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guide
to non-western experience with nothing
among the Arabs, the Chinese and the Indians, nothingness was
a concept to be embraced and celebrated. rather than sweep Nothing
away under the carpet as a philosophical embarrassment, Islamic
artists simply saw the void as a challenging emptiness to be
filled. and so they covered every available surface on their
temples with intricate geometric patterns, literally paying
homage to the void. Buddhists too have a deep respect for the
void, seeing in nothingness the ultimate reality and aiming
with their contemplative practices to experience the true reality
of nonbeing.
perhaps no one has embraced nothing as strongly as the Indians
who never had a fear of the infinite or of the void. Hinduism
has embedded within it, a complex philosophy of nothingness,
seeing everything in the world as arising from the pregnant
void, known as Sunya. the ultimate goal of the Hindu was to
free himself from the endless cycle of pain found in continual
reincarnation and reconnect with the Nothingness that is the
source and fundament of the All. for Indians, the void of Sunya
was the very font of all potential; nothingness was liberation.
no surprise then that it is from this sophisticated culture
that we inherit the mathematical analog of nothing, zero. like
Sunya, zero is a kind of place holder, a symbol signifying a
pregnant space where any other number might potentially reside.
the earliest known example of zero
appears in a Jain manuscript on cosmology from AD 458, though
indirect evidence suggests it must have been in use in India
as early as 200 BC. in the 7th century after Christ, the Indian
astronomer Brahmaghupta formally defined zero and spelled out
the algebraic rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying and
dividing with it. yet the
West was appalled by this enigmatic symbol when European
scholars first encountered it via the Arab world. how could
you signify nothing? to do so was to acknowledge its existence,
the very position early medieval thinkers had so sought to avoid.
- based on a text by Margaret Wertheim
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