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By Root 712 0

’, is faster, uses less space and is less laborious than long multiplication. Kenneth Williams told me that whenever he explains the Vedic method to school pupils they find it easy to understand. ‘They can’t believe they weren’t taught it before,’ he said. Schools favour long multiplication because it spells out every stage of the calculation. Vertically and Cross-wise keeps some of the machinery hidden. Williams thinks this is no bad thing, and may even help less bright pupils. ‘We have to steer a path and not insist that kids have to know everything all of the time. Some kids need to know how [multiplication] works. Some don’t want to know how it works. They just want to be able to do it.’ If a child ends up not being able to multiply because the teacher insists on teaching a general rule that he or she cannot grasp, he said, then the child is not being educated. For the smarter kids, added Williams, Vedic Maths brings arithmetic alive. ‘Mathematics is a creative subject. Once you have a variety of methods, children realize you can invent your own and they become inventive too. Maths is a really fun, playful subject and [Vedic Maths] brings out a way to teach it that way.’

My first audience with the Shankaracharya had not covered all intended topics of discussion, so I was granted a second one. At the beginning of the session, the senior disciple had an announcement to make: ‘We would like to say something about zero,’ he said. The Shankaracharya then spoke for about ten minutes in Hindi in an animated manner, with the disciple then translating: ‘The present mathematical system considers zero as a non-existent entity,’ he declared. ‘We want to rectify this anomaly. Zero cannot be considered a non-existent entity. The same entity cannot be existing in one place and non-existing somewhere else.’ The thrust of the Shankaracharya’s argument was, I think, the following: people consider the 0 in 10 to exist, but 0 on its own not to exist. This is a contradiction – either something exists or it does not. So zero exists. ‘In Vedic literature zero is considered as the everlasting number,’ he said. ‘Zero cannot be annihilated or destroyed. It is the indestructible base. It is the basis of everything.’

By now I was used to the Shankaracharya’s distinctive mix of mathematics and metaphysics. I had given up asking him to clarify certain points since by the time my comments had been translated into Hindi, discussed and then translated back, the answers inevitably added to my confusion. I decided to stop concentrating on the details of his speech, and let the translated words just float over me. I looked at the Shankaracharya closely. He was wearing an orange robe today, tied with a big knot behind his neck, and his forehead had been daubed with beige paint. I wondered what it would be like to live the way he did. I had been told that he sleeps in an unfurnished room, eats the same bland curry every day, and that he has no need or desire for possessions. Indeed, at the beginning of the session a pilgrim had approached him to give him a bowl of fruit, and as soon as he received it, he had given the fruit away to the rest of us. I got a mango, which was by my feet.

Trying to experience the Shankaracharya’s wisdom in a different way, I thought of the phrase ‘zero is an existent entity’ and repeated it like a mantra in my head. I let go. Suddenly I am lost in my thoughts. And it all makes sense. ‘Zero is an existent entity’ is not just the Shankaracharya’s mathematical point of view, but a pithy phrase of self-description. Sitting in front of me is Mr Zero himself, the embodiment of shunya in flesh and bone.

It was a moment of clarity, maybe even of enlightenment. Nothing was not nothing in Hindu thought. Nothing was everything. And the monastic, self-abnegating Shankaracharya was a perfect ambassador for this nothingness. I thought about the deep connection between Eastern spirituality and mathematics. Indian philosophy had embraced the concept of nothingness just as Indian maths had embraced the concept of zero. The conceptual leap