India's Living Traditions - Interesting
Facts
Vedic astrology is the traditional astrology of India and is some
4000-5000 years old. This is no fly by night tradition! In fact, the
remarkable thing is that it’s a living tradition. If you’ve
been studying Western astrology it’s not like you can simply
fly to Greece and find astrologers sitting in the streets practicing
in the manner of the great early Greek astrologers. But in India you
still can. If you’re really serious about learning
Vedic astrology, one day you should travel to India. Yes, it's a
country with over a billion people in a country not much bigger
than Texas, most of whom are just trying to survive in highly polluted,
impoverished conditions. But what we see today is not what India’s
been. For instance, did you know:
India was once the richest empire on earth, at about 3000 BC, with
cities more technologically advanced than most in Europe till the
time of the Renaissance!
The early Vedic sages invented the number system, the decimal system,
algebra, trigonometry, calculus, and the value of pi.
Albert Einstein said “We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught
us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery
could have been made."
In recent history: the creator of the Pentium chip was Vinod Dham;
the co-founder of Sun Microsystems was Vinod Khosla; the creator
of the hotmail email system was Sabeer Bhatia; and the GM of Hewlett
Packard is Rajiv Gupta – all from India.
Will Durant, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, said, "It
is true that, even across the Himalayan barrier, India has sent
to the West such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables,
hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system."
Mark Twain said, “India is the cradle of the human race,
the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother
of legend and the great grand mother of tradition.”
Sage Parashara - Father of Vedic Astrology By knowing
some of these facts and quotes you realize that India is not just
a country of slouches. India definitely has an illustrious past
which can be seen by the living traditions that still exist in Vedic
astrology, ayurvedic medicine, vastu (architecture), Sanskrit, music,
dance, yoga, systems of worship etc.
You can find living masters today in each of these traditions who
will give you a curriculum that will keep you busy for the rest
of your life. These traditions can be traced to long lineages back
to revered sages or rishis who formulated their respective systems
directly from intuitive knowledge gained from meditative insight.
There are two main systems of Vedic astrology practiced today: Parashari
and Jaimini, which were developed by the sages Parashara and Jaimini
respectively. The sage Parashara is said to be the 'Father of Vedic
astrology' who recorded the main principles of vedic astrology or
Jyotish, the science of light, into the classic Sanskrit
text known as the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra. This forms
the basis for the entire Parashari system, which is by far the most
widely used in India and the world today.
R. Santhanam and
Vaughn Paul, December 1992
Journey to India – R. Santhanam
In 1992, on my first trip to India, I studied with the late R.
Santhanam in New Delhi who translated the Brihat Parashara Hora
Shastra of Sage Parashara into English.
Since you’ve probably heard horrifying tales of travelers
abroad to India I’ll spare you a lot of the unnecessary details
of trying to get around in India. However, I will say that even
though I had made contact with R. Santhanam before leaving the United
States and was given detailed directions to his house it still took
me a hair raising 3 hour rickshaw ride fighting through unbelievably
noisy and chaotic traffic and getting lost repeatedly to find it!
Unmarked intersection
to R. Santhanam's house
If I hadn’t called James Braha, who wrote about his
experiences with R. Santhanam in his book Astro Logos, before leaving
I would not have been prepared. Fortunately the ordeal was worth it.
Santhanam had cleared his schedule for four whole days so that I could
study with him and I was thrilled! I brought blank tapes, notebooks
and about 30 charts of people I knew well and we spent about 8-10
hours a day together. While pouring endless refills of chai,
he easily described past events with each chart and told me how
he had come to those conclusions. He knew my brother was in space
engineering and a comedian, my sister was a school teacher, and
my parents divorced when I was 6. He knew my friends had difficulty
trying to conceive a child, and he knew my sister in law was just
about to have a child! He told me that my dharma was to be a Vedic
astrologer. He also predicted that I would later get a degree in
psychology, which I had no plans to do at the time, and integrate
Vedic astrology with psychology. Both of these predictions, as well
as others, have come to pass.
The most astonishing prediction was the one he made regarding my best
friend who at that time had just become a monk in the Mata Amritanandamayi
mission. He said that he would be getting married by 2002, which was
the farthest thing from his mind! It wasn’t till he met his
fiancée in 2000 that I realized Santhanam could be right! They
later got married just as he had predicted almost 10 years in advance!
Discovering The Sage Parashara Temple
Later, on my most recent trip in 2000 I had an unexpected glimpse
into the ancient Vedic astrology tradition when I was on a pilgrimage
in the Himalayas en route to Gangotri, the source of India’s
holiest river – the Ganges. We were staying at a hot springs
called Ganganani, which is a popular resting stop along the way towards
Gangotri. I decided to have a look around and came across a very small
temple just up the hill from the hot springs pool. Since I could read
the Sanskrit script I was amazed to read “Parashara Ashram.”
Ganganani hot springs
with Sage Parashara temple above
I asked whoever spoke some English about the origins of the place
and found out that that very spot was where the great sage Parashara,
the father of Vedic astrology, had lived the last 30 years of his
life, many thousands of years ago! The little temple had a stone
that was said to have been the one he sat on during meditation and
a small statue of the sage.
Inside the Sage Parashara temple
Sometimes when you read about these great sages who are said
to have intuited entire complex systems in meditation it’s easy
to feel as though they’re more like mythic characters than real
people. But to have been able to sit in that temple and pick up on
the feeling of reverence that the priest and local people had for
the sage it somehow became real that India does have an incredibly
vast and vibrant living tradition.
View
Himalayan pilgrimage photos
Copyright
2010. Vaughn Paul Manley. All Rights Reserved. |
