The "Lunar Controversy": How far away is the Moon, anyway? (And how old is that idea?)

Long ago, when I was still a wee lad and of meager literacy, I heard a few stories that profoundly seized my artistic imagination. One of these was the image of an older Kṛṣṇa, revealing his "universal form" to Arjuna in the midst of two vast armies; another, of a younger Kṛṣṇa lifting a small mountain with naught but his pinky finger, holding it aloft for seven full days; and yet another, when Śiva drank an ocean of poison, retaining it within his throat. In each of these narratives, the everyday feeling of the possible is mocked and symbols come into play whose obscure meanings challenge the listener to understand by rethinking the very nature of possibility. So taken up was I by this fantastic narrative imagery that I soon turned to the traditional forms of study in Hinduism: I accepted ordination into the practices of a brahmācārin sādhaka in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition.

It wasn't long before my Western education was being assaulted by traditional Vaiṣṇava authorities. After only a few weeks of practice, a devotee revealed to me that he believed that the Moon (candra) was further from the Earth than the Sun (sūrya). I found this view shocking and not just a little hard to swallow. Now, I had already been exposed to the fathomless horror of contemplating the limits of my own knowledge, and found my self-certainty about a wide range of matters deeply unsatisfying. I had always intuited that Darwin was right, before ever having been told that he was wrong, and I had assumed that NASA really had sent astronauts to the moon and back. But this seemed to fly in the face of Vaiṣṇava cosmology, since, to Vaiṣṇavas, the Moon is a heavenly realm, candra-loka, inhabited by higher entities, all of whom have vast lifespans, and superior bodies in every respect. Thus, on the authority of Prabhupada, I was to eject my confidence in the technological achievements of the West. Let us recall his teaching:

"They have gone to the moon planet? Then our whole propaganda, Kṛṣṇa Consciousness, becomes bogus. Therefore I always protest."

Conversation in Sydney, Australia, April 1, 1972.

It is clear that the threat to Vaiṣṇava cosmology was not just meager in Prabhupada's eyes. Thus he declared war on the very idea of the technological excellence embodied in Western science.

"It is my firm conviction that they did not go to the moon. Neither they'll be able to go to the Mars as they have planned it." 

Room Conversation, July 6th, 1976, Washington D.C.

One wonders then, how thousands upon thousands of scientists, all of whom apparently actually believe that they have successfully launched and completed several missions to both the Moon and Mars have managed to keep the wool so thoroughly pulled over their own eyes, particularly given their well-established reputations as being difficult to convince of anything without proof! But apparently, Prabhupada was more or less unflappable on this issue. At one point, he poses a radical hypothesis, that there was another planet in the way!

"They have not gone to the moon planet. . . It is far, far away. Their calculation is wrong. They are going to a wrong planet." 

Morning walk, June 4th, 1976, Los Angeles.

Elsewhere, Prabhupada further specifies the nature of the issue of distance:

"It is above the sun planet."

So, in various ways, Prabhupada protested (and this is somewhat important to focus on) the authenticity of the technological achievements of the West, rooted as they are in advanced mathematics. For anyone interested in further exploring Śrīla Prabhupada's views, I recommend taking a look at this link.

Prabhupada wasn't the only person who denied the Moon Landing. An abridged version of Bill Kaysing's hoax theory can be found here.

Personally, I have long since stopped entertaining the view that the Moon Landing was a hoax. But what is more significant for Vaiṣṇavas, neither do I find it necessary for others to do so in order to maintain the core of Śrī Kṛṣṇa's teachings. It's not actually necessary to go to all the trouble of arguing that the Moon is "further away", when what really matters to Vaiṣṇava cosmology is that it is uttara. This significant Sanskrit term has two pertinent meanings: the first is "higher"; the second meaning is "further North", relative to the uttama, the North Pole.

This is easy to imagine if we regard "up" and "down" in a bodily way while lying on the ground. Imagine yourself then, if you will, lying upon your back, in a wide, flat field somewhere in the Northern hemisphere, with your feet to the South, and your head to the North, staring up at the sky, watching with unbroken attention. Suppose that you were able to lay like this for many days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, even eons, undistracted, attending only to the relative passing of the various visible celestial bodies. It is important to take note of what you will see from this perspective. For one, you will see that the Sun and the Moon are either lower or higher than each other. Sometimes, when the Moon is in the ascending half of its cycle, it passes into a region of the sky "uttara" or "higher" than the Sun (i.e., further North). Or, on those rare occasions, when the moon happens to be directly on either of the "nodes" while passing in front of the Sun or behind the Earth, a Solar or Lunar eclipse occurs, respectively (most of the time, it is either "above" or "below" the Sun, which is why eclipses of either kind are a little bit rare). And it doesn't require for us to talk about the distances of planets in an absolute spatial sense. "Higher" here simply means higher degree of celestial latitude. 

Here, I have illustrated the ascending and descending Lunar nodes (Rāhu and Ketu) intersecting Solar plane of the Ecliptic at the Eastern and Western Horizons, while the Sun travels over the terrestrial zenith,  somewhere in the Northern hemisphere.  The Moon here is in its New moon phase, taken together indicating the maximal latitudinal "distance" between the Moon and Sun. In this instance, though not constantly, the Moon has a "superior", or uttara, celestial latitude with respect to the North Pole. The black arc expresses the South to North in degrees of latitude.

Indeed, when we reflect on the Purāṇic cosmology, we see that this sort of mapping does give us a suggestion about how the ancients saw the Heavenly realms. The "uttama" or "North-most" realm was just the Polestar, or "Druva-loka, the "fixed world". In fact, the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa treats Druva-loka as a Vaikuṇṭha planet, a realm not subject to "birth and death." However, this celestial immortality needs to be understood in the context of Indo-European astrotheology and myth. The Greeks, for example, often related narratives in which a constellation's setting below the Western horizon was tantamount to its death (and for which reason, the afterlife is frequently referred to as the "below"). And consequently, a star's rising above the Eastern horizon was tantamount to its birth, or rebirth. As such, the devatas, i.e., the "heavenly divinities" were related as subject to birth and death by the end of the late Vedic period, much the same as the Greek gods (who in a number of cases even retain the same names!).

It is important to understand this in a cosmological relief, where "appearance" (vyakti) and "disappearance" (avyakta) are among the primary characteristics of birth and death. What results from this interpretation is a more coherent understanding of the Epic-Purāṇic cosmos. We are closing in on a view of the world which conflates the "higher" with the "Northern". This is to be contrasted against an interpretation which regards the Earth as flat, and which takes the sole direction of "height" to be the local zenith.


An Admittedly Unsolicited Word of Advice for Devotees

When Prabhupada originally published the Fifth Canto of the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, many devotees fled the movement, their faith in Prabhupada's teachings irreparably blemished. It may be that Prabhupada simply failed to understand the historical complexities underlying the development of this many-layered cosmological model, and so posed an intellectual's opinion, rather than one equivalent to śāstra. By acknowledging that the Vedic cosmos is constituted by an historical manner of development, one affirms Kṛṣṇa's ubiquity as Eternal Time, as the cause of all causes. Thus, we can begin to peel back the historical layers of cosmological discourse, and can clarify and secure a critical, coherent, causal history of that development. Such development depends upon our willingness to regard all cosmological discourse as subordinated to the higher metaphysical revelation that Kṛṣṇa is Time itself (kālo 'smi, loka-kṣāya-kṛt). This is a harrowing task, no doubt, and might best be left to trained scholars. Yet without the best Vaiṣṇava intellects taking this issue up with all due seriousness, I worry that the future of Vaiṣṇavism will only increase in dogma, and will result in the gradual erosion of God-given reason, rather than its further advancement.


Further Implications

The particular way of looking at the Vaiṣṇava cosmos outlined above also gives us crucial insights into the constellar locations of the 14 heavenly realms, and discloses a provisional, critical method for determining the ages of the various elements that gradually accrued of this cosmological paradigm. If the Heavenly realms (listed below) are actually visible segments of the night sky, we may be able to piece together a "who's who" that identifies the regions by relating them to who resides in them (i.e., Brahmā living in Satya-loka, taken together with our knowledge of Brahmā's vehicle as a swan, the identification of Cygnus as a swan constellation, the antiquity of the Northern zenith's connection with the Cygnus realm of the celestial dome, and so on, and so forth). Mapping out the sky in this way will become a self-evident and secure process if it is done the right way, by giving all due care to the strengths and weaknesses of the postulates under consideration. Moreover, it may give us that ever-so-rare-and-precious calendrical data we've long been after, helping us to finally securely date the Vedic texts with a higher degree of precision than was previously possible.

In future blogs, we will inquire into who resides in each realm and what this reveals about the locations of specific constellations, and when possible, how old these elements appear to be.

borrowed from Wikipedia:[Loka]. Also, the Earth is not flat. 

Update (Jan 22, 2015): this blog entry has undergone numerous minor revisions for precision of language, and the like. I also added details to help visualize the issue in layman's terms.