Pankaj Jain 🖖

Everyone knows the Rigveda is the oldest book of India. Almost nobody knows what a computer scientist from Srinagar found hiding inside its table of contents. This is that story.... @subhash_kak Ji is a prof. of computer science at Oklahoma State. 1 of the 2 known methods of quantum cryptography comes from him. But his most unusual work is a discovery he calls the astronomical code of the Rigveda. Start with the fire altar, described in the Shatapatha Brahmana down to the last stone. It is enclosed by 360 stones: 21 for the earth, 78 for the atmosphere, 261 for the sky. It holds 10,800 ordinary bricks, which is exactly the number of muhurtas in a year of 360 days. And the same text says the Rigveda has 432,000 syllables. 432,000 is 40 x 10,800. The book is being described as an altar built out of verses. Now look at 261, the sky number. The sun appears about half a degree wide in our sky. Count its own diameters from horizon to horizon and you get ~339. Subhash Ji calls these sun-steps. Take the mean of 339 and 183, the half-year, and you land exactly on 261. The altar's sky number. Then Subhash Ji did something nobody had tried. He arranged the 10 books of the Rigveda in layers, like an altar. The Rigveda has 1,028 hymns / 1,017 without the 11 Valakhilya hymns that the tradition itself treats as a later supplement. Arrange the books as an altar and this is what falls out: - Books 4, 6, 8 and 9, the spine, hold exactly 339 hymns. The sun-step number. - Books 1 and 10 hold 382, which is 339 + 43. - Books 2, 3, 5 and 7 hold 296, which is 339 - 43. - And 43 is the hymn count of Book 2 itself. - Books 5 and 7 add to 191, which is the count of both Book 1 and Book 10. - The full count is 1,017, which is 339 x 3. - He counts 216 hymn groups. 216 is 2 x 108. The Jaiminiya Grhyasutra says plainly: Mercury is Vishnu. Vishnu's most famous feat in the Rigveda is measuring the universe in 3 strides. Subhash Ji's reading: divide the sky's 261 days by the 3 strides and you get 87 days. Mercury's actual year is 88 days. And 3 of Mercury's cycles through the sky, 118 days each in the code, give 354 days, the lunar year. The hymn says 2 of Vishnu's steps are visible to men, but the 3rd is beyond the flight of birds. Mercury is the hardest planet to spot precisely because it never strays far from the sun's glare. The code does not stop there. The Vedanga Jyotisha, the astronomy manual of the same world, counts the moon rising 1,768x in a yuga of 1,830 days. Divide and you get the moon rising every 24 hours and 50.5 minutes. I do not know if all of this was design. But when the spine of the altar of books adds up to the number of steps the sun takes across the sky, I find it hard to call it an accident. Anyone with a calculator can check every number here in one evening. That, to me, is the most stunning part. Source: Subhash Kak, The Astronomical Code of the Rgveda (3rd edition); S. Kak, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1995 and 1996. Photo 1: The 10,800 brick count = a year's muhurtas (p.75). Photo 2: Shatapatha Brahmana 10.4.2.23-24, the Rigveda as 432,000 syllables (p.89). Photo 3: The 1,017 hymn total and Subhash Ji's 339x3 reading - note he frames it as "we choose to view", i.e. his interpretation, not a count stated in the text (p.99). Also has his own Books 4-8 graph figure. Photo 4: The Mercury-Vishnu identification - 3 revolutions in 261 sky days, so 87 days (p.110).