The Arctic Home in the Vedas c16.9

Language: English

c16.9.1

Prof. Rangâchârya and especially Mr. Aiyer have ably treated this subject in their essays, and I agree in the main with them in their conclusions. I use the words ‘in the main’ deliberately, for though my researches have independently led me to reject the hypothesis of ‘divine years,’ yet there are certain points which cannot, in my opinion, be definitely settled without further research. I have shown previously that the word yuga is used in the Ṛig-Veda to denote ‘a period of time,’ and that in the phrase mânuṣhâ yugâ it cannot but be taken to denote ‘a month.’ Yuga is, however, evidently used to denote a longer period of time in such expressions as Devânâm prathame yuge in the Ṛig-Veda, X, 72, 3; while in the Atharva Veda VIII, 2, 21, which says “We allot to thee a hundred, ten thousand years, two, three, (or) four yugas,” a yuga evidently means a period of not less than 10,000 years;¹ and Mr. Aiyer is right in pointing out that the omission of the word ‘one’ in the above verse is not accidental. According to this view a yuga may be taken to have, at the longest, denoted a period of 10,000 years in the days of the Atharva Veda Samhitâ. Now it is found that Manu and the Mahâbhârata both assign 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000 years to the four yugas of Kali, Dvâpara, Tretâ and Krita respectively. In other words, the durations of Dvâpara, Tretâ and Krita are obtained by doubling, trebling and quadrupling the duration of Kali; and taking into consideration that Krita (which Mr.

c16.9.2

Aiyer compares with Latin quatuor) means ‘four’ in Sanskrit literature, the names of the yugas may perhaps be derived from this fact. We are, however, concerned with the duration of the four yugas, and adding up the numbers given above, we obtain 10,000 years for a cycle of four yugas, or a Mahâ-yuga, according to the terminology explained above. Manu and Vyâsa, however, add to this 10,000 another period of 2,000 years, said to represent the Sandhyâ or the Sandhyâmsha periods intervening between the different yugas. Thus the Krita age does not pass suddenly into Tretâ, but has a period of 400 years interposed at each of its ends, while the Tretâ is protected from the contact of the preceding and the succeeding yuga by two periods of 300 years each, the Dvâpara of 200 and the Kali of 100 years. The word Sandhyâ denotes the time of the dawn in ordinary literature; and Mr. Aiyer points out that as the period of the dawn and the gloaming, or the morning and the evening twilight, is each found to extend over three out of thirty ghatis of a day, so one-tenth of the period of each yuga is assigned to its Sandhyâ or the period of transition into another yuga; and that it is not improbable that these supplementary periods were subsequent amendments. The period of 10,000 years for a cycle of the four yugas is thus increased to 12,000, if the Sandhyâ periods are included in it, making Krita comprise 4800, Tretâ 3600, Dvâpara 2400 and Kali 1200 years.

c16.9.3

Now at the time of the Mahâbhârata or the Code of Manu, the Kali yuga had already set in; and if the yuga contained no more than 1,000, or, including the Sandhyâs, 1200 ordinary years, it would have terminated about the beginning of the Christian era.¹ The writers of the Purâṇas, many of which appear to have been written during the first few centuries of the Christian era, were naturally unwilling to believe that the Kali yuga had passed away, and that they lived in the Krita yuga of a new Mahâ-yuga; for the Krita yuga meant according to them a golden age, while the times in which they lived showed signs of degeneration on all sides. An attempt was, therefore, made to extend the duration of the Kali yuga by converting 1000 (or 1200) ordinary human years thereof into as many divine years, a single divine year, or a year of the gods, being equal to 360 human years. A Vedic authority for such an interpretation was found in the text from the Taittirîya Brâhmaṇa, which, we have quoted and discussed previously, viz., “That which is a year is a day of the gods.” Manu and Vyâsa simply assign 1000 years to the Kali yuga. But as Manu, immediately after recording the duration of the yugas and their Sandhyâs, observes “that this period of 12,000 years is called the yuga of the gods,” the device of converting the ordinary years of the different yugas into as many divine years was, thereby, at once rendered plausible;

c16.9.4

and as people were unwilling to believe that they could be in a yuga other than the Kali, this solution of the difficulty was universally adopted, and a Kali of 1200 ordinary years was at once changed, by this ingenious artifice, into a magnificent cycle of as many divine, or 360 × 1200 = 432,000 ordinary years. The same device converted, at one stroke, the 12,000 ordinary years of a Mahâ-yuga into as many divine, or 360 × 12,000 = 4,320,000 ordinary years, affecting in a similar way the higher cycles of time like Manvantaras and Kalpas. How the beginning of the Kali yuga was thrown back, by astronomical calculations, to 3102 B. C., when this hypothesis of ‘divine years’ was adopted, is a separate question by itself; but not being pertinent to the subject in hand we need not go into it in this place. Suffice it to say that where chronology is invested with semi-religious character, artifices or devices, like the one noticed above, are not unlikely to be used to suit the exigencies of the time; and those who have to investigate the subject from a historical and antiquarian point of view must be prepared to undertake the task of carefully sifting the data furnished by such chronology, as Prof. Rangâchârya and Mr. Aiyer have done in their essays referred to above.