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 from the 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 studying
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.
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