Excerpt from "Hindu Astrology"

I first became interested in astrology during my teens, when a family friend staying with us for a few weeks turned out to be a person who allowed her life to be ruled by astrology. This made me conscious of the fact that astrology can be a very serious matter. That was the case for an individual.

But, in 1956, having taken a degree in mathematics and doing some research in theoretical physics, I came to India, and discovered that astrology can also be taken very seriously by groups, and indeed by societies and cultures. Intrigued, I started reading about Indian astronomy and astrology. One of my first journeys in India was to visit the 18th century observatories built by Maharaja Sawai Singh II in Jaipur and Delhi.

Working as a college teacher of mathematics in Bengal, Kerala, and then Delhi, gave me a chance to understand the contributions of different parts of the country. I discovered that the way astrology had developed in India was a story still largely untold. Many important facts were lying around on the surface, waiting to be picked up. I began reading Sanskrit with the help of colleagues in the Sanskrit department of St Stephen’s College, Delhi.

For the earliest stages of Indian astrology and astronomy I read a number of Vedic works in English translations starting with the Rig Veda. I also went through the Rig Veda, and later the Taittiriya Brahmana, in the original Sanskrit, looking for key words and passages. With increasing material at hand, it became clear that, initially at least, Tantric astrology formed a separate school. Also, there were hints that the well-known astrological system of Ashtottari dasa was of Tantric origin. It was therefore with great excitement that I found in the Kalacakra Tantra the earliest account I had seen of this system. Step by step the various stages in the development of Indian astrology began to fall into place.

But why this interest in historical details? Does not this divert one’s attention from timeless truths to irrelevant fluctuations? That is not so here. If one wants to know, as I did, what sort of a subject astrology is, that is at least one question which can never be answered properly without invoking history. Recent philosophy of science, associated with the name of Professor Sir Karl Raimund Popper, has shown us that the question of whether something is a science, is decided by looking at the way it develops in time. (Science develops by trying to refute its own theories.) So, there is no escape from considering the history of astrology.

This does not mean that we shall have to concentrate in this book on minute details of dating. Some astrological writers have mentioned or left good clues, in their work, about their own date and perhaps the dates of other astrological writers, and this is helpful; but for our present purposes, even the century to which Varahamihira belonged (for example), although not unimportant, is certainly less important than his position in time relative to other writers. Similarly, the question whether certain systems of Indian astrology originated outside India or not, is less important for the present book than their place within Indian astrology.

This book, then, is not a book for scholars only, although its statements are backed up with references and Sanskrit quotations. Because astrology deals with basic human needs, and is of interest to the general public, the topics dealt with in this book have been selected with an eye both to astrologers and to the general interested reader.

After this introductory chapter, the next two chapters document some important changes which have appeared in Indian astrology over the centuries. My personal experience has been that historical studies of this sort throw a flood of light on the nature of astrology. The fourth chapter explores the system of yugas, manvantaras, kalpas, and so on, which form the traditional Indian framework for viewing the past. Chapter 5 begins a series of five chapters on various aspects of the origins of Indian astrology. These include questions such as: Why do some astrologers achieve good success at sometimes but not at others?

Dr. Stone, was a mathematics graduate, with a PhD in theoretical physics, both from the University of Oxford. He arrived in India in 1956, and taught mathematics at colleges in Bengal, Kerala, and Delhi. He became intrigued with the Hindu obsession of astrology and learned Hindi at Delhi University and Sanskrit at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan to understand the subject, specifically for the purpose of reading the source documents in their original language. Dr Stone went on to write this authoritative book. He was accepted as a Fellow of the Indian Association for History and Philosophy of Sciences, and Life Member of the Indian Mathematical Society and of the Indian Society for the History of Mathematics.