An Evening of Dharma, Science, and the Search for What Came Before

On the evening of August 21, 2026, I attended an event in Fremont, California, with my friends Ram and Dini.

Some evenings are easy to summarize. You attend an event, listen to a speaker, meet a few people, take away an interesting idea or two, and move on. This was not one of those evenings.

Now, two days later, on August 23, I am still thinking about what I heard.

I came into the room prepared to listen. I left with questions, notes, names of books, historical references, scientific claims I wanted to look at more closely, and that familiar feeling that comes when something challenges the way you have been taught to look at the past.

The evening centered on researcher and author Nilesh Nilkanth Oak, whose work explores the chronology of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Vedic literature, astronomy, archaeology, genetics, geography, and the much larger question of how we decide what we believe about ancient history.

What interested me most was that the evening did not begin with dates. It began with Dharma.

From there, what could have become simply another discussion about ancient India turned into something much larger: a conversation about knowledge, evidence, belief, doubt, intellectual responsibility, and what happens when we are willing to look again at things we thought we already understood.

Dharma as a Responsibility to Think

Oak began with a simple description of the jiva, the living being, through three ideas: Jnana. Iccha. Kriya. Knowledge. Desire. Action.

From there, he built his understanding of Dharma around something I found especially relevant today: freedom of thought carries responsibility with it.

It is easy to have an opinion. It is much harder to examine that opinion, challenge it, compare it with evidence, and admit when something we believed may not be completely correct.

That became one of the strongest themes of the evening. Do not believe something simply because a professor said it. Do not believe something simply because a religious leader said it. Do not believe something because it appeared in a book, on television, in a podcast, online, or because someone standing on a stage speaks with confidence. And, importantly, do not believe Nilesh Oak simply because Nilesh Oak said it.

Read, study, compare, question, test, and then decide what the evidence can actually support.

That message stayed with me because we are living in a time when information has never been easier to access. We have search engines, online libraries, podcasts, social media, digital archives, artificial intelligence, and more information arriving every hour than previous generations could have imagined.

But access to information is not the same thing as knowledge, and knowledge is not automatically the same thing as truth.

When the Dates Make the Room Sit Differently

Eventually, of course, the dates came, and they are the kinds of dates that make people in a room sit a little differently.

Oak considers the Ramayana and Mahabharata to be Itihasa, historical narratives rather than mythology in the way that word is commonly used today. His proposed chronology places the Mahabharata war in 5561 BCE and the Rama-Ravana conflict in 12,209 BCE.

Those dates are far earlier than mainstream academic chronologies, and Oak knows that.

What interested me was not simply the numbers themselves, but the challenge behind them. His argument is that these ancient texts contain hundreds of astronomical observations that can be examined against astronomical models and then compared with evidence from other disciplines.

Whether one ultimately agrees with his conclusions or not, the question is worth asking: if an ancient text contains descriptions of planetary positions, eclipses, seasons, rivers, coastlines, climate, geography, or other potentially measurable phenomena, should we investigate them? Or do we stop investigating because the text has already been placed on the shelf marked “mythology”?

That distinction became important throughout the evening.

Oak repeatedly told the audience not to accept his chronology because it sounded impressive or because it made them feel proud. He wanted people to challenge it.

That mattered to me.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “Believe me,” and saying, “Here is my evidence. Try to prove me wrong.”

Fifteen Days Became Fifteen Years

One of my favorite moments came when Oak explained how his own research began.

In 1994, while completing his master's degree in chemical engineering in Canada, he had already submitted his thesis and had about fifteen days before his defense. He encountered an astronomical passage in the Mahabharata involving Arundhati and Vashishtha, the stars known today as Alcor and Mizar.

He thought he could solve the problem during those fifteen free days.

He did solve it. It took him fifteen years.

He described finally seeing the result on May 8, 2009, his wife's birthday, and his first reaction was not celebration. It was disbelief. He thought he had made a mistake.

That detail stayed with me because it says something important about research. If every investigation gives us exactly the answer we wanted, we should probably become suspicious of ourselves.

Oak said he checked the result again and again before allowing himself to accept what he was seeing. Only then came the excitement.

I liked that part of the story because it made the research feel human: curiosity, frustration, persistence, doubt, verification, and finally discovery.

Ancient India, but Also the Ancient World

As the evening continued, the conversation traveled far beyond India, moving through Indonesia, China, Japan, Central Asia, Egypt, Greece, Peru, the Pacific, and even Atlantis.

Some of those connections were compelling. Some were speculative. Some deserve much more evidence before anyone should describe them as established history.

And that is exactly where I think an evening like this becomes useful. It forces us to separate three things that are often mixed together: what we know, what we reasonably infer, and what we are still trying to understand.

The ancient world was not made up of completely isolated civilizations. People moved. Merchants traveled. Pilgrims traveled. Ideas traveled. Languages borrowed from one another. Stories crossed borders and changed as they moved.

The Ramayana developed important traditions across Southeast Asia. Indian religious and philosophical ideas traveled into China and onward through East Asia. Greek writers wrote about India. Indian Ocean trade connected Africa, Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia long before modern globalization gave us a word for the phenomenon.

So even when a proposed historical connection eventually turns out to be wrong, the larger question remains valuable:

How connected was the ancient world, and how much of that history have we forgotten?

When Ancient Stories Sound Like Modern Technology

The discussion became especially interesting when it turned toward passages in the epics that sound surprisingly technological to modern ears.

Gandhari's hundred sons developing in vessels. Unusual forms of conception and birth. Bhishma and iccha mrityu, the ability to choose the time of death. Astras capable of extraordinary destruction. Pushpaka Vimana and other flying vehicles. Submerged cities.

It is tempting to hear those descriptions and immediately announce that ancient India had IVF, aircraft, genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, or technologies that modern science has only recently rediscovered.

But similarity is not proof.

I appreciated that, at several points, Oak acknowledged something much more useful:

We do not always know what the description means.

That may be one of the most important sentences anyone can say when discussing the ancient world.

Maybe some passages preserve descriptions of technologies we no longer understand. Maybe some are metaphorical. Maybe some are theological. Maybe some have been misunderstood through translation. Maybe future science will help us understand things that currently seem impossible. Or maybe the explanation will turn out to be much simpler than we imagined.

There is nothing intellectually weak about saying, “I don't know.” Sometimes that is where serious inquiry actually begins.

Science, Genetics, and the Danger of an Interesting Coincidence

One of the most striking scientific discussions involved genetics.

Oak referred to research showing a significant prehistoric reduction in Y-chromosome diversity and connected that phenomenon with his proposed date for the Mahabharata war.

It is an intriguing comparison, but it also reminded me of something important: an interesting correlation is not automatically proof of cause.

A genetic event occurring within the same broad period as a proposed historical event may deserve investigation. But the next question has to be: can we demonstrate the connection?

That is where the discussion becomes more than storytelling. It becomes research.

And that is also where Dr. Shanti Bhattacharya's background in molecular biology made the conversation particularly valuable. Again and again, her instinct was to ask: How do we know? Can it be repeated? What else could explain it? What evidence would confirm it? What evidence would disprove it?

Those are good questions whether we are studying molecular biology, astronomy, history, religion, or our own assumptions.

Sanskrit, Language, and the Humility of “I Don't Know”

At another point, the conversation turned to Sanskrit.

If the language of the Rigveda is already so sophisticated, how old is it? What came before it? How long did it take to develop?

Oak's first answer was simple:

“I don't know.”

I respected that.

He went on to discuss differences between Vedic Sanskrit and later Classical Sanskrit, linguistic change, multilingual societies, and passages in the Ramayana where language itself becomes part of the story.

But the answer began with uncertainty.

That mattered because all evening we were hearing enormous claims about ancient history. The willingness to say “I don't know” keeps curiosity from becoming certainty without evidence.

And certainty without evidence is dangerous no matter which side of an argument it comes from.

Hanuman, the Monkey King, and Stories That Travel

One of the more enjoyable moments came when the conversation turned to Hanuman and the Chinese Monkey King, Sun Wukong.

The similarities are difficult not to notice: powerful monkey heroes, extraordinary strength, shape-changing, enormous journeys, and stories associated with travel between cultural worlds.

Was Hanuman an influence on the development of Sun Wukong? Possibly.

Is Sun Wukong simply a Chinese version of Hanuman? That is much harder to establish.

And again, I found the question itself more interesting than the need for an immediate answer.

Cultural influence rarely travels in a straight line. Stories mix. Local traditions reshape them. Religious ideas encounter older traditions and become something new. What survives generations later may contain pieces from several worlds.

That is one of the reasons ancient history is so fascinating.

It refuses to stay neatly inside modern borders.

The Question From a Child

Then came one of the best questions of the evening.

A young girl asked:

Is there any evidence that Krishna really set foot on Earth?

There it was.

After astronomy, genetics, archaeology, Sanskrit, oceanography, philosophy, and thousands of years of tradition, a child reduced everything to the essential question:

Was he really here? How do we know?

Oak responded by talking about consilience, the idea that several independent streams of evidence can begin pointing toward the same conclusion. Astronomy, geography, oceanography, texts, genetics, and other forms of evidence may all contribute pieces to the larger picture.

At some point, historical investigation often becomes a question of what explanation best accounts for all the available evidence.

But history rarely gives us 100 percent certainty.

We do not have a time machine. We have fragments: texts, ruins, inscriptions, bones, genes, maps, memories, and stories.

Our job is to determine how those fragments fit together without forcing them into the picture we already wanted to see.

That child's question may have been one of the most important questions asked all night.

The Young People in the Room

Something else happened that evening that I do not want to overlook.

Young people were everywhere. They were helping with registration, managing the room, following podcasts, submitting questions, listening, challenging, and wanting to understand.

That may matter more in the long run than whether everyone agrees about 5561 BCE, 12,209 BCE, ancient navigation, Atlantis, or any other single theory.

A civilization survives when the next generation becomes curious about it, not when children are simply told what they must believe, but when they begin asking their own questions.

That is a very different thing.

Watching those young people engage with these subjects gave the evening an energy that no academic argument alone could have created.

History Should Not Be Protected From Questions

Near the end, Oak returned to the importance of understanding history.

I think there are two dangers here.

One is historical amnesia. The other is turning history into mythology about ourselves simply because the mythology makes us feel powerful.

Neither serves us well.

People should know where they come from, and people should understand the achievements of the civilizations that shaped them. But real respect for history also means allowing evidence to complicate the story.

If we truly believe our history matters, then it should be strong enough to survive questions. It should be strong enough to survive disagreement. It should be strong enough to survive new evidence. And it should be strong enough for us to say, when necessary:

We were wrong about that.

That is not disrespect.

That is intellectual maturity.

Two Days Later, I Am Still Thinking About It

Looking back now, two days after that evening in Fremont with Ram and Dini, I realize that I did not leave convinced that every extraordinary historical claim I heard had been proven.

That is not what the evening gave me.

It gave me something better.

It made me want to read.

I want to return to passages of the Ramayana and Mahabharata that I have read or heard before and look at them more carefully. I want to understand how ancient Indian thinkers approached logic, evidence, inference, debate, language, astronomy, and history.

I want to understand where contemporary scholarship agrees with these alternative chronologies and where it strongly disagrees. I want to know which extraordinary connections survive serious examination and which disappear when we investigate them more closely. I want to understand what the texts actually say before deciding what later generations have told me they say.

I came into that room on August 21 prepared to listen.

I left with homework.

Not because I had been told what to believe, but because I had been reminded that curiosity carries responsibility.

When something challenges what I think I know, I have choices. I can dismiss it because it makes me uncomfortable. I can accept it because I want it to be true. Or I can do the harder thing: read, investigate, question, compare, and decide what the evidence can actually support.

That evening made me want to do the harder thing.

Maybe that is ultimately what Dharma, history, and science have in common. They all ask something of us.

Knowledge. Desire. Action.

To know requires curiosity. To pursue knowledge requires desire. And to discover whether something is actually true requires action.

History does not become stronger when we protect it from questions.

Neither does faith.

Neither does science.

They become stronger when we are willing to look again.

And two days later, I am still looking again.