“Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it?
Whence was it born, whence came creation?
The gods are later than this world’s formation;
Who then can know the origins of the world?
None knows whence creation arose;
And whether he has or has not made it;
He who surveys it from the lofty skies,
Only he knows- or perhaps he knows not."

(source: Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science - By Carl Sagan p. 106 - 137). Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video

The theory of animal life and particularly of man was correctly understood by the ancient thinkers. The Brihat Vishnu Purana states that "the aquatic life precedes the monkey life" and that "the monkey life is the precursor of the human life." The same theory was explained in an interesting way by the dashavatara (ten incarnations). But evolution, as everything else, was the manifestation of the supreme spirit (Atman) as is testified by Chandogya Upanishad.

(source: Ancient Indian History and Culture - By Chidambara Kulkarni Orient Longman Ltd. 1974. p.268).

wpe33.jpg (4159 bytes)Hinduism is the only religion that propounds the idea of life-cycles of the universe. It suggests that the universe undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. Hinduism, according to Carl Sagan, "... is the only religion in which the time scales correspond... to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of the Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang"

Long before Aryabhata (6th century) came up with this awesome achievement, apparently there was a mythological angle to this as well -- it becomes clear when one looks at the following translation of Bhagavad Gita (part VIII, lines 16 and 17),

"All the planets of the universe, from the most evolved to the most base, are places of suffering, where birth and death takes place. But for the soul that reaches my Kingdom, O son of Kunti, there is no more reincarnation. One day of Brahma is worth a thousand of the ages [yuga] known to humankind; as is each night."

Thus each kalpa is worth one day in the life of Brahma, the God of creation. In other words, the four ages of the mahayuga must be repeated a thousand times to make a "day ot Brahma", a unit of time that is the equivalent of 4.32 billion human years, doubling which one gets 8.64 billion years for a Brahma day and night. This was later theorized (possibly independently) by Aryabhata in the 6th century. The cyclic nature of this analysis suggests a universe that is expanding to be followed by contraction... a cosmos without end. This, according to modern physicists is not an impossibility.

(source: Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient India).

Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry, a wide variety of essays. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature. In his book Mountain Paths, says:

"he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India with a Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed."

(source: Mountain Paths - By Maurice Maeterlinck).

In Hindu thought, interspersed between linear, time-limited existences lie timeless intervals of non-existence. The creation hymn of the Hindus, Nasadiya-sukta of Rig-Veda, affirms an absolute beginning of things and describes the origin of the universe as being beyond the concepts of existence and non-existence

“The Hindu ... pictured the universe as periodically expanding and contracting and gave the name Kalpa to the time span between the beginning and the end of one creation. The scale of this space or time is indeed staggering. It has taken more than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept.”

Hindu culture had this unique vision of the infiniteness of time as well as the infinity of space. When modern astronomy deals with billion of years, Hindu creation concepts deal with trillions of years. Vedanta upholds the idea that creation is timeless, having no beginning in time. Each creation and dissolution follows in sequence. The whole cosmos exists in two states -- the unmanifested or undifferentiated state and the manifested or differentiated state.

(source: The Origin of the Universe - By K B N Sarma - sulekha.com).

John Bowle, categorically declares that Plato was influenced by Indian ideas.

(source: A New Outline of World History - By John Bowle p. 91).

Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University’s Neil Turok, have recently developed The Cyclical Model.

They have just fired their latest volley at that belief, saying there could be a timeless cycle of expansion and contraction. It’s an idea as old as Hinduism, updated for the 21st century. The theorists acknowledge that their cyclic concept draws upon religious and scientific ideas going back for millennia — echoing the "oscillating universe" model that was in vogue in the 1930s, as well as the Hindu belief that the universe has no beginning or end, but follows a cosmic cycle of creation and dissolution.

(source: Questioning the Big Bang - msnbcnews.com).

Dick Teresi ( ? ) author and coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written:

"The big bang is the biggest-budget universe ever, with mind-boggling numbers to dazzle us – a technique pioneered by fifth-century A.D. Indian cosmologists, the first to estimate the age of the earth at more than 4 billion years. The cycle of creation and destruction continues forever, manifested in the Hindu deity Shiva, Lord of the Dance, who holds the drum that sounds the universe’s creation in his right hand and the flame that, billions of years later, will destroy the universe in his left. Meanwhile Brahma is but one of untold numbers of other gods dreaming their own universes. The 8.64 billion years that mark a full day-and-night cycle in Brahma’s life is about half the modern estimate for the age of the universe. The ancient Hindus believed that each Brahma day and each Brahma night lasted a kalpa, 4.32 billion years, with 72,000 kalpas equaling a Brahma century, 311,040 billion years in all. That the Hindus could conceive of the universe in terms of billions."

(source: Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick Teresi p. 159 and 174 -212).

The Hindus, according to Sir Monier-Williams, were Spinozists more than 2,000 years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted by scientists of the present age.

The French historian Louis Jacolliot says, "Here to mock are conceit, our apprehensions, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ about Evolution:

' The first germ of life was developed by water and heat.' (Book I, sloka 8,9 )
' Water ascends towards the sky in vapors; from the sun it descends in rain, from the rains are born the plants, and from the plants, animals.' (Book III, sloka 76).

(source: Philosophy of Hinduism - By T C Galav ISBN: 0964237709 p 17).

Sir John Woodroffe, (1865-1936) the well known scholar, Advocate-General of Bengal and sometime Legal Member of the Government of India. He served with competence for eighteen years and in 1915 officiated as Chief Justice. He has said:

"Ages before Lamarck and Darwin it was held in India that man has passed through 84 lakhs (8,400,000) of birth as plants, animals, as an "inferior species of man" and then as the ancestor of the developed type existing to-day.

"The theory was not, like modern doctrine of evolution, based wholly on observation and a scientific enquiry into fact but was a rather (as some other matters) an act of brilliant intuition in which observation may also have had some part."

(source: Is India Civilized: Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe Publisher: Ganesh & Co. Publishers Date of Publication: 1922 p. 22).

Thus, in Hinduism, science and religion are not opposed fundamentally, as they often seem to be in the West, but are seen as parts of the same great search for truth and enlightenment that inspired the sages of Hinduism. Fundamental to Hindu concept of time and space is the notion that the external world is a product of the creative play of Maya (illusion).



Kapila Rishi

To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas.

(image source: Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. Inc - 2002 calendar).

Refer to Indian Institute of Scientific Heritage and Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video


"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it."

It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness."

(source: Spiritual Practices of India - By Frederic Spiegelberg Introduction by Alan Watts p. 8-9).

The late scientist, Carl Sagan, asserts that the Dance of Nataraja (Tandava) signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory). According to Carl Sagan, (1934-1996) astro-physicist, in his book Cosmos says:

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology.

"It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of." Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but also the very essence of inorganic matter.

For modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artist created visual images of dancing Shiva's in a beautiful series of bronzes. Today, physicist have used the most advanced technology to portray the pattern of the cosmic dance. Thus, the metaphor of the cosmic dance unifies, ancient religious art and modern physics.

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."

(source: Cosmos - By Carl Sagan ISBN: 0375508325 p. 213 -214). Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video

Fritjof Capra (1939 - ) Austrian-born famous theoretical high-energy physicist and ecologist wrote:

"Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another’’. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance."

(source: The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism - By Fritjof Capra p. 241-245).

Nancy Wilson Ross (1901 -1986) made her first trip to Japan, China, Korea and India in 1939. She was the author of several books including The World of Zen and Time's Left Corner. Miss Ross lectured on Zen Buddhism at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. She served on the board of the Asia Society of New York which was founded by John D. Rockefeller III since its founding in 1956 and was on the governing board of the India Council. In private life she was known as Mrs. Stanley Young.

She has written:

"Anachronistic as this labyrinthine mythology may appear to the foreign mind, many of India’s ancient theories about the universe are startlingly modern in scope and worthy of a people who are credited with the invention of the zero, as well as algebra and its application of astronomy and geometry; a people who so carefully observed the heavens that, in the opinion of Monier-Williams, they determined the moon’s synodical revolution much more correctly than the Greeks."

" Many hundreds of years before those great European pioneers, Galileo and Copernicus, had to pay heavy prices in ridicule and excommunication for their daring theories, a section of the Vedas known as the Brahmanas contained this astounding statement:

“The sun never sets or rises. When people think the sun is setting, he only changes about after reaching the end of the day and makes night below and day to what is on the other side. Then, when people think he rises in the morning, he only shifts himself about after reaching the end of the day night, and makes day below and night to what is on the other side. In truth, he does not see at all.”

"The Indians, whose theory of time, is not linear like ours – that is, not proceeding consecutively from past to present to future – have always been able to accept, seemingly without anxiety, the notion of an alternately expanding and contracting universe, an idea recently advanced by certain Western scientists. In Hindu cosmology, immutable Brahman, at fixed intervals, draws back into his beginningless, endless Being the whole substance of the living world. There then takes place the long “sleep” of Brahaman from which, in course of countless aeons, there is an awakening, and another universe or “dream” emerges. "

"This notion of the sleeping and waking, or contracting and expanding, of the Life Force, so long a part of Hindu cosmology, has recently been expressed in relevant terms in an article written for a British scientific journal by Professor Fred Hoyle, Britain’s foremost astronomer. "



Lord Vishnu sleeping on a coiled serpent. Chalukya Period. 6th century A.D. Relief in Sanctuary # 9, Aihole,

Lord Vishnu is said to rest in the coils of Ananta, the great serpent of Infinity, while he waits for the universe to recreate itself.

For more refer to chapter on Greater India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor

Refer to Indian Institute of Scientific Heritage and Watch Carl Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video


"Plainly, contemporary Western science’s description of an astronomical universe of such vast magnitude that distances must be measured in terms as abstract as light-years is not new to Hinduism whose wise men, millennia ago, came up with the term kalpa to signify the inconceivable duration of the period elapsing between the beginning and end of a world system.

"It is clear that Indian religious cosmology is sharply at variance with that inherited by Western peoples from the Semites. On the highest level, when stripped of mythological embroidery, Hinduism’s conceptions of space, time and multiple universes approximate in range and abstraction the most advanced scientific thought. "

(source: Three Ways of Asian Wisdom – By Nancy Wilson Ross p. 64 - 67 and 74 - 76).

Dr. Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943), the great German Indologist, a man of penetrating intellect, the keenest esthetic sensibility observed:

“In one of the Puranic accounts of the deeds of Vishnu in his Boar Incarnation or Avatar, occurs a casual reference to the cyclic recurrence of the great moments of myth. The Boar, carrying on his arm the goddess Earth whom he is in the act of rescuing from the depths of the sea, passingly remarks to her:

“Every time I carry you this way….”

For the Western mind, which believes in single, epoch-making, historical events (such as, for instance, the coming of Christ) this casual comment of the ageless god has a gently minimizing, annihilating effect."

(source: The Myth and Symbols in India Art and Civilization – By Heinrich Zimmer p. 18 and 152 - 155 ).

Professor Arthur Holmes (1895-1965) geologist, professor at the University of Durham. He writes regarding the age of the earth in his great book, The Age of Earth (1913) as follows:

"Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book."

When the Hindu calculation of the present age of the earth and the expanding universe could make Professor Holmes so astonished, the precision with which the Hindu calculation regarding the age of the entire Universe was made would make any man spellbound.

(source: Hinduism and Scientific Quest - By T. R. R. Iyengar p. 20-21).

The Upanishads developed this spirit of inquiry, and traces of naturalistic and scientific thought in them are quite significant. The Samkhya system, which has been described as the ruling philosophy of pre-Buddhist India and an orthodox system having its roots in the Upanishads, is essentially rational, anti-theistic, and intellectual. According to Richard Garbe, it was in Samkhya doctrine that complete independence and freedom of the human mind was exhibited for the first time in history. Samkhya, probably the oldest Indian philosophical system, furnished the background for the Yoga system, and the early Buddhist biography Lalitavistara includes both Samkhya and Yoga in the curriculum of study for the young Buddha. Samkhya is generally ascribed to Sage Kapila and Yoga to Sage Patanjali. Ideas of natural selection, atomic polarity and evolution.

Like in other ancient civilizations, in Hindu India priests and scientists were often the same persons; the conflict between religion and reason is not the primitive condition but a contingent historical development in post-classical Europe, paralleled to an extent by the stagnation of Muslim culture from the 12th century onwards. The Sankya philosophy of Kapila, in short, is devoted entirely to the systematic, logical, and scientific explanation of the process of cosmic evolution from that primordial Prakriti, or eternal Energy. There is no ancient philosophy in the world which was not indebted to the sankhya system of Kapila. The idea of evolution which the ancient Greeks and neo-Platonists had can be traced back to the influence of this Sankhya school of thought.

(source: India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal - Chapter V - Naturalism and Science in Ancient India - p.153 - 188).

Professor Edward Washburn Hopkins (1857-1932) Indologist, Chair of Sanskrit Studies of Yale, says:

"Plato is full of Sankhyan thought, worked out by him, but taken from Pythagoras. Before the sixth century B.C. all the religious-philosophical idea of Pythagoras are current in India (L. Schroeder, Pythagoras). If there were but one or two of these cases, they might be set aside as accidental coincidences, but such coincidences are too numerous to be the result of change. "

And again he writes: "Neo-Platonism and Christian Gnosticism owe much to India. The Gnostic ideas in regard to a plurality of heavens and spiritual worlds go back directly to Hindu sources. Soul and light are one in the Sankhyan system, before they became so in Greece, and when they appear united in Greece it is by means of the thought which is borrowed from India. The famous three qualities of the Sankhyan reappear as the Gnostic 'three classes.'

(source: Religions of India - By Edward Washburn Hopkins p. 559-560).

Some sources even credit Pythagoras with having traveled as far as India in search of knowledge, which may explain some of the close parallels between Indian and Pythagorean philosophy and religion. These parallels include:

1. a belief in the transmigration of souls;
2. the theory of four elements constituting matter;
3. the reasons for not eating beans;
4. the structure of the religio-philosophical character of the Pythagorean fraternity, which resembled Buddhist monastic orders; and
5. the contents of the mystical speculations of the Pythagorean schools, which bear a striking resemblance of the Hindu Upanishads.

According to Greek tradition, Pythagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus and others undertook journey to the East to study philosophy and science. By the time Ptolmaic Egypt and Rome’s Eastern empire had established themselves just before the beginning of the Common era, Indian civilization was already well developed, having founded three great religions – Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – and expressed in writing some subtle currents of religious thought and speculation as well as fundamental theories in science and medicine.

(source: The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of Mathematics - By George Gheverghese Joseph p. 1 - 18). For more refer to chapter on India and Greece).
A 9th century Hindu scripture, The Mahapurana by Jinasena claims the something as modern as the following: (translation from [5])

"Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before creation?... How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. And it is based on principles."

(source: Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient India). (Refer to Visions of the End of the World - By Dr. Subhash Kak - sulekha.com).

Modern people divide the day into 24 hours, the hour - into 60 minutes, the minute - into 60 seconds. Ancient Hindus divided the day in 60 periods, lasting 24 minutes each, and so on and so forth. The shortest time period of ancient Hindus made up one-three-hundred-millionth of a second.

(source: Ancient nuclear blasts and levitating stones of Shivapur - By Alexander Pechersky - pravda.ru.com).

Speed of Light:

Sayana (c. 1315-1387) was a minister in the court of King Bukka I of the Vijayanagar Empire in South India; he was also a great Vedic scholar who wrote extensive commentaries on several ancient texts. In his commentary on the fourth verse of the hymn 1.50 of the Rig Veda on the sun, he says:

Tatha cha smaryate yojananam sahasre dve dve shate dve cha yogane ekena nimishardhena kramamana namo ‘stu ta iti

Thus it is remembered: (O Sun), bow to you, you who travers 2,202 yojanas in half a minute.

The Puranas define 1 nimesha to be equal to 16/75 seconds. 1 yojana is about 9 miles. Substituting in Sayana’s statement we get 186,000 per second.

Sayana’s statement was printed in 1890 in the famous edition of Rig Veda edited by Max Muller, the German Sanskritist . He claimed to have used several three or four hundred year old manuscripts of Sayana’s commentary, written much before the time of Romer. Further support for the genuineness of the figure in the ancient book comes from one of the earliest Puranas, the Vayu, conservatively dated to at least 1,500 years old. The Puranas speak of the creation and destruction of the universe in cycles of 8.64 billion years, that is quite close to currently accepted value regarding the time of the big bang.

(source: The Wishing Tree - By Subhash Kak p. 75 - 77 and Sayana's Astronomy - By Subhash Kak).