Jain Journal 1969 01

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

Page 41

JANUARY, 1969
135
three parts and the Daksina Bharata into three parts. The northern three parts and the southern two leaving the central one are occupied by non-aryans. The Aryans live in the central portion of the southern part only,
14. Search for preferred position
Cosmology in India no matter whether with the Hindus or the Jainas entered into stagnation and there was no further growth. To the common people this is a branch of knowledge about which their interest is the least ; to the more erudite, the last word had already been said and so there was no need for any further investigation. For the latest knowledge on this subject, therefore, we have to rely exclusively on the work done by the western scholarship. Even in the West, with the onset of the dark age, cosmology was lost back into the primitive state from which the Greeks had raised it. With the rise of Scholasticism, the Hellenistic learning was brought back ; but beyond this the scholastics would not go. The break-through was initiated by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) in his monumental work De Revolutionibus (1543). In this, he deposed the Earth from its position as the centre of motion of the universe by establishing that the Earth is no more than a planet like any other and that all the planets in our neighbourhood move about the Sun. The views expressed by Copernicus being highly revolutionary were adopted only by a few in the succeeding generations and of these two, Thomas Digges and Giordano Bruno, took the further step of assuming an infinite universe populated with infinite number of worlds moving round innumerable Suns. These ideas were, however, much ahead of the time when they were propounded. In one point, however, Copernicus could not yet break from the Greek tradition, viz., in his assumption of the circular motion of the planets. After the death of Copernicus an exhaustive study in the motion of Mars made by Johann Kepler established an eclipse. Thus there was a two-fold advance so far, viz., first, the preferred position shifted from the Earth to the Sun and the second, there was a break from the artificial restriction to uniform circular motion imposed a priori by the Greeks.
The Copernican revolution may be said to have reached its completion with Galileo Galelei (1564-1642) when the telescope was invented. This not only revealed the satellites of Jupiter and the ring round Saturn but also definitely deprived the Earth of any claim to central location. This honour had temporarily gone in favour of the Sun but then the Sun was not recognised as the pivot for all heavenly bodies as the Earth had hitherto been. For, Galileo's resolution of the milky way into a great collection of stars paved the way in later observations to a subservient position for the Sun itself among all heavenly bodies,
AS.