual Buddhism that sought knowledge in many different fields.
Some of the fields were directly related to Buddhist commitments,
such as medicine and health care; others went with the development and
dissemination of Buddhist culture, such as architecture and sculpture;
and still others linked Buddhist intellectual queries with interest in
analytical discipline.
Experimental sciences
Let me comment briefly on the last - not specifically with reference
to Nalanda, but as a way of understanding better the Buddhist
intellectual impact.
One of the connections on which evidence of intellectual connections
between China and India is plentiful is the impact of Buddhists in
general and of adherents of Tantric Buddhism in particular, on Chinese
mathematics and astronomy in the seventh and eighth centuries, in the
Tang period.
Yi Jing, who was a student of Nalanda and to whom I referred earlier,
was one of many translators of Tantric texts from Sanskrit into Chinese.
Tantrism became a major force in China in the seventh and eighth
centuries and had followers among Chinese intellectuals of the highest
standing. Since many Tantric scholars had a deep interest in mathematics
(perhaps connected, at least initially, with Tantric fascination with
numbers), Tantric mathematicians had a significant influence on Chinese
mathematics as well.
|
Centre of learning: ‘Science has to
fight parochialism and Nalanda was firmly committed to just
that.’ A 2006 file photo of what exists of the ancient
Nalanda University. Picture courtesy: The Hindu |
Indeed, as Joseph Needham notes, “the most important Tantrist was
I-Hsing (+672 to +717), the greatest Chinese astronomer and
mathematician of his time.” Needham goes on to remark that “this fact
alone should give us pause, since it offers a clue to the possible
significance of this form of Buddhism for all kinds of observational and
experimental sciences.” Yi Xing (or I-Hsing, to use Needham’s spelling),
who was in fact never a student of Nalanda, but belonged to a tradition
of which Nalanda was one of the results, was fluent in Sanskrit. (I
request the audience to be careful of the distinction between Yi Xing,
the mathematician and Yi Jing, the intellectual trained in Nalanda, who
was, among other things, interested in medicine.)
Indian religious literature
As a Buddhist monk, Yi Xing was familiar with the Indian religious
literature, but he had acquired a great expertise also on Indian
writings on mathematics and astronomy. Despite his own religious
connection, it would be a mistake to assume that Yi Xing’s mathematical
or scientific work was somehow motivated by religious concerns.
As a general mathematician who happened to be also a Tantrist, Yi
Xing dealt with a variety of analytical and computational problems, many
of which had no particular connection with Tantrism or Buddhism at all.
The combinatorial problems tackled by Yi Xing included such classic ones
as “calculating the total number of possible situations in chess.” Yi
Xing was particularly concerned with calendrical calculations and even
constructed, on imperial order, a new calendar for China.
Arab world
Calendrical studies in which Indian astronomers located in China in
the eighth century, along with Yi Xing, were particularly involved, made
good use of the progress of trigonometry that had already occurred in
India by then (going much beyond the original Greek roots of Indian
trigonometry). The movement east of Indian trigonometry to China was a
part of a global exchange of ideas that also went West around that time.
Indeed, this was also about the time when Indian trigonometry was having
a major impact on the Arab world (with widely used Arabic translations
of the works of Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Brahmagupta and others), which
would later influence European mathematics as well, through the Arabs
(Gherardo of Cremona would make the first Latin translation of Arab
mathematical texts that reported on Indian work in 1150, just before the
time when Nalanda would come to its sudden end).
Religious foundation
It is this general intellectual animation, including animation in
analytical and scientific questions, that we have to appreciate in
interpreting what was going on in old Nalanda. I take the liberty of
mentioning here that it is not, of course, unique to Nalanda that as a
religious foundation, it nevertheless pursued general intellectual and
scientific studies the products of which were of great interest also to
people who were not religious, or did not share the religion of the
foundations involved. Isaac Newton was religious - indeed very
mystically oriented - and while he revolutionised the nature of physics,
mathematics and optics, he had no problem with his (and, as it happens,
mine and Venky Ramakrishnan’s) college’s (that is Trinity’s) the then
religiosity and did not raise the kind of questions about compatibility
that some later Trinity-men, like Henry Sidgwick, would with powerful
arguments.
The mixture of religion and science was by no means unique to Nalanda
and to illustrate with another example, it was the Christian university
of Padua - one of the earliest of the extant universities in the world -
that produced Galileo Galilei. (I was, incidentally amused when, while
receiving an honorary doctorate at Padua, I heard Paul Ricoeur, another
recipient, chastising the University of Padua for not standing up
sufficiently for Galileo.
Ricoeur’s arguments were impeccable, though it seemed a little unfair
to blame the current Rector of Padua for Padua’s lack of support for
Galileo.) To what extent such conflict arose in Nalanda, I do not know,
but as more documents come to light, we may well find out whether there
were tensions in the relation between science and religion in Nalanda.
What is, however, absolutely clear is that this Buddhist foundation made
much room for the pursuit of analytical and scientific subjects within
the campus of Nalanda university.
A third question concerns the subjects that were actually taught in
Nalanda. Here we do have a problem, since the documents in Nalanda were
indiscriminatingly burnt by Bakhtiyar and his conquering army. We have
to rely therefore of the accounts of students of Nalanda who wrote about
what they had seen and given the reticence of Indians to write about
history (a subject of interest in itself), we have to rely mostly on the
accounts of outsiders who did not share that reticence, such as
Xuangzang and Yi Jing.
We do know that among the subjects taught and on which there was
on-going research, were medicine, public health, architecture, sculpture
and astronomy, in addition to religion, history, law and linguistics.
Eye-catching sight
What about mathematics? As it happens the Chinese chroniclers from
Nalanda, such as Yi Jing and Xuangzang, were not involved in
mathematical studies. Those in China who were deeply involved in Indian
mathematics, such as Yi Xing, did not train in Nalanda. There may have
been others, in India or China or elsewhere, from Nalanda who were
involved in mathematics (a subject that was flourishing in India in this
period) and whose documents have been lost.
However, we do know, from Indian accounts, that logic was a subject
that was taught in Nalanda and my guess is that eventually evidence
would emerge on this part of the curriculum in Nalanda as well.
Further indirect evidence in the direction of the presence of
mathematics in Nalanda curriculum was the inclusion of astronomy in
Nalanda. Xuangzang comments on that and refers elegantly to the
observational tower that seemed to rest among the cloudy fog high up and
provided an eye-catching sight in the Nalanda campus. In that period the
progresses in Indian and Chinese astronomy were closely linked with
developments with mathematics, particularly trigonometry.
Indeed, all the Indian experts that the Chinese brought to China for
astronomical work were mathematicians (one of these Indian
mathematicians became the Director of the official Board of Astronomy of
China in the 8th century). We do not know enough about the ancestry of
the Indian mathematicians who went to China to decide whether any of
them had Nalanda connections, but we do know that from early fifth
century Kusumpur, in nearby Pataliputra (Patna), was the place were the
mathematicians doing front-line innovative work on the subject were
congregating.
Propagating knowledge
I end with two final remarks. The first one concerns an aspect of the
intellectual life of Nalanda that emerges powerfully from the accounts
we do actually have about Nalanda from Chinese as well as Indian
scholars. The faculty and the students in Nalanda loved to argue and
very often held argumentative encounters. I have discussed elsewhere how
deep this argumentativeness is in Indian intellectual history, but I
want to add here that it is a part of the scientific tradition as well,
to seek arguments and defences, refusing to accept positions and claims
on grounds of faith. There were plenty of organised argumentative
matches going on in Nalanda and this too fits, in a very general way,
into the scientific connections of Nalanda.
Faculty members
The final remark concerns the passion for propagating knowledge and
understanding that Nalanda stood for. This was one reason for its
keenness to accept students from abroad. Xuangzang as well as Yi Jing
mentions the warm welcome they received as they arrived in Nalanda from
China. Indeed, Xuangzang used this commitment in an argument with the
faculty in Nalanda when he was asked - and pressed - to stay on as a
faculty member in Nalanda, after he had completed his studies.
He mentioned his commitment, and here he invoked the Buddha himself,
to spread enlightenment “to all lands.” He asked the rhetorical
question: “Who would wish to enjoy it alone and to forget those who are
not yet enlightened?” If the seeking of evidence and vindication by
critical arguments is part of the tradition of science, so is the
commitment to move knowledge and understanding beyond locality. Science
has to fight parochialism and Nalanda was firmly committed to just that.
(Prof Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and
was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1999, is Professor of Economics and
Philosophy at Harvard University in the US and Chairman of the Interim
Governing Board of Nalanda University)
Courtesy: The Hindu
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