Neither one nor many "neither one nor many" more intensively (throughout sixty-two of its ninety-seven stanzas) than any other text in Buddhist literature. This argument is one of a series of proofs used to demonstrate that phenomena are without real existence. Neither one nor many The 'neither one nor many' argument (Wylie: gcig du 'bral ba'i gtan tshigs) is an argument employed by different philosophers and spiritual traditions for various reasons. The argument and its permutations and antecedents, particularly the "problem of the One and the Many" as charted by McEvilley (2002: pp. 23–66) in his "magnum opus", has an ancient pedigree in the
Zodiac and astronomer Ptolemy, whose work "Tetrabiblos" laid the basis of the Western astrological tradition. Under the Greeks, and Ptolemy in particular, the planets, Houses, and signs of the zodiac were rationalized and their function set down in a way that has changed little to the present day. Ptolemy lived in the 2nd century AD, three centuries after the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes by Hipparchus around 130 BC. Hipparchus's lost work on precession never circulated very widely until it was brought to prominence by Ptolemy, and there are few explanations of precession outside the work of Ptolemy until