Invention of
Zero “Contribution from India”
The Indian
system of counting is probably the most successful intellectual innovation ever
devised by human beings. It has been universally adopted.The Indian zero symbol
found its way to Europe, primarily through Spain,via the channel of Arab
culture. The Arabs had close trading links with India which exposed them to the
mathematical skills of Indian reckoning. Gradually, they incorporated the
Indian zero into the notation of their own sophisticated system of mathematics
and philosophy .In AD 773 the Caliph of Baghdad received a copy of a
150-year-old Indian astronomical manual, Brahmasphutasiddhanta (the ‘Improved
Astronomical Textbook of Brahma’), which used Indian numerals and place-value
notation with a zero.
In AD 628,
the Indian astronomer Brahmagupta defined zero in this way and spelled out the
algebraic rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying and, most strikingly of
all, dividing with it. For example, “When sunya is added to a number or
subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged; and a number multiplied
by sunya becomes sunya.” .We have seen that our numerical zero derives
originally from the Hindu sunya, meaning void or emptiness, deriving from the
Sanskrit name for the mark denoting emptiness, or sunya-bindu, meaning an empty
dot. These developed between the sixth and eighth centuries. By the ninth
century, the assimilation of Indian mathematics by the Arab world led to the
literal translation of sunya into Arabic as assifr, which also means ‘empty’ or
the ‘absence of anything’. Remarkably, he also defines infinity as the number
that results from dividing any other number by zero and sets up a general
system of rules for multiplying and dividing positive and negative quantities.
Bindu is
used to describe the most insignificant geometrical object, a single point or a
circle shrunk down to its centre where it has no finite extent. Literally, it
signifes just a ‘point’, but it symbolises the essence of the Universe before
it materialised into the solid world of appearances that we experience. It
represents the uncreated Universe from which all things can be created. This
creative potential was revealed by means of a simple analogy. For, by its
motion, a single dot can generate lines, by whose motion can be generated
planes, by whose motion can be generated all of threedimensional space around
us. The bindu was the Nothing from which everything could flow.
This
conception of generation of something from Nothing led to the use of the bindu
in a range of meditational diagrams. In the Tantric tradition the meditator
must begin by contemplating the whole of space, before being led, shape by
shape, towards a central convergence of lines at a focal point.The inverse
meditational route convergence of lines at a focal point.The inverse
meditational route can also be followed, beginning with the point and moving
outwards to encompass everything, where the intricate geometrical constructions
of the Sriyantra are created to focus the eye and the mind upon the convergent
and divergent paths that link its central point to the great beyond.
The Indian
culture regarded Nothing as a state from which one might have come and to which
one might return indeed these transitions might occur many times, without
beginning and without end. Where Western religious traditions sought to flee
from nothingness.
