Reviving Bharatiya Vigyan - 1: Getting the hermeneutics right

 सुखम समग्रम विज्ञाने विमलेच प्रतिष्ठितं  

Sukham samagram vijnane vimalecha pratishtitham

"All happiness is rooted in good science," says the Charaka Samhita-- the definitive treatise on Ayurveda, dating back to 8th century BCE. This belies the widely believed notion that science and "scientific temper" came to India from the West. 

Every form of scientific practice, rests upon an underlying hermeneutics-- or a way of thinking. The hermeneutics of current day scientific inquiry is greatly influenced by the industrial revolution, which in turn was fuelled by colonial expansion of European powers. I've called this form of inquiry as "machine hermeneutics" and also sometimes called the "clockwork model," where the universe is considered to be a giant, impersonal automaton, driven solely by causality, and indifferent to our existence. 

Hermeneutics affect how we interpret our observations and what models we build. As the physicist Werner Heisenberg once said, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of inquiry." 

Scientific inquiry happened all over the world, and ancient India, or Bharat, was no exception. In fact, Bharatiya science had made great, pioneering strides in many different fields. Today, thanks to more than a thousand years of relentless assault on  this civilisation, much of this science is lost or greatly appropriated. Today, when we talk of Bharatiya thought, we either refer to its popular culture like its festivals, costumes, rituals, food, etc. or to its spirituality and its different existential philosophies. These two ends of the society, were kept together by different forms of "Vigyan" or science, that addressed practical questions of everyday interest. 

Much of the hermeneutic elements of Bharatiya Vigyan, are given distorted meanings and religious colouring, thanks to flawed interpretations by scholars from occupying powers. For instance, the term dharma is variously interpreted as "religion," "ethics," "duty," "divine law," and so on. The term karma has come to mean some form of divine retribution. The term atma is called "soul" and the term vidhi is called "fate," and so on. 

All of these are incorrect interpretations, resulting due to a method of interpretation called "Syncretism" that draws parallels between terms from an alien culture, to terms from one's own culture. It is only in recent times. that there is an increasing realisation that the world's understanding of Indian thought is highly distorted. And we have seen several efforts to spread greater awareness and perform some corrective action. The book Sanskrit Non-translatables by Rajiv Malhotra is one such effort. 

"Digesting" terms from an existing hermeneutic framework into an existing framework, delivers a death blow to the knowledge and wisdom latent in the framework. But today's science, driven largely on machine hermeneutics is so powerful and dominant, that presenting anything from a different method of inquiry is deemed unscientific. 

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For those of us who were brought up in the Western paradigm of science (which includes most, if not all readers of this post), there is a need to represent the hermeneutic basis of Indian science Bharatiya Vigyan ("Indian science" perhaps refers to Western paradigms of science practiced in India, today). 

Here is an attempt towards this. 

Everyday we deal with "systems" of different kinds. Broadly, in current day science, systems are broadly classified into two kinds: linear and non-linear systems. 

Linear systems, of which most machines are a type of, are relatively easy to understand and build. These are also called "open loop" systems, where the input affects the output, and not vice versa. Such systems can be designed with high precision and its behaviour predictable. Non-linear systems on the other hand, are also sometimes called "Complex Systems" where the output of the system becomes part of the input at the next time step. Non-linear systems can be very unpredictable, even though their constituent dynamics are very simple. Even a small change in inputs, can lead to vast changes in its output. This is known as sensitivity to initial conditions, and is popularly called the "butterfly effect" that says that, our weather is so complex, that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world, can potentially create thunderstorms in some other part of the world. The study of non-linear systems is also called "Chaos theory."

However, the transition between linear and chaotic non-linear systems is not abrupt. In between linear and chaotic non-linear systems are a class of non-linear, complex systems, that display properties of not sensitivity, but stability and resilience to initial conditions. Let us call this class of systems as "beings." All living beings are "beings" but several "non-living" systems are also complex and resilient, satisfying the definition of a being. The term jivatma (that. is sometimes translated as "materialized soul") is nothing but a complex, resilient system or a "being" as far as a Bharatiya scientist is concerned.  

Bharatiya Vigyan started understanding the universe, by representing it using "beings" rather than "matter" as we do today. The primary characteristic of a "being" is to "be" in a "state of being." Any minor perturbations would bring the being back to its stable state. The states of being that "hold" or are resilient or "sustainable" are called its dharma. Every being has its own dharma or its own resilient state of being. It is so ironic that this term today means "religion" or "duty" when it is actually a systemic property of physics! 

Any stable state of being of a complex system has its own energy and information content. This gives the being certain "capabilities" which is called prana. It is ironic again that we now associate the term prana with a narrow definition of breath. 

While all living beings are "beings" just about everything else can also be modelled as a being. Molecular structures that form solids are in a stable state of being. If they are perturbed a bit, they return back to their original form (which we call, "elasticity" in physics). Similarly atoms are in a stable state of being, with protons and electrons balancing out one another. If an atom loses an electron, it loses its dharma and becomes an unstable ion, leading to static electricity, lightning, and so on. 

Bharatiya scientists understood that just about all of life is a state of dharma. Our entire ecology is but a complex, resilient system, with its own stable states of being. The ecosystem hence, has its own dharma. And why just ecology? Even the solar system and perhaps the entire universe is nothing but a being. What appears chaotic (like say, thunderstorms) may just be a small part of a larger, resilient system of being (like the climate). 

While a stable state of being sustains for a while, we can also see that nothing in the physical world sustains forever. Life sustains for a while and dies away. Seasons sustain for a while, and change. Societies sustain for a while, and gets into turmoil. Even stars sustain for a (long) while and collapse. Even objects of the mind, like cultural practices, languages, and so on, do not sustain forever. Bharatiya philosophers hence started asking, what entity if any, sustains forever? The Sanskrit term for "forever" or "eternal" is Sanatana. The search for eternal sustainability came to be known as Sanatana dharma. This is what the "religion" of "Hinduism" is called in India. 

The notion of "religion" for the Bharatiya mind, is very different from what is conventionally understood as religion, in the West. It is not about commandments, nor about belief, nor about faith, nor about prophets and holy books. It is also not about rituals, norms, and specific forms of cultural practices. At its core, the practice of Sanatana dharma is about inquiry, search, conceptualisation, model building, hypothesis testing, argumentation, debate, and so on. Pretty much the stuff that "Science" is made of today. 

If we have to revive Bharatiya Vigyan, we should recover terms like dharma, karma, vidhi, etc. that have been give religious connotations, and provide them proper definitions using systems science.