The Symbol ‘0’

From an earlier Post: ‘There is no binary-ground to be found that can be settled-in, no ground that you can alight on as foundational truth. There is nothing to cling to nor is there a need to cling to anything.’

If you do find a ground to alight on, something to cling to, you have stopped short of Not-Two.

The settled conviction of this absence needed to be expressed in summary form. This was the intent of the original construct, the Symbol ‘0’. Here is its very brief history.

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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 convergence as True Nothing, Absolute Absence. And this convergence finds its completion in the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra [See front page].

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 and ‘True Nothing’ becomes simply: ‘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.‘

There is no such thing as ‘True Nothing’, as Absolute Absence. Or in the earlier language, there is no binary that can be alighted on as the terminus. This is the original intent and meaning of the Symbol ‘0’.

Any proper sighting of Not-Two is incomplete until you yourself arrive at this conviction. In this sense, Not-Two and the Symbol ‘0’ are firmly related, as Head to the other as Tail. Miss one, miss the other.

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].

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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 laying out of Its evolution and later regression will take a full post. I’ll get to it.