Karma Yoga Sastra -Tilak
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CHAPTER VIII
THE CONSTRUCTIN AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE COSMOS
What period of time lapses between the creation of the universe and its destruction or merging in nowhere mentioned in the Samkhya Karika. Yet, I think that the computation of time mentioned in the Manu-Samhita (1. 66-73), Bhagavadgila (8. 17), or the Mahabharata [1]must have been accepted by the Samkhya philosophers Our Uttarayana, that is, the period when the Sun seems, to travel towards the North is the day of the gods, and our Daksinayana, when the Sun seems to travel towards the South, is the night of the gods ; because, there are statements not only in the Smrtis, but also in astronomical treatises that the gods live on the Meru Mountain, that is to- say, on the north pole, [2]. Therefore, the period made up of the Uttarayana and the Daksinayana, which is one year according to our calculations, is only one day and one night of the gods, and three hundred and sixty of our years are" three hundred and sixty days and nights or one year of the gods. We have four yugas called, Krta, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. The periods of the yugas are counted as four thousand years for the Krta, three thousand years for the Treta, two thousand years for the Dvapara and one thousand years for the Kali. But one yuga does not start immediately after the close of the previous one, and there are intermediate years which are conjunctional. On either side of the Krta yuga, there are four hundred years ; on either side of the. Treta, three hundred ; on either side of the Dvapara, two hundred; and on either side of Kali there are one hundred. In all, these transitional periods of the four yugas amount to two thousand years. Adding these two thousand years to the ten thousand years over which the Krta, Treta, Dvapara and Kali yugas extend, we get twelve thousand years. Now, are these twelve thousand years of human beings or of the gods ? If these are considered to be human years, then, as more than five thousand years have elapsed since the commencement of the Kali yuga, not only is the Kali yuga of a thousand human years over, but the following Krta yuga is also over, and we must believe that we are now in the Treta yuga. In order to get over- this difficulty, it has been stated in the Puranas that theses twelve thousand years are of the gods. Twelve thousand years of the gods mean 360x12000=43,20,000, that is, forty- three lakhs and twenty thousand years. |
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