The Symbol ‘0’: Origin; Decline

The Symbol ‘0’ originates as an intuition with Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm a millennia earlier and finds its completion in the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra.

Yājñavalkya’s original formula was as a verb [Neti!; ‘Not-This’], an Act that must scuttle [‘Eat’] itself in the rounding before its settling. But if the rounding is incomplete, instead of finding ‘True Nothing’ you will in its place, find a ‘Something’.

The Verb [Neti] becomes a Noun, becomes what is called: ‘Nothing’, a late-stage binary-expression: ‘Nothing; Something’; ‘Absence; Presence’, et al. A Noun to which you then assign dimensions and properties. This is the Concept of Nothing, the Idea of Absence, an altogether different-animal [as in: -1<0+1].

To use the illustration by the Scholar-Monk Chandrakirti [around 600 CE]: ‘It is as if I ask a shopkeeper: ’What do you have to sell?’. And he replies: ‘I have nothing to sell’. And I say: ‘That will do. Sell me this nothing then.‘

A proper rounded Negation would devour all in its path, material or conceptual, and leave nothing behind. There would be no binary-expression that remains that you can point to and say: ‘It is This’.

The Decimal System of Number Representation [Sanskrit ‘Das‘, for Ten] births within 200 years of the oral-rendering of the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra. The core infrastructure that holds together the modern world of Model and Multiplicity.

Its first expression left the 10th place blank. It was later followed by the insertion of a dot and in time enlarged to the present Circle. Outside it were the cardinal integers 1 to 9, likely the planetary count, from Astrology/Astronomy, the parent-disciplines of Mathematics.

Importantly, there is no ‘Error’ [‘Accuracy and Error’ being themselves binary-constructions] in the present use of the Decimal System and the use of the Symbol as Concept. The problem arises only when the results are not limited to the assumptions, context and conditions of the analysis [which is often].

---

The schools of Śūnyathā [‘That-ness’] were the first to take this route [Śūnya-‘Nothing’ in its contemporary meaning]. The term Śūnyathā itself originates in the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra and the various ‘Doctrines of Codependence’ that define it all have their roots in ‘This Unformulated Principle'[ See front page].

The problems with the construct largely arose because it positioned itself as the binary-complement to the Symbol. In other words, it stopped the Negation at the Cliff’s Edge. I’ll get to it in a later Post.