Antiquity vs Innovation

Traditions value antiquity

Traditions instinctively value historical antiquity because it signals a stable strategy to its votaries. Thus even the nirgrantha & tathAgata respectively claimed that they were one in a long series of teachers/incarnates who existed alongside known H historical figures like uddAlaka AruNi or rAma the ikShvAku or kR^iShNa devakIputra or the pANDu-s. Their tradition wrote pseudo-rAmAyaNa-s and pseudo-bhArata-s to emphasize the deep history of their mata to their followers i.e. it is antiquity was not less than that of their ortho-religious (H) rivals.

This idea was probably quite deep in the Indian psyche – that’s why perhaps kAlidAsa actually had a verse protesting the idea that not all that is old is necessarily a positive signal. Even as late as the 1700s the H students of Euclid commented that it has value because it was a revelation of prajApati that had simply been transmitted by uklidasha.

Reconciling innovation

One could ask then who does one reconcile innovation with this tendency. The H faced this issue with the siddha-s. The way it was done was to tether this siddha-s back to a parampara that had an archaic root. Thus, we see some of the same siddha-s being tethered to the shaiva tradition and the counter-religious traditions. Even within tradition innovators took great effort to show their connections to the older tradition & how they stem from it. e.g. abhinavagupta linking himself to the old tantra-s like malinIvijaya or siddhayogeshvarI-mata.

One could ask would this not be a bad thing in science? I don’t see it immediately as being the case with its best practitioners. They saw themselves as examining a long tradition; (e.g. nilakaNTha looking back at the mathematical traditions down to AryabhaTa) & then picking up their good stuff while innovating.