Yuga, Manvantara and Kalpa Years: Brahma's Day, Worked Out

One manvantara is 306,720,000 years, or 308,448,000 with the twilight that closes it. One kalpa, which is one day of Brahma, is 4,320,000,000 years, and his night is as long again. A year of Brahma is 3,110,400,000,000 years and his life of a hundred such years 311,040,000,000,000. These are the figures of the Surya Siddhanta, chapter 1, verses 15 to 24, in Ebenezer Burgess’s 1860 translation, and every one of them follows from two numbers: the 432,000 years of the Kali age and the ratio 4:3:2:1 between the four ages. This page does the multiplications in order, then shows where the text places the present inside them.

The Ladder of Units

The first rung comes from verses 1.13-14: the solar year is called a day of the gods, and 360 of those days and nights make a year of the gods, the divine year in which the ages are measured. The years in the right-hand column are solar years. Burgess’s own tables carry both columns, divine and solar, and every total above matches his printed figures.

Step 1: The Great Age of 4,320,000 Years

Each age has a body and, on either side, a junction one tenth as long: a dawn before and a twilight after. In divine years the four bodies are 4,000, 3,000, 2,000, 1,000, so the ages with their junctions are 4,800, 3,600, 2,400, 1,200 divine years, 12,000 in all. Multiplied by 360:

• Krita (Satya): 4,800 × 360 = 1,728,000 years (body 1,440,000, each junction 144,000)
• Treta: 3,600 × 360 = 1,296,000 years (body 1,080,000, each junction 108,000)
• Dvapara: 2,400 × 360 = 864,000 years (body 720,000, each junction 72,000)
• Kali: 1,200 × 360 = 432,000 years (body 360,000, each junction 36,000)

Burgess also notes that the text of Manu (1.68-71) gives the length of this divine age as simply 12,000 years, and that it is Manu’s commentator who turns them into divine years; Burgess takes this as a sign that the 4,320,000 figure is an expansion of an older 12,000. How far into the present Kali age the count has gone is worked out separately, year by year, on the Kali Yuga years page.

Step 2: A Manvantara, and Why 994 Ages Make 1,000

Verse 1.18 makes 71 great ages a manvantara, “another Manu” or the interval of one Manu: 71 × 4,320,000 = 306,720,000 years. At its end comes a twilight as long as a Krita age, 1,728,000 years, which the text describes as a deluge. Verse 1.19 then puts 14 manvantaras into a kalpa, each with its twilight, and adds a fifteenth junction of the same length at the very beginning.

The arithmetic looks as if it should fall short of a round thousand, since 14 × 71 is only 994 great ages. The 15 junctions supply the rest: 15 × 1,728,000 = 25,920,000 years, which is exactly 6 great ages, and 994 + 6 = 1,000. So a kalpa is 1,000 × 4,320,000 = 4,320,000,000 years. Burgess found the choice of fourteen and seventy-one not obvious, and suggested the pull of the number seven together with the need for equal junctions.

Step 3: Brahma’s Day, Night, Year and Life

Verse 1.20 calls the kalpa a day of Brahma and gives his night the same length, so a full day and night is 8,640,000,000 years. Verse 1.21 gives his whole life as a hundred, and the commentary, as Burgess reports it, reads that as a hundred years of 360 such days and nights. A year of Brahma is then 360 × 8,640,000,000 = 3,110,400,000,000 years, and the hundred years 311,040,000,000,000, about 311 trillion. Burgess notes that the Puranas call that span a para and its half a parardha.

Where the Text Places the Present

Verses 1.21-23 give the position: half of Brahma’s life is past, and of the second half this is the first kalpa; in it 6 Manus are past with their twilights, and of the 7th Manu, Vaivasvata, 27 great ages are past; and of the 28th the Krita is over. Adding those up, with the opening junction of the kalpa, gives the time to the end of that Krita:

• Opening junction of the kalpa: 1,728,000
• 6 manvantaras with their twilights: 6 × 308,448,000 = 1,850,688,000
• 27 great ages of the 7th: 27 × 4,320,000 = 116,640,000
• The Krita of the 28th: 1,728,000
• Total: 1,970,784,000 years, Burgess’s figure for the end of the Golden Age

Add the Treta and Dvapara, 2,160,000 years, and the kalpa had run 1,972,944,000 years when the Kali age began. With the 5,127 Kali years complete since the new year of 2026, 1,972,949,127 years of the present kalpa are past and 2,347,050,873 remain, a little under half. Of the present manvantara, 120,533,127 years of its 306,720,000 are past, 186,186,873 remain, and after the present great age 43 more are to come in it. A summary of these figures, cited in the English Wikipedia article on the manvantara to S. V. Gupta (2010), is that the present lies in the first day of the 51st year of Brahma, in the reign of the seventh Manu, in the Kali of the 28th great age.

The Surya Siddhanta then makes one further deduction, peculiar to it in Burgess’s view. Verse 1.24 sets aside 17,064,000 years, 47,400 divine years, as the time Brahma spent in the work of creation, and the text’s planetary reckoning counts only from the end of that. Burgess worked the count to 1,955,884,960 years from the end of creation to April 1859; on the same basis it stood at 1,955,885,127 at the 2026 new year. The two totals differ by exactly the 167 years between the dates, which is a check that the sums above and his agree.

The Fourteen Manus

The names of the Manus of the present kalpa, in the order given in the English Wikipedia article on the manvantara, which quotes the Vishnu Purana in H. H. Wilson’s 1840 translation for the first seven. The article itself gives two names for the thirteenth.

1. Svayambhuva (past)
2. Svarochisha (past)
3. Uttama (Auttami) (past)
4. Tamasa (past)
5. Raivata (past)
6. Chakshusha (past)
7. Vaivasvata (the present manvantara)
8. Savarni
9. Daksha-savarni
10. Brahma-savarni
11. Dharma-savarni
12. Rudra-savarni
13. Raucya (Deva-savarni)
14. Indra-savarni

A Different Kalpa: Aryabhata’s 1,008 Ages

Not every astronomer used these divisions. In W. E. Clark’s translation of the Aryabhatiya, verse 1.3 gives 14 Manus to a day of Brahma and 72 great ages to a Manu. That makes 14 × 72 = 1,008 great ages, or 4,354,560,000 years, and Clark notes that Brahmagupta criticised Aryabhata for exactly this figure of 1,008 instead of 1,000. Aryabhata also appears to have split the great age into four equal quarters of 1,080,000 years. The two schemes agree on the 4,320,000-year great age and differ on everything built from it.

What These Numbers Are, and Are Not

Burgess calls the system of ages arbitrary and not of astronomical origin, a cosmogony from the Puranas and Manu that astronomy adapted itself to. It is reported here as the text’s own arithmetic. None of the figures is a measurement of the age of the Earth or the universe, and the page does not set them against those, nor read any coming event from them. The other time scales in the site’s calendar are much shorter: the sixty named years on the samvatsara names page, and the units of a single day, ghati, pala and vipala, on the ghati and pala page.

In Brief

• Great age: 4,320,000 years (12,000 divine years of 360)
• Manvantara: 71 great ages = 306,720,000 years; 308,448,000 with its twilight
• Kalpa (day of Brahma): 4,320,000,000 years = 1,000 great ages (994 in manvantaras + 6 in junctions)
• Year of Brahma: 3,110,400,000,000; life: 311,040,000,000,000; half past (155,520,000,000,000)
• Present kalpa: 1,972,949,127 years past, 2,347,050,873 to come
• Present Manu: the 7th, Vaivasvata; 186,186,873 years of his manvantara remain

In Hindi: युग, मन्वंतर और कल्प के वर्ष: ब्रह्मा का एक दिन.