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ETERNAL
INDIA
encyclopedia
A GREAT DESTINATION
band of translators who rendered into Chinese the six hundred
Sanskrit works brought from India.
Hiuen-Tsang has some interesting observations to make re-
garding the dress and manners of the people of India. The men
wound a strip of untailored cloth round the waist and up to the arm
pits, leaving the right shoulder bare. The women wore a long robe
which covered both shoulders and fell down loose. During winter in
the northern parts of the country closefitting jackets were worn. .
Regarding the character of the people, he observes that they
were of a hasty and irresolute temperament. But they were not
deceitful and discharged their obligations.
I-TSING
I-tsing, the third Chinese monk to journey to India, had formed
the idea of going to India in his 17th year but he had to wait till he
was 37. Unlike his two predecessors who had travelled overland,
he took the sea route both ways. He arrived in India in 673 and left
in 685 to return to China.
I-tsing spent ten years at Nalanda hearing the teaching of the
Doctors of law and collecting holy books. In his account of his
journeys given in his works
A record of the Buddhist religion as
practised in India and the Malay archipelago
and
Memories of
Eminent Monks who Went in Search of Law in the Western Coun-
tries
I-tsing speaks of the hazards he faced on the journey to India
and in India. "The reason for this is the immensity of the stony
deserts of the land of the Elephant (India), the great rivers and the
brilliance of the Sun which pours forth its burning heat, or else the
towering waves heaved up by the giant fish, the abysses and the
water that rise and swell on high on the heavens.” Of several
Korean monks who had gone to India, I-tsing says. "They died in
India , and never saw their country again."
AL-BIRUNI
Al-Biruni who has been hailed as "the first of the scientific In-
dologists" wrote the first detailed account of the religion, science,
literature, customs and manners of the Hindus. He was a Muslim of
Iranian origin who lived and worked mostly in Ghazni until his death
at the age of 75 in 1049A.D. He came to India in the wake of the
invading forces of Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11th century. His
famous work on India,
Kitabul Hind
was prepared in 1030 A.D.
It is a book of 80 chapters which Al-Biruni in his introduction
described as an "accurate description of all categories of Hindu
thought." This is followed by chapters on religion and philosophy,
social organisation, civil and religious laws, iconography, religious
and scientific literature, metrology, weights and measures, al-
chemy, geography, cosmography, astronomy, astrology, social life,
manners and customs, festivals, punishments and expiations.
The vigorous intellectual life in which Fa-hien and Hiuen-
Tsang had participated and which had drawn them all the way from
China was absent in the India which Al-Biruni saw. He was
constrained to observe: "The Hindus believe that there is no coun-
try but theirs , no nation.like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion
like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited and
stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which
they know and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it
from men of another caste among their own people, still much more,
of course, from any foreigner. According to their belief, there is no
other country on earth but theirs, no other race of man but theirs,
and no created beings besides them have any knowledge or science
whatsoever. Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any
science or scholar in Khurasan and Persia they will think you to be
both an ignoramus and a liar. If they travelled and mixed with other
nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors
were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is."
Al-Biruni states that the "heathen Greeks" before the rise of
Christianity were in much the same situation as the Hindus. But
the Greeks had thinkers who "worked out for them the elements of
science not of popular superstition." Al-Biruni mentions Socrates
who "opposed the crowd of his own nation and died faithful to the
truth."
"The Hindus had no men of this stamp both capable and willing
to bring sciences to a classical perfection. Therefore you mostly
find that even the so-called theorems of the Hindus are in a state
of utter confusion, devoid of any logical order, and in the last
instance always mixed up with the silly notions of the crowd. I can
only compare their mathematical and astronomical literature as far
as I know it, to a mixture of pearl shells and sour dates, or of pearls
and dung or of costly crystals and common pebbles. Both kinds of
things are equal in their eyes, since they cannot raise themselves
to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction. "Al-Biruni men-
tions certain "strange manners and customs" he had observed
among the Hindus.
"In washing they begin with the feet, and then wash the face.
"On festive days they besmear their bodies with dung instead of
perfumes.
"When a child is born people show particular attention to the man,
not the woman.
"In shaking hands they grasp the hand of a man from the convex
side.
"They do not seek permission to enter a house, but when they
leave it they ask permission to do so.
"They write the title of a book at the end of it not at the beginning."
He concedes that in numeral signs the Hindus are "far ahead
of us." This is hardly surprising because the Hindus had invented
the system of nine digits and a zero which, transmitted by the
Arabs to Europe in the early centuries of the Christian era, had
supplanted the cumbersome Roman system of numerals.
Al-Biruni was deeply interested in mathematics and astron-
omy since a young age. He notes that "the science of astronomy"
is the most famous among the Hindus." However the standard
works seen by him were those which had been written centuries
ago. Science, he observes, can flourish when kings and princes
"free the minds of scholars from the daily anxieties for the neces-
sities of life and stimulate their energies to earn more fame and
favour, the yearning for which is the pith and marrow of human
nature." He adds that "the present times are not of this kind. They
are the very opposite and therefore it is quite impossible that a new
science or any new kind of research should arise in our days. What
we have of sciences is nothing but the scanty remains of bygone
better times."
These remarks were to prove prophetic. Battered by succes-
sive waves of foreign invasions and internecine conflicts the
genius of India shrivelled up. The spirit of inquiry died out. The
Dark Ages had begun.