“[T]he word-symbols that the Sanskrit language used to express the concept of zero conveyed concepts such as the sky, space, the atmosphere or the firmament.

In drawings and pictograms, the canopy of heaven in universally represented either by a semi-circle or by a circular diagram or by a whole circle. The circle has always been regarded as the representation of the sky and of the the Milky Way as it symbolizes both activity and cyclic movments.

Thus the little circle, through a simple transposition and association of ideas, came to symbolise the concept of zero for the Indians.

Another Sanskrit term which came to mean zero was the word bindu, which literally means ‘point’.

The point is the most insignificant geometrical figure, constituting as it does the circle reduced to its simplest expression, its centre.

For the Hindus, however, the bindu represents the universe in its non-manifest form, the universe before it was transformed into the world of appearances. According to Indian philosophy, this uncreated universe possessed a creative energy, capable of generating everything and anything: it was the causal point.”

 —Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.