The Sun Treatise

The City of Rome Romaka-nagara was explained to be the home of the Ionians Yavanas; often used to refer to Greeks or westerners. Another teacher mentioned is Maya the Daitya an architect of the Asuras in mythology, whose specific location is unknown, though Western scholars consider him a Greek (Yavana) and Indian scholars consider him a resident of Assyria or Babylonia. However, the astronomer Brahmagupta (628 AD) considered only the Romaka-Siddhanta to be foreign literally "outside of the tradition/Smriti", but not the Saura-Siddhanta the Solar Doctrine. In verses 2-6 of the first chapter of the current Surya-Siddhanta, it is written that at the end of the Golden Age Satya-yuga, an Asura named Maya performed penance to the Sun God Surya to learn astronomy. The Sun God then appointed a part of himself Amsha-purusha; an emanation or personified portion for this task. This emanated person taught the entire Surya-Siddhanta—which the Sun God himself had taught to the Great Sages Maharishis in earlier ages—to Mayasura, from whom the Sages later received it again.

If the Vedic collections Samhitas, the ritual texts Brahmanas, and the philosophical Upanishads are studied with an impartial mind, it will be found that even in that prehistoric era, experiences of celestial observation are scattered throughout, and they were debated extensively. If this were not the case, where would the concept of the equinoctial points Ayanavindu being in different lunar mansions Nakshatras come from? How else could they have known the relationship between the seasons, months, lunar dates Tithis, and stars? Even in medieval India, there was no shortage of intelligent and eagle-eyed astronomers and mathematicians. Those who read the works of Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Brahmagupta, Munjala, Keshava, Ganesha, and others can see what subtle observations they wrote regarding celestial events. Now, scholars like Shankar Balkrishna Dixit and Prabodh Chandra Sengupta have also proven through comparative studies of Eastern and Western astronomers that Indian astronomy is entirely independent of the systems of Hipparchus or Ptolemy famous Greek astronomers.

It appears clearly from the Aryabhatiya the seminal work of Aryabhata, c. 499 AD that Aryabhata created his text by churning the ancient astronomy of India and by personally observing the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars.1

G. R. Kaye writes, "There is no doubt that Varaha—

1 By the grace of God, I have rescued the jewel of true knowledge from the ocean of both true and false knowledge, using the boat of my own intellect. (49)
That which was previously known as the doctrine of the self-born [Brahma] is now called the Aryabhatiya; whoever slanders this work destroys the merit of their good deeds and their life. (50)
The Sun is determined by the rotation of the Earth; the Moon is determined by its conjunction with the Sun; and all the stars and planets are determined by their conjunction with the Moon and the stars. (48) These verses are from the "Golapada" or spherical section of the Aryabhatiya, emphasizing the observational basis of Aryabhata's work.