We all know how important zero is to the functioning of this modern world and enough has already been said about the origin of it. The zero as we see it today - the pristine effortless simple shape which is mastered by even kindergarten kids in a day or two was once beyond the comprehension of our ancestors. something could represent nothing was nothing short of a miracle in human history. zero wasn't just another number to the number system. it was the anchor for other numbers to recycle itself over and over again to mean different things without being complicated.
But unlike other numbers zero has a broader aspect to it than its mere numerical value. To comprehend the idea of zero in its entirety we might need to alter our perception towards the world. It demands an altered vision of reality. And it is this unique perspective that it demands to unveil itself made it exclusively accessible to the east back at its origin. But this is not to say other civilizations never had zero. in fact, Mayans and Babylonians have their own share of the story of zero. But the zero in all its glory, the number in its own right that we see today; the zero that has become one of the lifebloods of our digital world was conceived in the east and to be precise in India.
So to understand what leverage east had over west that got them zero, we might have to first understand the difference in the perceptions they had for reality. well, the way we see the world today regardless of which side it is now is very binary. everything seems to be drawn with definite contrast. there are no shades. no middle way. We tend to organize perceived reality in terms of opposites: day-night, light-dark, hot-cold, male-female, good-evil, life-death and so forth. and what it does is that such perception constricts us to a very limited reality. like the one we are suffering from now, chauvinism - you are either patriot or downright terrorist. you are either with me or against me. And we go on to dichotomize everything in the world, depriving us of the beauties of ambiguities, the elegance of subtleties and sometimes even leaving us blind to the immense possibilities, one that could have been zero.
So back in the days, the concrete mind of the ancient Greeks could not conceive the void as a number, let alone endow the void with a symbol and its because they couldn't wrap their head around the fact that the emptiness in itself could be an entity. Their idea of the world and universe, in general, was based on corporeal reality much of which was derived by linear logic and ascertained by contradictory relationships. if something is true then there is no way that it can be not true. In fact, this idea underlies what in mathematics we call the law of the excluded middle which was first established by Aristotle whose assertion was that "it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing." There is no middle ground between true and not true. The very definition of “A” is that it is not “not A, Something cannot be both.
But unlike the west, in the east, there was a gradation to the truth or falsity. it had more nuances. for any state of affairs, there were four possibilities instead of two. it could either be true or false or both true and false or neither true nor false. This originates from Buddhist philosophy called Catuskoti means four corners. It was employed particularly by Nagarjuna, the most important and influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself. who developed it and engaged it as a 'learning and meditative portal to realize the sunyata which means emptiness. it is a common practice among Buddhists that when they meditate they begin with counting one as they breathe in and 2 as they breathe out eventually slipping into the deep meditative state which is the void or If could put a name to it now would be zero.
But unlike other numbers zero has a broader aspect to it than its mere numerical value. To comprehend the idea of zero in its entirety we might need to alter our perception towards the world. It demands an altered vision of reality. And it is this unique perspective that it demands to unveil itself made it exclusively accessible to the east back at its origin. But this is not to say other civilizations never had zero. in fact, Mayans and Babylonians have their own share of the story of zero. But the zero in all its glory, the number in its own right that we see today; the zero that has become one of the lifebloods of our digital world was conceived in the east and to be precise in India.
So to understand what leverage east had over west that got them zero, we might have to first understand the difference in the perceptions they had for reality. well, the way we see the world today regardless of which side it is now is very binary. everything seems to be drawn with definite contrast. there are no shades. no middle way. We tend to organize perceived reality in terms of opposites: day-night, light-dark, hot-cold, male-female, good-evil, life-death and so forth. and what it does is that such perception constricts us to a very limited reality. like the one we are suffering from now, chauvinism - you are either patriot or downright terrorist. you are either with me or against me. And we go on to dichotomize everything in the world, depriving us of the beauties of ambiguities, the elegance of subtleties and sometimes even leaving us blind to the immense possibilities, one that could have been zero.
So back in the days, the concrete mind of the ancient Greeks could not conceive the void as a number, let alone endow the void with a symbol and its because they couldn't wrap their head around the fact that the emptiness in itself could be an entity. Their idea of the world and universe, in general, was based on corporeal reality much of which was derived by linear logic and ascertained by contradictory relationships. if something is true then there is no way that it can be not true. In fact, this idea underlies what in mathematics we call the law of the excluded middle which was first established by Aristotle whose assertion was that "it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing." There is no middle ground between true and not true. The very definition of “A” is that it is not “not A, Something cannot be both.
Recommended Book "Finding Zero"
But unlike the west, in the east, there was a gradation to the truth or falsity. it had more nuances. for any state of affairs, there were four possibilities instead of two. it could either be true or false or both true and false or neither true nor false. This originates from Buddhist philosophy called Catuskoti means four corners. It was employed particularly by Nagarjuna, the most important and influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself. who developed it and engaged it as a 'learning and meditative portal to realize the sunyata which means emptiness. it is a common practice among Buddhists that when they meditate they begin with counting one as they breathe in and 2 as they breathe out eventually slipping into the deep meditative state which is the void or If could put a name to it now would be zero.
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