The book you could carry in your head, the gist

The book you could carry in your head

The main old Indian handbook on birth charts is tiny, twenty-eight chapters and a little over four hundred verses, and being that small is both why it survived for centuries and why almost nobody could use it without a teacher.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

The chapter on what work a person will do for a living is four verses long. The longest chapter in the book is a list of thirty-six pictures, because a list is the one thing you cannot make shorter.

About fifteen hundred years ago an Indian astronomer called Varahamihira wrote a handbook on reading birth charts. Its name, Brihat Jataka, starts with a word meaning large. The book is not large. It has twenty-eight chapters and, in the Sanskrit text used here, four hundred and nine verses. The whole of it fits on a few dozen leaves.

That was deliberate. Students learned books like this by heart, from a teacher, out loud. A short book can be memorised. Verse helps too, because a line that has lost a word stops sounding right, so the mistake is caught. Varahamihira went further and used many different verse patterns, some of them long and complicated. Harder to learn, harder to get wrong.

Squeezing has a price, and he named it himself in his second verse. He says he is building a small boat out of stanzas in many patterns, each one carrying several meanings. Several meanings is the problem. A packed verse is a reminder, not an explanation. Read it alone, with nobody to ask, and much of the book is a wall.

So other people wrote the explanations. The most important was Bhattotpala, a scholar from Kashmir, usually dated to the 960s, who went through the book line by line. His notes quote older books that have since disappeared completely. In Kerala, a shortened commentary covering only the first ten chapters became the standard book that students actually learned.

Compare the biggest book in Indian astrology, the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra. It has no old commentary at all. The small book has a shelf of them. Books get explained when they are being taught, and this one could be taught anywhere, because a teacher could carry all of it in his head.

Words decoded

Varahamihira: an Indian astronomer and astrologer at work in the 500s CE
Brihat Jataka (बृहज्जातक): his handbook on reading the chart of a birth; the title means roughly "the large book on nativities"
birth chart: a map of where the sun, moon and planets stood at the moment somebody was born
verse: a line of writing in a fixed rhythm, made to be recited and remembered
metre: the rhythm pattern a verse follows; break the pattern and the ear notices
commentary: a later scholar's explanation of an older book, written alongside it
Bhattotpala: a Kashmiri scholar of the tenth century who explained Varahamihira's books line by line
Shaka era: an Indian way of numbering years, counting from 78 CE, so Shaka 888 is 966 CE
Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra: the largest classical Indian book on astrology, and the one with no old commentary

Why anyone should careHow a book is built decides who can read it and who cannot. This one was built to be carried in a memory, which made it portable and made it obscure at the same time, and everything the tradition then had to add came in the form of somebody else's explanation. When you are handed an old text and told it is complete in itself, the question worth asking is what it was expecting you to already know.

Read it properly, 7 min The book you could carry in your head