WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE TROUGH SCRIPTURES AND RELIGIOUS TEXTS

DIS YOU KNOW THAT THE ANCIENT TAMILS HAVE ALREADY WROTE DOWN ABOUT SPLITTING ATOMS IN THE 12TH CENTURY IN THE KAMBAR RAMAYANA.
Chennai: Science tells us that water evaporates and turns clouds into rain bearing ones. But the same scientific fact is mentioned in ancient Tamil religious literature too, said K. Sambandan. There is a verse in the Thiruvembavai, which talks of how sea water evaporates and makes clouds heavy with moisture. Again scientists for a long time said the atom could not be split, until it was proved otherwise. But centuries ago, the Tamil poet Kambar wrote of the splitting of the atom in his Kamba Ramayanam.He writes about Lord Narayana’s Narasimha avatara and recounts how Prahlada is taunted by his father Hiranyakasipu. The asura, Hiranyakasipu, asks his son Prahlada where Lord Narayana resides. Prahlada replies that He resides not only in an atom, but if an atom were to be split into a hundred parts, He would still be in every one of those parts. Thus an ancient Tamil treatise talks of the splitting of the atom, thereby showing that the ancient Tamils were aware of the possibility that an atom could be split. But while we respect the findings of scientists, we are not even aware of what has been said in our religious literature about scientific facts.

In science there is a paradox called the Twin Paradox. Suppose there is a pair of twins. One of them lives on the earth, but the more adventurous one takes off in a spacecraft and travels to some other planet. He returns some years later. The twin who chose to live in Earth is found to be older than the twin who traveled to another planet. They are twins, and yet, one, by virtue of his being on a planet other than earth, is younger. Our Hindu religious literature makes a similar point. We are told that one year on the earth is the equivalent of just a day in the life of a celestial. So we have in Hindu mythology, an idea similar to the Twin Paradox of Physics. Unfortunately, we only value what comes from the West. We do not know of the valuable information and knowledge that is there in ancient Sanskrit and Tamil religious works.

Our ancestors did not lack in wisdom or knowledge. It is for us to realise the treasure of knowledge that is there in our Sanskrit and Tamil religious literature.

How did Avvaiyar (a Tamil poetess) know and write about atoms 2000 years ago?

The most surprising fact about this good old woman is that she knew about fluid compressibility and the energy which an atom can produce!!! Strange but true, some of her poetic verses contain scientific principles which are said to be discovered only in the modern age; below is a sample of her intellect……she writes in the ‘Puranaanooru’,

‘aazha amukki mugakkinum aazhkadal neer

Naazhi mugavaadhu naalnaazhi’

This means, even when the deep sea water is compressed to its depth, it will never compress even for a half of a second. This concept is said to be proposed and proved sometime during the early 1800-s. The poetic verse has a small flaw, as the water is compressible to a negligible portion. But it is a mystery, as the poetess wrote these lines by merely seeing the water!!!

Her intelligence doesn’t end here. She has stated about the smashing of atom and the energy it can produce in her praise on Thirukkural. The concept of nuclear fission was proposed in modern age. But Avvaiyar knew it before, stating

‘anuvai thulaithezh kadalai pugatti

Kuruga tharitha kural’

Meaning: Thirukkural is as powerful as the energy of the seven large oceans compressed into a divided atom.

Avvaiyar has discovered already about structure of an atom, again by mere vision. But this was found by Mr.Sommerfield in 1850’s and put to effect, while the whole world simply saw the power of the seven large oceans annihilating a rich city to ruins in 1945. Remember Hiroshima???

Therefore, we must know that Indians are less to none in any field, and we can repeat, if not emulate, the feats of our ancestors. If they can achieve much by seeing, we can discover much more by experimenting and researching

The Indian Sage who developed Atomic Theory 2,600 years ago

John Dalton (1766 – 1844), an English chemist and physicist, is the man credited today with the development of atomic theory. However, a theory of atoms was actually formulated2,500 years before Dalton by an Indian sage and philosopher, known as Acharya Kanad.

Acharya Kanad was born in 600 BC in Prabhas Kshetra (near Dwaraka) in Gujarat, India. His real name was Kashyap.

Kashyap was on a pilgrimage to Prayag when he saw thousands of pilgrims litter the streets with flowers and rice grains, which they offered at the temple. Kashyap, fascinated by small particles, began collecting the grains of rice. A crowd gathered around to see the strange man collecting grains from the street. Kashyap was asked why he was collecting the grains that even a beggar wouldn’t touch. He told them that individual grains in themselves may seem worthless, but a collection of some hundred grains make up a person's meal, the collection many meals would feed an entire family and ultimately the entire mankind was made of many families, thus even a single grain of rice was as important as all the valuable riches in this world. Since then, people began calling him ‘Kanad’, as ‘Kan’ in Sanskrit means ‘the smallest particle’.

Kanad pursued his fascination with the unseen world and with conceptualising the idea of the smallest particle. He began writing down his ideas and teaching them to others. Thus, people began calling him ‘Acharya’ (‘the teacher’), hence the name Acharya Kanad (‘the teacher of small particles’)

Kanad’s conception of Anu (the atom)

Kanad was walking with food in his hand, breaking it into small pieces when he realised that he was unable to divide the food into any further parts, it was too small. From this moment, Kanad conceptualised the idea of a particle that could not be divided any further. He called that indivisible matter Parmanu, or anu (atom).

Acharya Kanad proposed that this indivisible matter could not be sensed through any human organ or seen by the naked eye, and that an inherent urge made one Parmanu combine with another. When two Parmanu belonging to one class of substance combined, a dwinuka (binary molecule) was the result. This dwinuka had properties similar to the two parent Parmanu.

Kanad suggested that it was the different combinations of Parmanu which produced different types of substances. He also put forward the idea that atoms could be combined in various ways to produce chemical changes in presence of other factors such as heat. He gave blackening of earthen pot and ripening of fruit as examples of this phenomenon.

Acharya Kanad founded the Vaisheshika school of philosophy where he taught his ideas about the atom and the nature of the universe. He wrote a book on his research “Vaisheshik Darshan” and became known as “The Father of Atomic theory.”

In the West, atomism emerged in the 5th century BC with the ancient Greeks Leucippus and Democritus. Whether Indian culture influenced Greek or vice versa or whether both evolved independently is a matter of dispute.

Kanad is reporting to have said: ”Every object of creation is made of atoms which in turn connect with each other to form molecules.” His theory of the atom was abstract and enmeshed in philosophy as they were based on logic and not on personal experience or experimentation. But in the words of A.L. Basham, the veteran Australian Indologist, "they were brilliant imaginative explanations of the physical structure of the world, and in a large measure, agreed with the discoveries of modern physics."

BY APRIL

APRIL

April Holloway is a Co-Owner, Editor and Writer of Ancient Origins. For privacy reasons, she has previously written on Ancient Origins under the pen name April Holloway, but is now choosing to use her real name, Joanna Gillan.