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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
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