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Opinion | The Mathematics Of The Gita

15 0
28.07.2025

The Gita is a literary masterpiece. When I say literary, I am not including its remarkable exposition of the various Indian darshanas and their integration into a coherent vision, or its rhetoric, or the spiritual stepwise evolution experienced by the seeker who dives into it and adheres to it from beginning to end.

I bring to your attention an aspect of the Gita that is often ignored. Its symphonic structure conceived in 700 shlokas is an expression of what Sri Aurobindo called complex harmonies. Its structure of independent shlokas that are strung together through the various means of rhythm, internal referencing, refrains, and a didactic and dialogic process that builds up chapter by chapter creates a kaleidoscopic experience that is fluid, alive, and constantly fresh. My soon-to-be-released book The Literary Genius of the Gita explores this aspect of the scripture.

But there is another more esoteric and hidden aspect that might be worth exploring. That is its mathematical structure of matrix-like configurations that too has hitherto been ignored. The present essay is an attempt to explore this characteristic of its poetry.

It may be worth mentioning here that the tradition of Sanskrit poetry, as shown by Pingala in Chhanda Shastra, is unique that its letters or varnas can be arranged in a binomial pattern. That is, the short syllables are assigned a value of 1 and the longer syllables a value of 2. When the varnas are represented by their mathematical value, we see interesting patterns emerge that were described by him in detail as an aspect of Sanskrit prosody. The only other language that assigns a mathematical structure to its phonemes that I know of is Hebrew especially in the Kabbalistic traditions.

Modern mathematical structures such as Pascal’s triangle and Fibonacci numbers were described by Pingala in his Meru Prastara couple of millennia ago. How far can we explore this today with artificial intelligence? Recently a write-up was published by Thomas Kissel in the journal Greek Reporter with the title ‘Greek Philosopher Plato’s Secret Code Discovered and Solved, Historian Claims’. It claims that there is a code of musical pattern buried in........

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