Free Zero by Charles Seife Page B

Greece, but Rome’s power did not extend as far east as Alexander’s had. As a result, remote India was insulated from the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries AD .
    India was also insulated from Aristotle’s philosophy. Though Alexander had been tutored by Aristotle, and no doubt introduced India to Aristotelian ideas, the Greek philosophy never took hold. Unlike Greece, India never had a fear of the infinite or of the void. Indeed, it embraced them.
    The void had an important place in the Hindu religion. Hinduism had started off as a polytheistic religion, a set of tales about warrior gods and battles similar in many ways to the Greek mythos. However, over centuries—centuries before Alexander arrived—the gods began to merge together. While Hinduism retained its popular rituals and devotion to its pantheon, at its core Hinduism became monotheistic and introspective. All the gods became aspects of an all-encompassing god, Brahma. At about the same time that the Greeks were rising in the Western world, Hinduism was becoming less like the Western myths; the individual gods became less distinct and the religion became more and more mystical. The mysticism was patently Eastern.
    Like many Eastern religions, Hinduism was steeped in the symbolism of duality. (Of course, this idea occasionally came up in the Western world, where it was promptly branded as heretical. One example is the Manichaean heresy, which saw the world as being under the influence of equal and opposite sources of good and evil.) As with the yin and yang of the Far East and Zoroaster’s dualism of good and evil in the Near East, creation and destruction were intermingled in Hinduism. The god Shiva was both creator and destroyer of the world and was depicted with the drum of creation in one hand and a flame of destruction in another (Figure 13). However, Shiva also represented nothingness. One aspect of the deity, Nishkala Shiva, was literally the Shiva “without parts.” He was the ultimate void, the supreme nothing—lifelessness incarnate. But out of the void, the universe was born, as was the infinite. Unlike the Western universe, the Hindu cosmos was infinite in extent; beyond our own universe were innumerable other universes.

    Figure 13: Shiva’s dance
    At the same time, though, the cosmos never truly abandoned its original emptiness. Nothingness was what the world came from, and to achieve nothingness again became the ultimate goal of mankind. In one story, Death tells a disciple about the soul: “Concealed in the heart of all beings is the Atman, the Spirit, the Self,” he says. “Smaller than the smallest atom, greater than the vast spaces.” This Atman, which resides in every thing, is part of the essence of the universe, and is immortal. When a person dies, the Atman is released from the body and soon enters another being; the soul transmigrates and the person is reincarnated. The goal of the Hindu is to free the Atman entirely from the cycle of rebirth, to stop wandering from death to death. The way to achieve the ultimate liberation through lifelessness is to cease paying heed to the illusion of reality. “The body, the house of the spirit, is under the power of pleasure and pain,” explains a god. “And if a man is ruled by his body then this man can never be free.” But once you are able to separate yourself from the whims of the flesh and embrace the silence and nothingness of your soul, you will be liberated. Your Atman will fly from the web of human desire and join the collective consciousness—the infinite soul that suffuses the universe, at once everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is infinity, and it is nothing.
    So India, as a society that actively explored the void and the infinite, accepted zero.
    Zero’s Reincarnation
    In the earliest age of the gods, existence was born from non-existence.
    â€”T HE R IG V