30 January 2015 - QA 6

Gurudev, I am studying the Vedanta. Could you talk about the Nyaya Shastra (science of logic or reasoning)?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Nyaya implies — the means of knowing; weather your knowledge and the means by which you gained the knowledge is correct or not. Again, it’s a great intellectual debate.

There are sixteen principles of Nyaya and there are so many types of Nyaya to see whether your perception is correct. This is what Nyaya Shastra is all about.

We have been given to understand that Galileo first said that — the Earth goes round the Sun. But since thousands of years, people in India believed that the Sun is the centre and all the planets go around it. You go to any temple and you will find that they keep the Sun in the middle and all the 9 planets around it.

The fact that Earth is spherical was known to ancient India long time ago. That is why even today the Panchang (Indian calendar based on placements of planets in zodiac) is highly accurate of the movement of the stars and the planets. The calculation which was done hundreds of years ago about when the eclipse will happen, when Jupiter will transit, etc., was all calculated to the minutest detail.

Yes, in the west it was Galileo who discovered it and he was persecuted also. But here (in India), people knew it. They always said Khagola (astronomy). Gola means spherical. They said that the universe is spherical and all the planets are spherical. They always knew about the spherical movement of the planets. History needs to be rewritten.

You see the Sun setting or rising. But it is neither setting nor rising. It is a perceptual error. Similarly, some things happen by accident. Like a crow sat on a tree and a mango fell. Mango was already ripe and it was about to fall anyway. But a crow came and sat on the tree, so you relate them and think that the crow made the mango fall. This is called Kakataliya Nyaya (one of the principles of Nyaya Shastra).

Similarly there are many such modes of understanding and judging whether one’s perception is correct or not.