Vedanga Jyotisha

Vedanga Jyotisha (IAST: Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa), or Jyotishavedanga (Jyotiṣavedāṅga), is one of earliest known Indian texts on astrology (Jyotisha). The extant text is dated to the final centuries BCE, but it may be based on a tradition reaching back to about 700-600 BCE.

Quotes

• Like the crests on the heads of peacocks, like the gems on the hoods of the cobras, mathematics is at the top of the Vedanga sastras.
  • (Vedanga Jyotisa, 4) [1] [2] [3]

• Some scholars seem very unwilling to stray too far from the chronological security of the explicit statement in the Vedangajyotisa that places the vernal equinox in 10 degrees of Bharani, the winter solstice in the beginning of Sravistha, the summer solstice in the middle of Aslesa, and the autumnal equinox in 3 degrees of Visakhd. Astronomers have assigned this conjunction dates ranging from 1391 to 1181 B.C.E. (Keith [1912] 1967, 423) Even this text, since the time of Max Muller (1892, xxix) and despite containing such specific information regarding the position of all four equinoctial and solsticial points, has not been unanimously accepted as a reliable record of the second millennium B.C.E. Whitney, like Thibaut, also questions the correspondence of the naksatras mentioned in the Vedangajyotisa to the equal 1 3Vz degree divisions they de- noted in later times.
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12

• Accordingly, Kak (1994b) adjusts the latitude of thirty-five degrees to account for refraction, so that "after corrections are made this corresponds to a latitude of thirty-four degrees which is correct for northwest India to the North of the Sarasvati valleys" (101). Since this ratio is applicable to Northwest India, he considers it perfectly acceptable to propose that the Vedangajyotisa could have been composed in this latitude. This view has received support from Yukio Ohashi (1997), who believes that "it is clear that this formula is based on the observation in North India" and more specifically the "Kashmir area, and much north of the basin of the Ganga River which was the central area in post-Vedic period [sic]." According to yet another astronomer, Narahari Achar, "It does not follow that India borrowed from Mesopotamia, or, for that matter, Mesopotamia borrowed from India; nothing precluded the possibility of parallel development in both countries independent of each other." More important, he notes that "a ratio of 2:1 for the duration of the longest day to the shortest day was used in the early days of Mesopotamia and was only modified to the value 3:2."39
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12