Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [53]
In my hotel in Puri I met up with two leading proponents of Vedic Mathematics to learn more about it. Kenneth Williams is a 62-year-old former maths teacher from southern Scotland who has written several books about the method. ‘It is so beautifully presented and so unified as a system,’ he told me. ‘When I first found out about it I thought this is the way mathematics ought to be.’ Williams was a subdued, gentle man with a priestly forehead, trim salt-and-pepper beard and heavy-lidded blue eyes. With him was the much more talkative Gaurav Tekriwal, a 29-year-old stockbroker from Kolkata, who was wearing a crisp white shirt and Armani shades. Tekriwal is president of the Vedic Maths Forum India, an organization that runs a website, arranges talks and sells DVDs.
Tekriwal had helped me secure an audience with the Shankaracharya, and he and Williams wanted to accompany me. We hailed a motor rickshaw and set off to the Govardhan Math, an auspicious name but one that, unfortunately, has nothing to do with maths. It means monastery, or temple. We passed the seafront and small streets lined with stalls selling food and patterned silk. The Math is a plain brick and concrete building the size of a small country church, surrounded by palm trees and a sand garden planted with basil, aloe vera and mango. In the courtyard is a banyan tree, its trunk decorated with ochre cloth, where Shankara, the eighth-century Hindu sage who founded the order, is believed to have sat and meditated. The only modern touch was a shiny black frontage on the first floor – a bullet-proof façade that was installed to protect the Shankaracharya’s room after the Math received Muslim terrorist threats.
The current Shankaracharya of Puri, Nischalananda Sarasvati, inherited the position from the man who inherited it from Tirthaji. He is proud of Tirthaji’s mathematical legacy, and has published five books on the Vedic approach to numbers and calculation. On reaching the Math we were ushered into the room the Shankaracharya uses for his audiences. The only pieces of furniture were an antique sofa with deep red upholstery and, immediately in front of it, a low chair with a large seat and wooden back covered in a red shawl: the Shankaracharya’s throne. We sat facing it, cross-legged on the floor, and waited for the holy man to arrive.
Sarasvati entered the room, wearing a faded pink robe. His senior disciple stood up to recite some religious verses, and then Sarasvati clasped his hands in prayer, touching the image of Shankara on the back wall. He had blue eyes, a white beard and a light-skinned, bald pate. Sitting down in a half lotus on his throne, he assumed an expression between serene and glum. As the session was about to begin, a man in blue robes dived in front of me, throwing himself prostrate before the throne with outstretched hands. Sighing like an exasperated grandfather, taracharya nonchalantly shooed him away.
Religious procedure requires the Shankaracharya to speak Hindi, so I used his senior disciple as an interpreter. My first question was ‘How is maths linked to spirituality?’ After several minutes the reply came back. ‘In my opinion, the creation, the standing and the destruction of this whole universe happens in a very mathematical form. We do not differentiate between mathematics and spirituality. We see mathematics as the fountainhead of Indian philosophies.’
Sarasvati then told a story about two kings who met in a forest. The first king told the other that he could count all the leaves on a tree just by looking at it. The second king doubted him and started tearing off the leaves to count them one by one. When he had finished he arrived at the precise number given by the first king. Sarasvati said the story was evidence that the ancient Indians had the ability to count large numbers of objects by looking at them as a whole instead of enumerating them individually. This and many other skills from that era, he added, had been lost. ‘All these lost sciences can be regained by the help of serious contemplation, serious