It was a bright spring day, when the vaṭakinī mahotsava was being celebrated. Several families from the town were arriving early in the morning at a shrine, which contained a gigantic image of the terrible ape Hanūmat. Even as Somakhya arrived with his family he saw his classmate Lootika, with whom he had recently made acquaintance at the Padmāvatī-caitya, arriving arriving at the shrine with her family. The two of them high-fived on meeting each other but conscious of their families watching kept to their own respective groups. Soon they all assembled at the enclosure before the idol and the arcaka performed the ritual of abhiṣeka with milk, honey and various other substances before the final lustration with water. Then each family had to wait for their turn for their personalized session where the image of the great simian was garlanded with their personal offerings. Some offered a garland of vaṭaka-s with a central hole, yet others were offering garlands of jahāngiri-s and still others garlands of laḍḍuka-s made of a legume’s paste. It was a wait of several hours before that would be done. In the meantime some families participated in listening to a narration of the sundarakāṇḍa, others took part in a saṃskṛta-saṃbhāṣaṇa-śibiram, and yet others in cooking food to offer to poverty-stricken people. The youngsters were playing various games. However, Somakhya did not feel like joining them. Instead sat for a while with his parents hearing the sundarakāṇḍa but he was not too inspired by the lack of the vīra-rasa and the melodramatic bhakti of the bhāgavata. Hence, he got up and wandered away to see what his friends were up to. Vidrum who was playing marbles with some others called out to him to join them but that day his mind was not in the game, and he wandered away after watching for a minute or two. Then he saw some other acquaintances playing a kandūka-krīḍā but he was again disinclined to join them. As he wandered towards the river adjacent to the shrine he saw Lootika’s sisters and other girls playing a childish game with much enthusiasm. Finally, he wandered past two vīrakal-s of dead heroes and reached an enormous aśvattha at the edge of the shrine’s campus. Beneath it were several Nāgas and on the rim of the circular platform around it he saw Lootika seated. Noting her to be engrossed in a book he let her be and proceeded to the wall near the river from where he saw several dinosaurs cackling and screaming in or by the water. Then he saw a vāhana of the great god Kumāra jump off a tree and course into the sky the in full glory. This brought to his mind a mantra from the Ṣaṇmukha-kalpa – he felt it was some kind of signal and started walking back. As he passed the sprawling aśvattha Lootika called out to him.
Seated beside her under the great tree he asked: “Not engaging something more physical like your sisters? What are you reading?”
Lootika: “Actually my limbs are still aching from five hour climb up Candragupta Maurya’s western precipice yesterday. Hence, I thought I would finish off reading the fourth of the śūlapuruṣa-s.”
S: Which śūlapuruṣa? I remember you mentioning Herr Nietzsche before…”
L: “Well, I have covered Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler. Though we routinely study Karl Gauss as part of our education in mathematics and science, I am only now taking in his biography – he is the fourth of the śūlapuruṣa-s”.
S: “Reading biographies of scientists serves more than one useful purpose. First, it lets us gain an estimate of where exactly we stand with respect to their deeds. In this regard Gauss is an unscalable peak in the realm of science and mathematics; perhaps in times closer to our own only Śrīnivāsa Rāmānuja could have come close. May be a thousand Newtons.”
L: “Indeed. Reading and thinking about these mleccha-s, the four śūlapuruṣa-s in particular, has brought forth many disparate questions some potentially deep and others shallow. Among others, the parallels and contrasts between the scientist and the philosopher among the mleccha-s as well as our own midst strikes me. I wanted to talk to you about these things.”
S: “Pray proceed.”
L: “What do you think of Gauss’s aphorism in Latin – ‘pauca sed matura (Few but ripe)’ . Is this the correct approach to science?”
S: “Today we are often confronted with ‘pūrṇa-kara iva khara-viṣṭāḥ |’ in science. In this atmosphere, this is indeed a sound approach, especially for those who do science for merely for the sake of fluffing up their publication count – saying little new but appearing in possession of a big CV. On the other hand it is misused by the cartel which runs the magazines to slow down and prevent publication of what is really good science. Looking at what a man does often reveals more than his motto. After all, in real life Gauss himself provided the counter-example. He published two immensely dense books and papers amounting to at least 12 sizable volumes. So his motto was certainly no obstacle to his productivity; hence, if we have a lot to say there is no harm putting down a lot on paper. Moreover, given that today science is done by the mleccha-rIti, we should be ready to move fast to strike before our bhrātṛvyas.”
L: “One thing which caught my attention is in regard to the little that we know of the peculiar philosophical positions of Gauss. Among these was his alteration of a statement of Plato recorded by Plutarch ‘ἀεὶ ὁ θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ (the god always always geometrizes)’ to ‘ἀεὶ ὁ θεὸς ἀριθμετἰζεῖ (the god always arithmeticizes)’. In our days, with computers being an inseparable part of our lives, one might be inclined to say: ‘saṃkhyānti nityaṃ devāḥ | (the gods always compute)’. It appears that Gauss privileging arithmetic over geometry might be a step in the direction of eventually seeing the ultimate action of the gods as being one of computation. Perhaps, it was reflection of his own capacity for enormous calculations and algorithmic thinking as seen in his algorithm for π. It also seems to me that our people arrived at something closer this position than that of our yavana cultural cousins. After all, though we display geometry of some sophistication and intricacy in our śrauta rituals, we arrive at it not so much by geometrizing but via an algorithmic back-end intensive on computation. What can be more distinctive than the way the yavana arrives at 
S: “Gauss’s favoring of ‘arithmetic’ at first sight does appears like a step in the direction of: ‘nityaṃ hi devāḥ saṃkhyānti na kṣetraṃ pragaṇayantīti |’. But it appears that our position was much more of the pure form of it than that of Gauss. For us it would seem that all emerges via an algorithmic process; mathematics itself is subservient to and a limb of the algorithmic process, even as the śrauta ritual and bhāṣā were produced via computational processes. However, what we see on part of Gauss is a much greater status accorded to arithmetized mathematics. After all he remarked to Bessel, another man close the pinnacle of scientific capacity: ‘all the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.’ Thus, Gauss places the measurements, which form the basis of science as we know, below the ‘science of eternal truths’, which is mathematics. Here perhaps he is closer to the Platonists than to us.”
L: “Somakhya, we can clearly apprehend certain things to be computational processes. The development of a multicellular organism can be seen as computation performed by transcription factors on DNA sequence. We can also see the maintenance of particular gene expression states as computation performed by enzymes writing and erasing modifications on histone tails or DNA in chromatin coupled with reader proteins that recognize them. One can also imagine other forms of computations taking place more generally in the whole universe: after all if space and time are quantized then reality is amenable to being conceived as a series computations performed on these discrete units. Then the question would emerge if there is a need at all for the θεὸς in all this.”
S: “If indeed the whole universe were a computer, as it seems likely to people like us, then we may say that the fundamental aspect of it is information which impinges on and underlies existence. This information is what one might be inclined to assign to the realm of the θεὸς. In our old sāṃkhya thought this underlying information is an essential foundation of the universe in the form of the guṇa known as sattva; of the two other guṇa-s, energy maps to rajas and mass to tamas. The deva-s were seen as manifestations of that underlying information the sattva: thus one may see them as the limbs of the code that operates the universe-computer. In this conception one might say we are the ones closer to the Platonists. But there is no place for the θεὸς outside of the universe-computer, as Gauss, due the vāsana-s of the preta-delusion might have imagined.”
L: “Hence, it would seem to me that when those entities of the underlying universe-code impinge on the physical world we see them as manifestations of the deva-s as praised in the veda; when they impinge on our phenomenal world we see them as the devatā of the mantra or the mantra itself. The latter aspect appears to play a larger role in the tantra-s.”
S: “Lootika, we may with some caution accept that to be the siddhānta.”
L: “Gauss seems to accept something like a śuddha-bhuvanādhvan (pure worlds) beyond this physical world where the one might rest after cessation in the physical world. But his certainty in this regard despite admitting the absence of a ‘rigorous scientific basis’ in notable. Let me read out his words to you:
‘In this world there is a pleasure of the intellect, which is satisfied in science, and a pleasure of the heart, which consists principally of the fact that human beings mutually ease the troubles and burdens of life. But if it is the job of the highest being to shape creatures on special spheres and to let them exist 80 or 90 years in order to prepare such a pleasure for them, then that would be a miserable plan. Whether the soul lives 80 years or 80 million years, if it perishes once, then this space of time is only a reprieve. One is therefore forced to the view, for which there is so much evidence even though without rigorous scientific basis, that besides this material world another, second, purely spiritual world order exists, with just as many diversities as that in which we live – we are to participate in it.’
Now let me read out what he writes in a letter to his friend Bolyai:
‘It is true, my life is adorned with much that the world considers worthy of envy. But believe me, dear Bolyai, the austere sides of life, at least of mine, which move through it like a red thread, and which one faces more and more defenselessly in old age, are not balanced to the hundredth part by the pleasurable. I will gladly admit that the same fates which have been so hard for me to bear, and still are, would have been much easier for many another person, but the mental constitution belongs to our ego, which the creator of our existence has given us, and we can change little in it. On the other hand I find that this consciousness of the nothingness of life, which in any case the greater part of humanity must express on approaching the goal, offers me the strongest security for the following of a more beautiful metamorphosis.’
continued…
Filed under: art, Heathen thought, Life Tagged: ancient Hindu thought, Gauss, Nietzsche, philosophy, Schopenhauer, science, Spengler, Story
