Boudhayana

Tupur

Have you seen the yajnashala – the altar - made during any Hindu worship ceremony? Can you recall what its shape was? How long, how wide, how much high was it?

The ancient book named Krishnayajurveda tells us in detail about the shapes and sizes of the altars. But think of the ancient times of the sages and the maharajas; how could they build altars of different shapes and sizes in different seasons to worship various deities as directed in Krishnayajurveda?

Around 500 or 300 BC, there lived a mathematician, Boudhayana who wrote the techniques of building altars in his treatise Sulvasutra. He described all the methods with mastery in Geometry.

Sulvasutra has three different parts. Through 116 geometric principles described in the first part of Sulvasutra, Boudhayana has taught geometric processes to obtain proportionate length, breadth and width of an altar.

Once the basic geometry is taught in the first part, the second part of the book details the methods of constructing different types of altars used in domestic worships through 83 geometric principles.

The third part, through its 323 principles, told about methods of building of special types of altars.

Actually Sulvasutra is the sixth part of a larger treatise by Boudhayana. Five other parts are Shroutasutra consisting of 19 chapters describing the processes of sacrifices in vedic yajna, Karmantasutra comprising 20 chapters, Dwoidhasutra, Grihasutra and Dharmasutra each being compiled into 4 prasnas.

The most interesting aspect of Sulvasutra is that it contains all the lessons of our school geometry. Obviously it comprises derivatives from tenets of Euclidian geometry as well as hypothesis of Pythagoras, though Boudhayana himself gave the credit to Taitteriya Samhita for all his knowledge. Boudhayana thus had the knowledge and understanding of the basic tenets of Euclidian geometry as well as hypothesis of Pythagoras. Whether he learnt these from some source or he himself re-invented them on his own cannot be said but as the communication among various countries was very poor during those times it can be said that he created these basic principles independently.