Page 566 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION 347
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 ystem, except Aryabhatta, who holds
that 72, and not 71, Mahdyugas make a Manvantara, and that
a Mahayuga i divided into four equal parts which are termed
!(rita, Tretd, Dvapara and Kali. According to this chronologi-
cal system, we are, at pre ent, in the 5003rd year ( elapsed ) of
the Kali yuga of the 28th Maha-yuga of the 7th ( V aivasvata )
Manvantara of the current Kalpa; or 1 792,949,003 years have
in other words, elapsed since the deluge which occurred at the
beginning of the present or the Shveta-v§.raha Kalpa. This esti-
mate is, as observed by Prof. Ra~glicMrya, 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.,
Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, is, it will be S\!en, the basis of this
chronological system, and we have therefore to examine more
critically what this collection of four yugas, otherwise termed a
Maba-yuga, really signifies and whether the period of time ori-
ginally denoted by it was the same as it is said to be at present.
Prof. Ra~g§.charya 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 cer-
tain points which cannot, in my opinion, be definitely settled
without further research. I have shown previously that the word
yuga is used in the ~ig-Veda to denote ' a period of time ' and
that in the phrase manu~hd yuga 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 Devanam prathame yuge
in the ~ig-Veda, X, 72, 3; while in the Atharav 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