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Notion Of Circular Flat Earth In Jaina Cosmogrphy
Sajjan Singh Lishk & S.D. Sharma Dept. of physics, Punjab Uuiversity Patiala (Punjab)
Many ancient nations had cosmological and cosmographical notions that may appear to us to be strange. Anaxagoras believed that the sun was a blazing mass of metal as big as Greece. The Egyptians believed the earth to be rectang ular like their country. The ancient Japanese thought that heaven is round and earth square. Jainas thought that earth was made up of a series of flat concentric rings of land masses surrounded by concentric ocean rings. The central island of the earth was Jambudvipa. This notion was closely related to their peculiar theory of two suns, two moons and two sets of nakshatras. Such a tentative model of the cosmos was the outcome, as the writer of this article emphasises, of their striving for a scientific formulation of the description of the real world.
Man has been continuously striving for a formulation of concepts which will permit description of the real world in mathematical terms. Consequently there was no dearth of any strange type of cosmological and 1
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cosmographical notions among all ancient nations. The earth was supposed to be cake-shaped by Anaximander (611-546 B.C.) and to be surrounded by a sphere of air outside which there was a sphere of fire. Pythagoreans supposed the universe to consist of separate concentric spheres of crystal which respectively carried along by their rotation the moon, the sun, each of five planets and the whole body of the fixed stars; and these spheres in their rapid motion emitted a music to be perceived and sensed only by those endowed with faculties. Anaxagoras (C. 500-428 B.C.) of Klazomenae also believed that the Sun was a mass of blazing metal as big as Greece and the heavenly bodies in general were masses of rock.1 It is also said that Anaximander of Miletus had suggested about 550 B. C. that men lived on the surface of a cylinder that was
1. Taylor, F. Sherwood, A Short
History of Science (1940), p. 66. The Scientific Book Club, 111 Charing Cross Road, W.C. 2, London,
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