Series
Tradition
The texts and their history: who wrote, when, in what language, for whom. A tradition with its history given back. Written by Rukmini Athavale.
tradition
Twenty-seven before twelve
Twenty-seven star stations carried the Indian sky for a thousand years and more before a single sign arrived. What that frame was, and what it did.
tradition
An encyclopedia that happens to include astrology
Varahamihira's largest book covers wells, walls, clouds, orchards, animals and gems in about a hundred chapters. The birth chart waits until chapter 101.
tradition
Who was Parashara?
The sage whose name sits on the tradition's largest book, and what the book's own history, held honestly, lets a reader do with it.
tradition
Brahmagupta's chapter of faults
In 628 one Indian astronomer gave a chapter of his book to another's errors, in verse. Which objections were real, and where the argument turns into contempt.
tradition
One thousand and thirty-one aphorisms
A whole system of chart reading in 1,031 aphorisms, one of them two words long: the Jaimini Sutras, their letter code, and a date nobody can fix.
tradition
Eight annas for the coming year
The first printed Marathi panchang came off a homemade press in 1831. What print settled for the almanac, what it thinned, and how a reckoning became a brand.
tradition
The century the zodiac arrived
Signs, houses, aspects and the week entered a sky India had already divided. What arrived, through which doors, and why no honest date is a single year.
tradition
A Greek book in Sanskrit verse
The Yavanajataka survives in one damaged palm-leaf book. What it holds, how it reached print, and why its two famous dates no longer stand.
tradition
Entering the Hora Shastra by a side door
A guided first reading of a very large book: where to enter, what to write down, what to skim, and which passages later hands almost certainly added.
tradition
The verse in the middle of the page
Bhashya, tika, vritti, vyakhya: the Indian commentary genres explained, why terse books needed them, and how a commentator disagrees without saying so.
tradition
The oldest calendar we have
The Vedanga Jyotisha: forty-odd verses of calendar arithmetic with no planets in them, and an argument about age that is really about two clocks.
tradition
Varahamihira, and a century that can be pinned down
The one classical Indian author who left an account of himself, what survives testing, and why a single fixed point matters on a shelf of undated books.
tradition
The book you could carry in your head
Varahamihira's Brihajjataka in numbers: twenty-eight chapters, a little over four hundred verses, and what that compression cost and bought.
tradition
Sky in the Rigveda, and the temptation to over-read it
What the oldest hymns plainly say about the sky, what later readers computed into them, and how to keep those two piles apart.
tradition
Aryabhata says the earth turns
A verse of 499 puts the turning in the earth and not in the sky. What its readers did with it, and why a tradition can keep a claim and still decline it.
tradition
The many schools of jyotisha
Parashari, Jaimini, Tajika, nadi, and the regional computation traditions: one sky read through several different grammars, and why that is a strength.
tradition
The Kerala school, and calculus before Newton
Madhava's series for pi, a book of proofs written in Malayalam, and what the phrase calculus before Newton can honestly be made to carry.
tradition
The book that moved Mercury
The Tantrasangraha of 1500 rebuilt the planetary scheme because the old rule kept failing for Mercury and Venus, and defended the right to revise.