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Indian philosophies from Hinduism to Buddhism, although they differed in various issues, all held that reality could not be known by reason and logic but only by a mystical union with existence called samadhi or nirvana, purported to be transcendental to reason and logic. They believed that reason and logic could take them only to the point where they could merge into existence through the cessation of the mind. In truth, their mystical union, samadhi or nirvana, was nothing more than a glorified perception or sensation. They inverted the epistemological order of human cognition, which proceeds from sensation to perception and perception to conception, and gave perception and sensation the ultimate cognitive status.
Therefore, albeit the Hindus perfected one of the greatest discoveries in human history -- the zero, they could not realize its cosmic function as a mathematical tool of science. Although it required a conceptuality-centered modality of consciousness to conceive of the zero, the Hindus did not possess a conceptuality-centered philosophy -- an Aristotelian philosophy -- to integrate the zero concept into a larger philosophical scheme so as to bring about its fruits. The zero, thus, had to wait for nearly 1000 years until the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Copernicus in order to bear its fruits and transform the human world forever.
Meanwhile, in the West, the Romans repeatedly burned the Alexandrian library, which as early as 100 B.C. was reputed to have had 700,000 manuscripts containing the wealth of Greek intellectual achievements. The library was first set on fire in 47 B.C. during the war between Caesar and Pompey (40,000 volumes were burned), set ablaze in 272 A.D. by a Roman emperor, ignited in 391 A.D. by another Roman emperor, and finally completely destroyed by the Muslims in 642 A.D. Thus, before the zero could reach the Western world around 700 A.D. via the Moorish invasion of Spain, the intellectual soil wherein this remarkable concept could have borne fruit had been destroyed almost completely by the master neocheaters and their neocheating strategies. The Western world had entered the Dark Ages.
In the centuries since its discovery, the place-value system of numeration with the zero concept has been propagated throughout the world even more widely than the alphabet of Phoenician origin, and it has become the only universal language humanity now possesses. When its advantages became known to the scholars, reckoners, and businessmen of civilization in contact with India, they gradually began to adopt this new system, abandoning the imperfect systems which they inherited from their ancestors. The zero and its immense computational capabilities provided humanity with an infinite horizon for the evolution of knowledge.
Among those who adopted this new system of numeration and adapted it to their own forms of writing were the Arabs. In the vast empire that they built within less than a century after Mohammed's death, the Moslems forced conquered nations to adopt their language and its writing. Thus, Arabic soon became a means of communication, particularly among scholars of diverse origins. In 772 A.D. al-Mansur, the second caliph of the Abbassid dynasty, founded the capital Baghdad, which quickly became one of the great commercial and intellectual centers of the world where the cultural heritage of the conquered nations was well-received. It was in Baghdad that the evolution of Arab science began, assimilating all the Greek and Hindu scientific works that came to the Arab-Islamic world.
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