Concepts of Space, Time, and Consciousness in Ancient India

This paper describes Indian ideas of the early-Purana/Mahabharata times (centuries BC) on the nature of space, time and consciousness that would be of interest to the physicist. In order to simplify references, we quote mainly from Yoga-Vasistha (YV), which is representative of that period of Indian thought. YV professes to be a book of instruction on the nature of consciousness but it has many fascinating passages on time, space, matter and cognition. This paper presents a random selection that has parallels with recent speculations in physics. It also presents a brief account of the context in which ideas of YV developed.