Flat earth theory

[Kimstu]

It’s certainly true that in the cosmology of the Hindu Puranas, the earth was generally considered to be a flat disk supported by some animal, sometimes a turtle. I don’t know exactly where the “turtles all the way down” motif came in.

Medieval and early modern Indian astronomers frequently argued against the flat-earth cosmology, since they considered the earth as spherical. So it must have been quite common among non-astronomers to believe in the Puranic flat earth supported by something, or else the astronomers wouldn’t have spent so much time criticizing that belief.

I seem to remember that the “turtles all the way down” theme is less of an actual cosmological model and more of a rhetorical argument about infinite regression. That is, not the proponents of the Puranic model, but those critical of it, would have criticized the original turtle-support idea as leading to an infinite regression, because the turtle supporting the earth has to be supported by something else, etc. etc.

The Indologist Christopher Minkowski of Cornell has written about these cosmological debates, but I don’t know the details on this particular topic:

Turtles All the Way Down? Tradition and Experiment in Cosmological Reasoning

Christopher Minkowski, Cornell University

In 1503 the astronomer Jnanaraja completed the Siddhantasundara, the first general treatise on astronomy to appear in Sanskrit in three and a half centuries. In one chapter of the work, Jnanaraja re-opened a cosmological problem: how to reconcile the spherical, geocentric model of the astronomers with the flat-earth cosmology of the sacred literature, the Puranas. Jnanaraja sought to reconsider the position of accommodation reached by earlier astronomers, especially Bhaskara (11th Ct.). Jnanaraja argued against Bhaskara concerning the support of the earth, its power to attract objects, and the ‘down-ness of down.’ These proposals and others touched off a new round of cosmological debate in Sanskrit that continued into the 18th Century.
The history of Jnanaraja’s ideas opens into a larger historical problem—how to place the Siddhantic astronomers in the wider intellectual history of Sanskrit authors. A way into the problem lies in asking an underlying question—in what would a satisfying “reconciliation” of Puranas and Siddhantas consist? One finds a growing interest among the astronomers of this period in integrating the method of astronomy with the Pramana system of proof that was developed in the principal sastras, especially logic. In discussing cosmology, astronomers were willing to put into play their three forms of gaining certainty and their mutual relations: evidence from observed phenomena, mathematical calculation, and textual authority.