not all the ancient indian texts are purely religious some include mathamatics medicne
and story telling
No department of Indian literature is more interesting to the student of comparative literature than that comprising the fables and fairy tales. Scarcely a single motif of European fable collections is not to be found in some Indian collection, and there is good reason to believe that the bulk of this kind of literature originated in India. The earliest and most important collection of Indian fables is Buddhistic and is written in the Pali language; it appears to date to the 4th century BC. This collection, comprising stories of former lives of Buddha, is known as the Jatakas. The two most important Sanskrit collections, the Panchatantra and the Hitopadesa, are both based on Buddhist sources.
A noteworthy feature of the Sanskrit collections of fables and fairy tales is the insertion of a number of different stories within the frame of a single narrative, a style of narration that was borrowed by other Oriental peoples, the most familiar instance being that of the Arabian Nights. The Panchatantra passed from a Pahlavi translation of the original Sanskrit into Arabic, Greek, Persian, Turkish, Syriac, Hebrew, Latin, and German and from German into other European languages. The Hitopadesa, said to have been composed by Narayana, purports to be an excerpt from the Panchatantra and other books. The most famous collection of fairy tales is the very extensive Kathasaritsagara, composed by the Kashmiri poet Somadeva about AD1070.
India abounds in all forms of scientific literature, written in tolerably good Sanskrit even to the present day. The ancient legal books of the Veda continue in modern poetical Dharmashastras and Smritis, of which the Manu Smriti, or Laws of Manu, and Yajnavalkya are the most famous examples. Rooted in the Upanishads are the six Hindu systems of philosophy (Vedanta, Yoga, Mimamsa, Nyaya, Sankhya, and Vaisheshika) and their abundant writings. Grammar, etymology, lexicography, prosody, rhetoric, music, and architecture each have a technical literature of wide scope and importance. The earliest works of an etymological character are the Vedic glosses of Yaska; later (4th century BC), but far more important, is the grammar of Panini and his commentators Katyayana and Patañjali. Mathematics and astronomy were eagerly cultivated from very early times, the so-called Arabic numerals coming to the Arabs from India and designated by them as Hindu numerals. Indian medical science may have begun to develop before the beginning of the Christian era, for one of its leading authorities, Caraka, was the chief physician of King Kanishka. The beginnings of Indian medical science reach back to the writings in the Atharva-Veda.
Contributed By:
Henry M. Hoenigswald, D.Litt.
Professor Emeritus
[This message has been edited by rvikz (edited August 12, 2001).]