The purpose of the movements of the luminaries
Understanding the model is, however, only part of it. The question is to understand the purpose. Understanding how a car moves is not as useful as the practical knowledge of how to drive and use one.
« Making Sense of the Vedic Universe, a Higher-Dimensional Reality
The purpose of the movements of the luminaries
The example of the potter’s wheel helps us to understand the relative motions of the sun, planets, and stars over the surface of our planet, and of Bhū-mandala in general. Understanding the model is, however, only part of it. The main question is to understand the purpose of it. Understanding how a car moves is not as useful as the practical knowledge of how to drive and use a car in our daily lives. This practical knowledge of the purpose of the system is given in the next two verses:
“The original cause of the cosmic manifestation is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Nārāyaṇa. When great saintly persons, fully aware of the Vedic knowledge, offered prayers to the Supreme Person, He descended to this material world in the form of the sun to benefit all the planets and purify fruitive activities. He divided Himself into twelve parts and created seasonal forms, beginning with spring. In this way He created the seasonal qualities, such as heat, cold and so on.
According to the system of four varṇas and four āśramas, people generally worship the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Nārāyaṇa, who is situated as the sun-god. With great faith they worship the Supreme Personality as the Supersoul according to ritualistic ceremonies handed down in the three Vedas, such as agnihotra and similar higher and lower fruitive acts, and according to the process of mystic yoga. In this way they very easily attain the ultimate goal of life.” (SB 5.22.3-4)
One mistake we commonly make when studying Vedic cosmology is to see this study as a mere tool to understand the universe in which we live. That’s the same mistake modern researchers make when studying the cosmos. In text three, Śukadeva Goswami puts us back into the correct framework, stating that, like all other luminaries, the sun is not an autonomous astronomical body. The all-important sun is a manifestation of Nārāyaṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
The sun performs several essential functions, such as sustaining life, serving as a purificatory agent, regulating the performance of activities, and so on.
The words dvādaśadhā vibhajya ṣaṭsu vasantādiṣv ṛtuṣu (He divided Himself into twelve parts and created seasonal forms, beginning with spring) indicate that not only the sun, but also the twelve months and the six Vedic seasons are also direct manifestations of the Lord. All these arrangements are intentional, created to facilitate people’s lives in this world and to help them to gradually find their way back home, back to Godhead.
When we just study the structure of the universe and orbits of the planets without this context, it appears that the arrangement is accidental, which leads us in the opposite direction, failing to see the purpose of everything. We can see that this is precisely the mistake in modern science. Although they more or less understand the phenomenal manifestation, they conclude that the arrangement is accidental, which leads to atheism.
Other scriptures, such as the Bible and Quran, in turn, fail to offer a consistent theistic explanation. This is offered only in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam.
Three different calendars
“The sun-god, who is Nārāyaṇa, or Viṣṇu, the soul of all the worlds, is situated in outer space between the upper and lower portions of the universe. Passing through twelve months on the wheel of time, the sun comes in touch with twelve different signs of the zodiac and assumes twelve different names according to those signs. The aggregate of those twelve months is called a saṁvatsara, or an entire year. According to lunar calculations, two fortnights — one of the waxing moon and the other of the waning — form one month. That same period is one day and night for the planet Pitṛloka. According to stellar calculations, a month equals two and one quarter constellations. When the sun travels for two months, a season passes, and therefore the seasonal changes are considered parts of the body of the year.
Thus the time the sun takes to rotate through half of outer space is called an ayana, or its period of movement [in the north or in the south].
The sun-god has three speeds — slow, fast and moderate. The time he takes to travel entirely around the spheres of heaven, earth and space at these three speeds is referred to, by learned scholars, by the five names Saṁvatsara, Parivatsara, Iḍāvatsara, Anuvatsara and Vatsara.” (SB 5.22.5-7)
After explaining the orbit of the sun and establishing that the sun is a manifestation of the Lord, Śukadeva Goswami explains how the movements of the sun influence the passage of time, and the difference between the Vedic calendar, the solar calendar, and the lunar calendar.
The solar year is called saṁvatsara, the time that it takes to go through the twelve rāśis (signs). The solar year is divided into 12 months, but the solar month differs from the lunar month, which is the full cycle of waxing and waning of the moon. This lunar month equals the duration of a day and night in Pitṛloka. This shows how the passage of time is relative. What is a day and night in different regions of the cosmos can be a month, a year, or a thousand ages for us.
In his purport to text seven, Prabhupāda states, “According to solar astronomical calculations, each year extends six days beyond the calendar year, and according to lunar calculations, each year is six days shorter. Therefore, because of the movements of the sun and moon, there is a difference of twelve days between the solar and lunar years. As the Saṁvatsara, Parivatsara, Iḍāvatsara, Anuvatsara and Vatsara pass by, two extra months are added within each five years. This makes a sixth saṁvatsara, but because that saṁvatsara is extra, the solar system is calculated according to the above five names.”
What exactly does it mean?
In Vedic culture, people follow three different calendars:
a) The Vedic cosmological calendar, which is divided into 12 months of 30 days each. This is the normative calendar for cosmic cycles. Kali-yuga is composed of 432,000 of these years of 360 days, for example. This Vedic calendar is anchored on the rotation of the kāla-cakra and is thus the same all over the cosmos. The length of the day varies from one planetary system to the other (one day for the demigods is one year for us, one day for Brahmā is 8.64 billion years for us, etc.), but everywhere people use calendars of 12 months of 30 days, according to the length of their days.
The difficulty with this 360 day calendar in our case is that it does not precisely reflect the movements of the sun and the moon. As described, the astronomical bodies have their own independent counterclockwise movements, and thus their own, natural cycles. This leads to the other two calendars:
b) The solar year corresponds to the orbit of the sun. It has approximately 365 1⁄4 days. The solar year is important, because it governs the seasons, climatic cycles, and so on. It is thus essential in agriculture, since the right time to plant and harvest is determined by the seasons, and not by a normative calendar.
c) The lunar year has about 354 days. It is important because it governs religious dates, such as festivals, vratas (such as ekādaśī), the calculations of auspicious and inauspicious dates, and so on. The Vaiṣnava calendar we follow is an example of application of the lunar calendar.
Each lunar month is divided into two halves, with a total of 30 tithis. The Kṛṣṇa-pakṣa (the waning phase of the moon) starts after Pūrṇimā and ends at Amāvāsyā, while the Śukla-pakṣa (the waxing phase) begins after Amāvāsyā and ends at the next Pūrṇimā (you can see that these two are usually mentioned in the Vaiṣnava calendar). There are two ekādaśīs in a lunar month, at the 11th tithi of each phase.
The difficulty is that the tithis don’t match the solar days. They are calculated based on the angular separation of the sun and moon, and range from 19 to 26 hours. A tithi can thus start at any time of the day and night. That’s why sometimes ekādaśīs and other dates often fall on different days in different parts of the world, due to the difference in the time of the local sunrise. This is the discrepancy Prabhupāda mentions in his purport. The lunar calendar has 6 days less than the Vedic normative calendar, and the solar calendar has about 6 days more. In this way, there is a difference of 12 days between the lunar and solar calendars.
In Vedic societies, people would usually follow the lunar calendar. To keep it in synchrony with the solar calendar, they would use the five-year saṁvatsara system, in which two extra months were added to the lunar calendar every five years, creating a functional sixth year to correct the accumulated lunar–solar discrepancy. Nowadays, it is more common to add an extra month every two or three years (the Pūruṣottama Māsa), but in any case, the underlying principle is the same.
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« Making Sense of the Vedic Universe, a Higher-Dimensional Reality
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