Jain Journal 1968 07

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 46

JAIN JOURNAL
Purāņa, there are seven islands and seven seas, the last one being a sea of sweet water. This in turn is surrounded by the golden land, suvarnamayi-bhumi which again is surrounded by the Lokāloka mountain and then the whole thing is wrapped by a crust giving the appearance of the surface of an egg. Beneath this are the seven nether lands (pātāla), the whole superstructure being supported by the tāmasa body of Visnu which is Anantanaga (the divine serpant) that holds the universe on its innumerable hoods.
Similar views of expressing the universe in terms of common-place objects also developed elsewhere. Thus with the people of ancient Egypt, the sky is a vast heavenly Nile, (the river in Egypt which was the craddle of their civilisation), along which the Sun God Ra sailed from the east to the west every day to return at night to his starting point through a subterranean abode of the dead. According to the Egyptian myth, the Sun-God Ra was occasionally thrown into eclipse when his boat was attacked by a great serpant.
The western world, however, obtained their rudiments of cosmology neither from the Orient nor from the near-East. Of greater interest to them was the primitive cosmology of Babylonia. From this were derived not only the rival cosmological views current during the dark age, but also the contemporary scientific view can trace its ancestry from Babylon. In the Babylonian view, the central earth is a great mountain, which is hollow underneath and is surrounded and supported by a vast ocean, beneath which is the abode of the dead. On top of the earth is the solid vault of heaven resting on mighty oceans and separating the upper waters from the lower. Across this vast heavenly vault move the sun, the moon and the celestial stars.
The Greek physical science had its genesis in the Mediterranean colonies in the 6th century B.C., when the most outstanding name is Thales of Miletus. During the next two hundred years, it flourished on the mainland of Hellas and then it migrated to Alexandria which henceforth became a great centre of scientific studies. Now, throughout the main line of development from Thales of Miletus in the 6th century B.C. to Ptolemy of Alexandria (150 A.D.), for about seven hundred years, it was taken for granted that the earth was the immobile centre of the universe around which the heavenly bodies daily rotated. With the exception of one or two celebrities like Heracleides and Aristarchus, about whom mention has been made earlier, the entire Greek world subscribed to the above view of a static earth. A notable addition to the above view was made by the idealistic philosophers like Pythagorus and Plato to the