D. WUJASTYK SCIENCE AND VEDIC STUDIES ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the issue of how science and history of science may help or be helped by Vedic studies. The conclusions drawn are that: 1. Vedic studies are important for the history of Indian science; 2. Modern science, in particular physics, is not a useful source of philosophical ideas that confirm aspects of Vedic studies; 3. Vedic studies will not contribute to modern scientific research; and 4. Vedic studies are nevertheless centrally important for an understanding of Indian history and culture in general. 1. SCIENCE IN THE VEDA The knowledge of a country’s history and past cultural and scientific achievements is a central part of its self-consciousness. India is unique in having unbroken cultural traditions reaching back almost four thousand years. Those traditions have changed and evolved, but much ancient practice and belief survives even today in India: the brahmin priest still murmurs prayers from the second millennium BC; the villager cleans his tongue with a scraper described in medical texts from the time of the Buddha. Since science is such an important, even defining, element of modern international culture it is natural to seek India’s historical contribution to this field. The contribution is there, and it is real. During the latter part of the second millennium BC, the eastward migrations of the Indo-European peoples reached South Asia. 1 The ritual liturgy of these peoples was memorized wholesale by families of hereditary priests. By extraordinary feats of memory and tradition 1028 of these hymns have reached us today in much the same form as they existed circa 1200 BC. This body of Sanskrit liturgical literature is called veda, ‘the knowledge’. 2 The subject matter of these hymns is religious and includes the praise and worship of the gods, and prayers for health, long life, and many sons. From these hymns, we are able to deduce obliquely some information about health, healing and other sciences in these early times. It must be stressed that there is no such thing as ‘Vedic Science’ in any unified sense. What we can do is scour the surviving liturgical texts for insights into the scientific thinking of the time. Historians of science have found in these texts, and in the commentarial and explanatory literature that grew around them, important information on traditional Journal of Indian Philosophy 26: 335–345, 1998. c 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.