The Krishna Key

by Ashwin Sanghi

‘That’s because the manual describes in precise detail the building of a Smashaanachitha—a funeral altar. The Mastaba of Djoser, built around 2700 BCE, is an inverted Vedic funeral altar down to the very last detail,’ said Kurkude triumphantly. ‘But how did that happen?’ asked Saini. ‘All construction needed geometry and it was the Vedas that gave the world geometry,’ explained Kurkude. ‘The present English word, geometry, is derived from a Greek root which itself was derived from a Sanskrit word—Jyamiti. In Sanskrit, jya means an arc or a curve and miti means the correct perception or measurement. The prayer in the Egyptian Book of the Dead is more or less identical to the Taittiriya Samhita, which prescribes the invocations to be used at a funeral altar. It says “May we gain prosperity in the world of our fathers.” Uncanny, wouldn’t you say? The world deludes itself into believing that it was Pythagoras who gave us the famous theorem regarding the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle but the Baudhayana Sulbasutra, which was written five hundred years before Pythagoras, states that a rope stretched along the length of a diagonal line produces an area which the vertical and horizontal sides make together. So who invented the Pythagoras theorem—Pythagoras or Baudhayana?’ ‘You mean that Pythagoras got it from the Vedas?’ asked Saini. ‘Don’t take my word for it. The French philosopher Voltaire was the one who vehemently declared, “Pythagoras went to the Ganges to learn geome...