(National Geographic Asia) Sept. 30, 2020: Archeologist Allan Maca leads a team of intrepid experts on an epic adventure to solve mysteries, explore secrets, and reveal amazing wonders of Ancient China like never before.

Stupa burial mounds exist across Central Asia

Guided by images from space [20 to 50 miles above earth], cutting-edge technology on the ground, and the very latest excavations of Chinese archeologists, they will reveal palaces and tombs, incredible megastructures, and even entire long-lost cities. Along the way they will uncover new revelations about the Great Wall of China, explore the myths of Xanadu [made famous by the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," which Wisdom Quarterly's own poet in residence, Dhr. Seven, thinks refers to a Buddhist civilization and a description of a Buddhist stupa, pagoda, and temple complex, which Coleridge read about from the writings of a British Christian missionary and traveler who visited the very place Coleridge is dreaming of and trying to describe in verse], and unearth evidence of ancient civilizations — discovers that are rewriting the history books.

Let this be a lesson to all you kids. Mouth off to cops all you want. But don't. take. drugs. Because then you seem really stoopid. Drunk in public is bad but wasted on pharmaceutical pills, dirty heroin, or fentanyl-laced drugs is worse. The cops must love to choke people out and break their ribs from kicking them on the sides when the cameras are off. Here they are on their best behavior. And one gal is feeling dumb to see how dumb she looked on camera.

(Storytrails) Premiered March 6, 2023. CHENNAI (Madras), India - How old are the oldest settlements in South India?

What did the recent excavations at Keeladi (aka Keezhadi) and other places along the Vaigai and Porunai (Thamirabarani) rivers reveal?

For a long time, it was believed that South India had no ancient urban civilizations like in the north [where the Indus Valley Civilization and the Vedic Civilization thrived near Gandhara, now in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which were formerly parts of the Indian Empire].

While the Sangam Period (dated 300 BCE–300 CE) literature talks of a sophisticated Tamil civilization, there was no concrete archeological proof to back it up…until the path-finding/groundbreaking Keeladi excavations that started in 2015.

A series of digs carried out by the Archaeological Survey of India in a little village near Madurai unearthed artifacts dating back at least to the 6th century BCE [the time of the Buddha].

This included pottery fragments with graffiti marks very similar to the Indus Valley Civilization script. But Keeladi isn’t the first or only place to offer evidence of ancient settlements in Tamil Nadu.

Adichanallur, Korkai, Pallavaram, Attirampakkam, and many more sites have produced an array of amazing artifacts over the last 100 years or so, including the oldest human tool to be ever discovered in India -- a hand-axe that was discovered in Pallavaram, part of present-day Chennai.

It’s only in recent years that the pieces of the jigsaw have started coming together. Archeologists believe that many more exciting discoveries, possibilities, and answers are waiting to be found at this site.

Angie Landeros knew her daughter had always been shy. "Very, very shy," she says. "She always felt awkward talking to other kids her age."

Then came the COVID-19 lockdowns in March, 2020. Ten years old, Landeros' daughter began feeling unbearably self-conscious seeing herself on the computer screen during Zoom lessons.

When her elementary school went to a hybrid format that required most kids to attend in person, some days she'd refuse to go. Once she had a full-blown panic attack in the car and began kicking and screaming.

On another day, says Landeros, "she literally ran out the door to hide from us."

Landeros and her husband, Michael Bloch, are psychiatrists at the Yale Child Study Center, so they knew what their daughter was going through: social anxiety disorder.

She wasn't the only one. According to a national survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, adults reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression on a near-daily basis jumped to 41 percent in 2021, from 11 percent in 2019. (It dropped to 32 percent in 2022, still nearly triple the pre-pandemic level),

Nearly eight in 10 adults said COVID-19 was causing significant stress in their lives, according to a survey by the American Psychological Association (APA). The pandemic is only one of many anxiety-provoking... More

(Bhikkhu Dipa) Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan (Dec. 22, 1887-April 26, 1920) was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who lived during the time of the British Raj. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

The movie The Man Who Knew Infinity is about the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, who is generally viewed by mathematicians as one of the two most romantic figures in the discipline.

Ramanujan (1887-1920) was born and died in Southern India, passing away at the age of 32. [Suicide?] But in one of the most extraordinary events in mathematical history, he spent World War I at Trinity College Cambridge at the invitation of the leading British mathematician Godfrey Harold (G. H.) Hardy (1877-1947) and his great collaborator John E. Littlewood.

 

Brahmin wisdom comes from space

As a boy he refused to learn anything but mathematics, almost entirely self-taught, and his pre-Cambridge work is contained in a series of notebooks. 

 

The work he did after returning to India in 1919 is contained in the misleadingly named Lost Notebook. It was lost and later found in the Wren library of the leading college for mathematics of the leading University in England. While in England Ramanujan became the first Indian Fellow both of Trinity and of the Royal Society.

• REVIEW: This story deserves more attention (Cynical Historian)

A Man of Numbers

Ramanujan had an extraordinary ability to see patterns. While he rarely proved his results, he left a host of evaluations of sums and integrals. He was especially expert in a part of number theory called modular forms which is of even more interest today than when he died.

 

The lost notebook initiated the study of mock theta functions that are only now being fully understood. Fleshing out his notebooks has only recently been completed principally by American mathematicians Prof. Bruce Berndt and Prof. George Andrews. It comprises thousands of printed pages.

 

An old Indian friend, Swami Swaminathan, oversaw the Ramanujan Library in Madras (modern Mumbai, India) over half a century ago. He commented that had Ramanujan been born ten years earlier, he would not have been able to receive the education and financial assistance that made his pre-Cambridge work possible.

 

Swaminathan went on to say that had Ramanujan been born just ten years later, he would probably have received a more robust and more ordinary education. In either case, this version of Ramanujan would not exist.

 

Ramanujan and Me

 

Ramanujan has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My father David was a student of one of Hardy’s students. In our house “the Bible” referred to Hardy’s masterpiece Divergent Series.

 

In 1962 on the 75th anniversary of Ramanujan’s birth the envelope (below) arrived at my parents' home. A kind stranger had put the franked stamps on the back.

  

In 1987 I was fortunate enough to speak with my brother at the major centennial conference on Ramanujan, held at the University of Illinois. We had become experts on and had extended Ramanujan’s work on Pi.

 

Highlights at the conference included the Nobel prize winning astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who described how important Ramanujan’s success in England had been to the self-confidence of himself and the co-founders (along with Mahatma Gandhi) of modern India including Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first prime minister of independent India in 1947.

 

In 2008 David Leavitt published a novelized version of Ramanujan’s life entitled the Indian Clerk. While Leavitt captures much beautifully, as a novelist, he takes some considerable liberties. I prefer my novels as fables and my biographies straight.

 

In 2012 on the 125th anniversary of Ramanujan’s birth the Notices of the American Mathematical Society published eight articles on his work. This suite forcibly showed how Ramanujan’s reputation and impact continue to grow.
 
Gifted with Numbers

There is one famous anecdote about Ramanujan that even a non-mathematician can appreciate. In 1917 Ramanujan was hospitalized in London. He was said to have tuberculosis, but it is more likely this was to cover a failed suicide attempt.

 

Hardy took a cab to visit him. Not being very good at small talk, all Hardy could think to say was that the number of his cab, 1729, was uninteresting.

 

Ramanujan replied that quite to the contrary it was the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two distinct ways:

1,729 = 12³ + 1³ = 10³ + 9³

This is now known as Ramanujan’s taxi-cab number.

 

Mathematicians in the Movies

There has been a recent spate of books, plays, movies, and TV series about mathematicians and theoretical physicists: A Beautiful Mind (2001), Copenhagen (2002), Proof (2005) and last year’s Oscar winning movies The Imitation Game about Alan Turing, and The Theory of Everything on Stephen Hawking. More

The "pleasure-dome" Buddhist stupa on the fertile ground (Frank Jones/faj2323/flickr)

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Echoes of XANADU: The Western poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while on prescription opium (Laudanum tincture), read vague tales of splendor from the British geographer, cleric, and author Samuel Purchas reporting on stories by returning travelers from Asia. He made one relative of the Northeast Asian Mongol marauder/emperor Genghis Khan most famous:
 

Frank Jones

"Kubla Khan" reportedly had a wondrous summer capital -- much as Prince Siddhartha who later became the Buddha had three palaces in his vast Indo-Scythian territory of Shakyaland or Sakastan in Central Asia, modern Afghanistan, one of them being Kapilavastu (but people act as if this capital, in the vicinity of modern Bamiyan, comprised the Shakyas' entire "country" or janapada).

Kubla Khan (theromantics.weebly.com)

It was transliterated from Shangdu into "Xanadu." Fortunately, Dr. Ranajit Pal figured out the campaign to minimize and confuse pre-Indian Buddhist history. Was there a pre-Buddhist history? Yes, it arose simultaneously in the Buddha's country, which Wisdom Quarterly calls Shakyaland (Sakastan, Afghanistan, Indo-Scythia, Gandhara) because one of its capitals was in Kapilavastu, which Dr. Pal suggests quite convincingly was likely in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

Kubla Khan (alicedraws)

We conjecture, based on recent archeological finds, that another seasonal capital was at Mes Aynak and another possibly in modern Kabul (Kapil'). The region, like neighboring India, has three seasons necessitating various capitals (like the moving head of government in modern Jammu & Kashmir state in Himalayan India): hot, cold, and rainy.

Kublai Khan was in faraway Asia, which centered around a stupa (chorten) or Buddhist burial mound. This reliquary Coleridge referred to as a "pleasure-dome" with caves of ice in arguably his most intriguing and acclaimed work:

KUBLA KHAN
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poetryfoundation.org)

Xanadu of Coleridge's imagining or Purchas' writing with a peace pagoda (jazbalive.com)

  
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
   Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery....

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

Scythian hats, blue eyes like the Buddha (faj2323/flickr)

The "Monastery of Tranquil Felicity" or Amarbayasgalant Monastery (Mongolian Амарбаясгалант хийд, Amurbayasqulangtu keyid; Manchu Urgun Elhe Sy, Chinese 慶寧寺) is one of the three largest Buddhist monastic centers in Mongolia.

The monastic complex is located in the Iven Valley near the Selenge River, at the foot of Mount Büren-Khaan in Baruunbüren sum (district) of Selenge Province in northern Mongolia.

The nearest town is Erdenet, which is about 60 km to the southwest.
 

The monastery was established and funded by order of Manchu emperor Kang Xi or Enkh-Amgalan Khan to serve as a final resting place for Zanabazar (1635-1723), the first Jebtsun-damba Khutuktu, or spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism for the Khalkha in Outer Mongolia.

Scythian "Sun Emperor"

According to tradition, while searching for an appropriate site to build the monastery, the exploratory group came across two young boys, Amur and Bayasqulangtu, playing on the steppe. They were inspired to build the monastery on that very spot and to name it after the two children, Amur-Bayasqulangtu.

Construction took place between 1727 and 1736 and Zanabazar's remains were transferred to a newly created temple in 1788. More

• A Shakyan/Scythian Warrior Princess: "The Golden Maiden" (Issyk Kurgan, originally mislabelled as "Golden Man" but whose frame suggests it was a female) would seem to be Coleridge's hallucinated "Damsel with a dulcimer" in the second half of the poem:

A damsel with a dulcimer
Could I revive within me her symphony and song
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That I would build that pleasure dome in air
That all who heard should see it there...
 

Why did the Buddha have blue eyes?

Blue and green eyed Central Asians are not uncommon even today (Blue_agava/flickr.com)

Buddhist Birth-Stories

He was a Scythian (Shakyan), and that was not so uncommon. The Shakyans, also referred to as the Sakas, Sakkas, and Sakyas, controlled territory between Iran to the west, India (Gandhara, modern Pakistan) to the east, and as far north as Kazakhstan and Ukraine (all called Scythia by the ancient Greeks), going from Central Asia up to Northern Asia and Russia's East.

The Buddha said it of himself -- in The Story of the Lineage (Nidana Katha, translated by Rhys Davids and included in his Jataka Tales work, Buddhist Birth-Stories) -- that he was of the "solar race," a noble (aryan), which was taken in India to mean a kshatriya (warrior)-caste nobleman (royal).

Eurasian Middle Eastern Indo-Scythians? (TIC)

The Shakyan Prince Siddhartha Gautama (matrilineal name from his mothers, the Gotami/Gaumata sisters) came from the "Middle Country" (Majjhima-desa), which refers to Central Asia and Middle East, in line with Northern India (Gandhara, Indo-Scythia). Dr. Pal claims the mothers were from Seistan-Balochistan (not Nepal), a province in Southern Afghanistan between Iran and Pakistan.

Boudanath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal

But in Buddhism aryan went from the concrete meaning Indo-Iranian (ariyan) to ennobled in the sense of "enlightened." This gets into the ugly subject of the "Aryan Invasion" theories, as if India and the glorious Indus Valley Civilization that preceded it could not have developed (with the usual aid of akasha-devas), without European or Northern Asian intervention, the conquerors bringing technological advancements like Romans overtaking and uplifting backward Israel.

Clearly sudden advancements come to Earth not from Earth but from more mysterious origins, then everyone tries to take credit for them as created by their group.

Map of Indo-European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BCE according to the Kurgan model. The Anatolian migration (indicated with a dotted arrow) could have taken place either across the Caucasus or across the Balkans. The magenta area corresponds to the assumed Urheimat (Samara culture, Sredny Stog culture), the red to the area that may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples up to ca. 2500 BCE, when Buddhism began, and the orange area by 1000 BC (wiki).

The most remote spot on Earth?
It's become a small world after all. The most remote inhabited place on the planet? It's an island so out of the way it only gets mail once a year by slow moving freighter.