Page 567 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

348 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME
of not less than 10,000 years* 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 Samhita. Now it is found that Manu and the
Mahabharata both assign 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000 years to the
four yugas of Kali, DvApara, TretA and Krita respectively. In
other words the durations of DvApara, Treta and ~ita are
obtained by doubling, trebling and quadrupling the duration
of Kali, and taking into consideration that K~ita (which Mr.
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 Mahd-yuga accord-
ing to the terminology explained above. Manu and Vyasa~
however, add to this 10,000 another period of 2,000 years, said
to represent the Sandhya or the SandhyAmsha periods interven-
ing between the different yugas. Thus the K~ita age does not
pass suddenly into Treta, but has a period of 400 years interpos-
ed at each of its ends, while the TretA is protected from the
contact of the preceding and the succeeding yuga by two periods
of 300 years each, the Dvapara of 200 and the Kali of 100 years.
The word Sandhya 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 twi-
light, 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
Sandhya or the period of transition into another yuga; and that
these supplementary periods were subsequent amendments.
The period of 10,000 years for a cycle of the yugas is thus
increased to 12,000, if the Sandyha periods are included in it,
making Kpta comprise 4800, Treta 3600, Dvapara 2400 and Kali
1200 years. Now at the time of the Mahabharata 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 Sandhyas,
1200 ordinary years, it would have terminated about the beginn-

" Athara Veda VIII, 2, zr,-?ffif ~s~;;i" ~~ ~ 'ffiVr ~
~l1~: I