The Arctic Home in the Vedas c16.8

c16.8

And not only Vedic but also Purâṇic chronology, properly understood, leads us to the same conclusion. According to the Purâṇas the earth and the whole universe are occasionally subjected to destruction at long intervals of time, the earth by a small and the universe by a grand deluge. Thus we are told that when the god Brahmâ is awake during his day the creation exists; but when at the end of the day he goes to sleep, the world is destroyed by a deluge, and is re-created when he awakes from his sleep and resumes his activity the next morning. Brahmâ's evening and morning are thus synonymous with the destruction and the re-creation of the earth. A day and a night of Brahmâ are each equal to a period of time called a Kalpa, and a Kalpa is taken for a unit in measuring higher periods of time. Two Kalpas constitute a nycthemeron (day-and-night) of Brahmâ, and 360 × 2 = 720 Kalpas make his year, while a hundred such years constitute his life-time, at the end of which a grand deluge overtakes the whole universe including Brahmâ. Now according to the Code of Manu and the Mahâbhârata the four yugas of Krita, Tretâ, Dvâpara and Kali form a yuga of gods, and a thousand such yugas make a Kalpa or a day of Brahmâ of 12,000,000 years, at the end of which a deluge destroys the world. The Purânas, however, have adopted a different method of computation. The four yugas of Krita, Tretâ, Dvâpara and Kali are there said to constitute a Mahâ-yuga; 71 such Mahâ-yugas constitute a Manvantara, and 14 Manvantaras make a Kalpa, which, according to this method of counting, contains 4,320,000,000 years. The difference between the durations of a Kalpa according to these two methods is due to the fact that the years making up the four yugas of Krita, Tretâ, Dvâpara and Kali are considered to be divine in the latter, while they are obviously human in Manu and the Mahâbhârata. For further details the reader is referred to the late Mr. S. B. Dixit's History of Indian Astronomy in Marâthi, Prof. Rangâchârya's essay on Yugas, and Mr. Aiyer's Chronology of Ancient India, a book, in which the question of yugas and especially that of the beginning of the Kali yuga, is subjected to a searching and exhaustive examination. The Hindu writers on astronomy seem to have adopted the same system, except Âryabhaṭṭa, who holds that 72, and not 71, Mahâ-yugas make a Manvantara, and that a Mahâ-yuga is divided into four equal parts which are termed Krita, Tretâ, Dvâpara and Kali. According to this chronological system, we are, at present, in the 5003rd year (elapsed) of the Kali yuga of the 28th Mahâ-yuga of the 7th (Vaivasvata) Manvantara of the current Kalpa; or, 1,972,949,003 years have, in other words, elapsed since the deluge which occurred at the beginning of the present or the Shveta-vârâha Kalpa. This estimate is, as observed by Prof. Rangâchârya, quite beyond the limit admitted by modern geology; and it is not unlikely that Hindu astronomers, who held the view that the sun, the moon, and all the planets were in a line at the beginning of the Kalpa, arrived at this figure by mathematically calculating the period during which the sun, the moon and all the planets made an integral number of complete revolutions round the earth. We need not, however, go into these details, which, howsoever interesting, are not relevant to the subject in hand. A cycle of the four yugas, viz., Kṛita, Tretâ, Dvâpara and Kali, is, it will be seen, the basis of this chronological system, and we have therefore to examine more critically what this collection of four yugas, otherwise termed a Mahâ-yuga, really signifies and whether the period of time originally denoted by it was the same as it is said to be at present.