Name: India: Crash Course History of Science #4
Uploaded: 2021-05-23T15:33:22.000Z
Duration: 13 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You might have recognized the names of some of the Greek natural philosophers.

They were individuals with quirky theories, and we have records about them.

But they weren't the only people making knowledge back in the day.

India had major urban centers, centralized administrative states, and complicated metaphysical

traditions long before the Greeks had anything big—

And olive trees, which are bigger than goats but still small.

And a few gods and goddesses doing normal stuff like cheating on each other.

In Indian scriptures, thousands of gods and demons made perpetual war, destroying and

Ancient Indian thinkers didn't give rise to the same natural philosophy as

India presents a convenient counterpoint to Greece because knowledge-making in india was

indeparable from a long religious tradition, sponsored by the state,

At the same time, both regions exchanged ideas with each other and the wider world.

Today we'll dive into a couple of major aspects of Indian natural philosophy, underlying

Oh, and we'll talk about everyone's favorite large mammal—the elephant!

Ancient India was home to several schools of thought, including what would become Hinduism,

its more austere rivals Buddhism and Jainism, and a super-fatalistic faith called Ajivika

The most important Hindu texts were the Vedas.

The word “veda” literally means “knowledge.”

These sacred texts are passed along orally, even today.

But they had also been written down for centuries by the time Alexander the Great invaded western

Science and religion were entangled in both Greece and India.

True, the Greek natural philosophers began to break with a mythological tradition, or

at least repurposed it, proposing new ways of thinking about nature.

Even so, we can never neatly separate out science from religion: they mutually affect

In India, “knowledge” systems were essentially, well, vedic.

The Vedas were written in a sacred language, Sanskrit, which was standardized around the

time of the first Greek natural philosophers.

The greatest Sanskrit scholar, Panini, wrote a book on grammar listing almost four thousand rules!

These covered phonetics, meter, semantics, etymology—everything about the language

In fact, Panini's theory of how words are formed was so advanced that it was directly

So you can say that the first science in India was linguistics.

And this tradition of memorizing the Vedas and trying to understand words eventually

led to the study of acoustics and musical tones.

But is studying a language, which is a very human thing, the same kind of knowledge-making

Linguists make hypotheses, take careful observations, and put together testable theories about how

They might be frustrated by the seeming randomness of their subjects… but then again, so are

Some parts of the Vedas concerned math and astronomy.

But mostly they concerned gods and rituals.

The Vedas taught that the cosmos is clearly ordered, as is human society.

What happens in the reality you perceive is the result of a complicated ethical algorithm

running in the background—so you have to sacrifice a lot of animals and stay in your

Thus the Vedas functioned not only as a basis for a whole language, but as a way of teaching

people how society should be: a mirror of an orderly cosmos.

And so we arrive at the present year: 321 BCE…

At that time, in Greece, Aristotle had been dead for only one year.

Over in Babylon, in what is now Iraq, Aristotle's former boss Alexander the Great had been dead

But in eastern India, a young adventurer named Chandragupta Maurya was very

much alive: that year he became emperor of nearly the entire subcontinent.

Alexander had only recently invaded India, wisely choosing not to start beef with the

When Alexander died, India consisted of a lot of small kingdoms.

Maurya, inspired by the model of Alexander and coached by a brilliant older adviser,

From there, Maurya conquered the weaker kingdoms one by one, forging them into a powerful state

called —wait for it, what name did he name it?

The dynasty that Maurya founded lasted from 322 to 180 BCE.

It sponsored research into astronomy, hydraulic engineering, and forestry.

Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka  became one of the most powerful and culturally

influential rulers of India, as well as a serious convert to Buddhism.

He outlawed hunting and other unnecessary acts of violence towards animals, opened public

hospitals, and spread Buddhism as far as Athens!

When the Buddhist monk Faxian  visited India from Jin Dynasty China, starting

in 399 CE, he favorably compared the two empires: both were civilized societies where Buddhism

Increased travel between states brought increased trade in goods as well as ideas.

Under the Maurya Empire, more than half of the arable land in ancient India was irrigated,

That sustained a lot of people… and required a lot of planning.

Thus Indian states developed whole government departments to supervise the building and

They controlled a vast system of canals and sluices, funded by taxes.

Breaching a dam was punishable… by death!

The centralized Maurya Empire—like the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese ones—was a “hydraulic”

state: its control of water allowed harvests stability, keeping large populations alive.

To control nature, the people running these big states needed to know lots of things about

the lands, plants, animals and especially rivers they controlled.

And most especially about the people who owed them taxes.

First rule of history: nobody ever, ever liked paying taxes.

Another key to running a big state in India was the elephant.

Training hundreds of war elephants was important to continued military power.