SUN PRINCIPAL

Stats tell you

The table of contents in this text are:

1.     The Mean Motions of the Planets

2.     True Places of the Planets

3.     Direction, Place and Time

4.     The Moon and Eclipses

5.     The Sun and Eclipses

6.     The Projection of Eclipses

7.     Planetary Conjunctions

8.     Of the Stars

9.     Risings and Settings

10. The Moon's Risings and Settings

11.  Certain Malignant Aspects of the Sun and Moon

12.  Cosmogony, Geography, and Dimensions of the Creation

13.   The Gnomon

14.    The Movement of the Heavens and Human Activity

Methods for accurately calculating the shadow cast by a gnomon are discussed in both Chapters 3 and 13.

Time cycles

The astronomical time cycles contained in the text were remarkably accurate at the time. The Hindu Time Cycles, copied from an earlier work, are described in verse.

11. That which begins with respirations (prana) is called real.... Six respirations make a vinadi, sixty of these a nadi;

12. And sixty nadis make a sidereal day and night. Of thirty of these sidereal days is composed a month; a civil (savana) month consists of as many sunrises;

13. A lunar month, of as many lunar days (tithi); a solar (saura) month is determined by the entrance of the sun into a sign of the zodiac; twelve months make a year. This is called a day of the gods.

14. The day and night of the gods and of the demons are mutually opposed to one another. Six times sixty of them are a year of the gods, and likewise of the demons.

15. Twelve thousand of these divine years are denominated a caturyuga; of ten thousand times four hundred and thirty-two solar years

16. Is composed that caturyuga, with its dawn and twilight. The difference of the krtayuga and the other yugas, as measured by the difference in the number of the feet of Virtue in each, is as follows:

17. The tenth part of a caturyuga, multiplied successively by four, three, two, and one, gives the length of the krta and the other yugas: the sixth part of each belongs to its dawn and twilight.

18. One and seventy caturyugas make a manu; at its end is a twilight which has the number of years of a krtayuga, and which is a deluge.

19. In a kalpa are reckoned fourteen manus with their respective twilights; at the commencement of the kalpa is a fifteenth dawn, having the length of a krtayuga.

20. The kalpa, thus composed of a thousand caturyugas, and which brings about the destruction of all that exists, is a day of Brahma; his night is of the same length.

21. His extreme age is a hundred, according to this valuation of a day and a night. The half of his life is past; of the remainder, this is the first kalpa.

22. And of this kalpa, six manus are past, with their respective twilights; and of the Manu son of Vivasvant, twenty-seven caturyugas are past;

23. Of the present, the twenty-eighth, caturyuga, this krtayuga is past.