Ancient Indian Cosmology
Richard Gombrich
Abstract
In 1835 Macaulay advocated English education as more likely to benefit Indians than what they could learn from their own traditional literature. Should the Government, he asked, ‘countenance, at public expense . . . geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’? On this point at least we may sympathise with Macaulay. Indian cosmology has not been a popular subject, even with modern Indologists. It does not lead anywhere. Its development had little or nothing to do with the achievements of Indian science; even Indian astronomy is conceptually separable from the rest of ancient Indian cosmology to a very large extent. 1 Moreover, it had no intimate connection with those currents of Indian religion which have attracted most attention in the West, and indeed been most successful in the East: Buddhism, the idealistic monism called advaita vedānta, and the devotional theism of bhakti. All these three movements, or complexes of movements, are soteriologies concerned with the individual’s moral and metaphysical makeup, and very largely indifferent to the physical universe outside him. But the most discouraging feature of traditional Indian cosmology is not its fantastic and uncritical character but its complexity. Indeed, the title of this paper imposes the unenviable task of outlining not one but four cosmologies. The earliest known Indian cosmology, the Vedic, is very different from the classical cosmologies which arose after the middle of the first millennium bc: the Hindu, the Buddhist and the Jain; and these three again, though not entirely unrelated, are quite distinct. Worse still, not one of these four major cosmological systems presents a single straightforward picture. Professor Kirfel’s book Die Kosmographie der Inder (see bibliography) has over 400 large pages with hardly anything more than bare quotations and tables, and it covers only cosmography, the spatial arrangements of the universe. Forced to a choice, I have decided to devote three-quarters of this paper to Vedic and Hindu cosmology, not because Buddhists and Jains are any less interesting, but simply because the vast majority of Indians are and have been Hindus.