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2012.10.27 The Greek transmission of astral science into India reconsidered Critical remarks on the contents and the newly discovered manuscript of the Yavanajātaka Bill M. Mak (Kyoto University) bill.m.mak@gmail.com The transmission of the astral science through the Eurasian continent from Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India and ultimately to China and Japan, is one of the major 20th century discoveries in the field of history of science and history of ideas. David Pingree, who followed the footsteps of his predecessor Otto Neugebauer, attempted to connect the Indian jyotiṣa materials with their Greek and Babylonian "antecedents" and thereby demonstrated the largely unilateral flow of foreign ideas into India which shaped Indian astronomy throughout the first millennium of the modern era. India was portrayed thus as a recipient and in turn, an entrepôt of foreign ideas, indianized in their outlook and subsequently disseminated to the Central Asia and the Far East via Buddhism, and to the Southeast Asia via Hinduism. According to Pingree, "the fundamental approach [of Indian jyotiṣa] and many of the models and parameters of each period were determined by the foreign sources" despite their unique Indian appearances. In other words, as far as the essentials of the Indian jyotiṣa as we know today is concerned, not much can be said to be original. While the Babylonian and Greek influence to Indian astral science cannot be denied, encompassing fields such as cosmology, astronomy and astrology, to what extent the foreign influences shaped Indian jyotiṣa remains debatable. Central to Pingree's thesis of "unoriginality" is his landmark study of the Yavanajātaka (1978) where many remarkable Greek parallels such as the planetary weekdays and unique Babylonian elements such as various astronomical algorithms were identified. Based on his edition of the text, allegedly the earliest textual evidence of Greek transmission of astral science into India extant, Pingree dated the work to be 269/270 C.E., versified by Sphujidhvaja based on a prose translation (of a lost Greek text) composed by Yavaneśvara in 149/150 C.E. However, some of Pingree's claims have been dismissed by Indian scholars, most notably by K.S. Shukla (1989) who pointed out that Pingree's rather free emendations of what Pingree believed to be a highly corrupted manuscript are incorrect and unnecessary in some key instances including calendrical constants and astronomical algorithms. Pingree's claims are nevertheless largely accepted amongst Indologists. In 2011, Michio Yano and Sho Hirose identified a hitherto unreported manuscript of Yavanajātaka in the archive of the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP). Upon scrutiny, materials from the new manuscript fills up over half of the lacunae reported in Pingree's edition. More importantly, some of the new readings revealed Pingree's dating of the text based on the highly problematic bhūtasaṃkhyā to be impossible, rendering Pingree's hypothesis of 2nd century CE being the terminus ante quem of Greek transmission of astral science to India to be purely conjectural. A re-examination of Pingree's edition including all his emendations thus becomes a desideratum. In this paper, I will discuss the position of the Yavanajātaka in the history of astral science in India in light of the new textual evidences, as well as the latest research in pre-classical sciences in India. Three topics which I will focus on are: i) The transmission of the Yavanajātaka; ii) The non-Greek elements and the Vedic connection as revealed by the Chinese evidences; iii) Elements of Hinduization.