The main aim of this paper is to provide a source for the study of mathematical proofs in India. I give here an English translation, together with a mathematical commentary. of a short Sanskrit passage that contains unique rationales of the formulas for the volumes of pyramids and regular tetrahedrons. The passage presumably belongs to Sankara, a sixteenth-century South-Indian mathematician. I also outline the prehistory of pyramids and tetrahedrons in Indian mathematics in the Introduction and give a glossary of Sanskrit geometrical terms in the Appendix.
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