Keywords: Kali Yuga, Kalki Avatar, Bhagavat Puran
Author: Chitta Darshana
Date: June 18, 2020
Last updated: July 16, 2022
Table of Contents
Introduction
This story begins in 2019. After a near-fatal car accident, I had time to kill. For a mysterious reason, the chronology of ancient Dharmic texts and their classifications (Itihasa, Puranas, and Vedas) caught my fancy temporarily. One of the earliest Purana texts is the Srimad Bhagwatam, also known as the Bhagavad Puran. Chapter 12 in this text covers the ‘Degraded Dynasties of Kali Yuga,’ a chronology of past and future kings. I had never before heard of an Indic text containing such detailed predictions. I was intrigued.
Translations of ancient Sanskrit texts, such as the Vedas, had always sounded nonsensical to me. I was chair-bound and recuperating from injuries. With nothing else to do, I brushed up on my Sanskrit and got started on translating the chapter. I used the popular translation of the Shrimad Bhagwatam published by ISKCON as a starting point to bootstrap the process.
Terminology
For the uninitiated, let me clarify some terminology. The word ‘Yuga’ is a generic term equivalent to the English word ‘epoch’ or ‘period.’ This word is used in conjunction with a four-sided cyclic system of epochs
- Satya Yuga ( सत्ययुग: – the epoch of Wisdom and Truth)
- Treta Yuga (त्रेतयूग: – the epoch of three-fold life)
- Dwapara Yuga (द्वापरयुग: – the epoch of twofold life)
- Kali Yuga (कलियुग: – the epoch of the one-fold life).
These four are together referred to as Chatur Yuga (चतुर्युग:, chatur is ‘four’ in Sanskrit). According to most Vedic scholars and followers of Dharma (Hindu/Sanatan Dharma, Buddha Dharma, Jain Dharma, Sikh Dharma), we are now in the Kali Yuga – the age of ignorance (causality) and the least fruitful (one-fold) life. Considering the Yuga to be of a particular length of time time, the entire period of the four Yugas is called a Maha-Yuga (maha is ‘big’ in Sanskrit).
We don’t need to care about all these terms, but I’ve provided them just in case there is any confusion in your mind between Kali Yuga and all these other ***-Yugas.
The Ancient Global Origins of the Chatur Yuga
Dharmic texts, such as the Bhagawad Gita (the song of Creation), mention the Yuga Cosmology and call the Kali Yuga the age of vice (Gita: 8.17). In the Brahma-Vaivarta Purana, Sri Krishna (the author of the Gita) says that the length of Kali Yuga will be 5000 years. The Codex Rios, a Spanish translation of ancient South American cosmology, mentions four ages with a total length of ~17,000 years. Teń thousand miles away from Sri Krisna’s birthplace, the Aztecs published a Calendar Stone, which now rests in the Yale University Museum. This stone corroborates portions of the Codex Rios and depicts four ages – Atonatiuh (4008 years), Eecatonatiuh (4010 years), Quiauhtonatiuh (4801 years), and an unnamed fourth age lasting 5042 years. According to the inscription, this last age ends due to vice.
The Sacred City of Caral-Supe in South America, the oldest urban center in the continent, used astronomy to orient buildings and created calendars using underground observatories. A similar continental civilization is likely to have created the Aztec Calendar Stone. Current research indicates that Caral Supe was constructed around 2600 BCE, roughly in the same period as the Bhagavad Gita (if we go by a consensus estimate of ~3100 BCE proposed by most scholars). It appears that civilizations on opposite sides of the planet had the same ideas about these four epochs, each lasting about 4000-5000 years, with the final age being characterized by moral degradation of various forms. Furthermore, it appears that all of them were pointing to the present day as the approximate end of this final age. This is not just a statistical coincidence of the sort you commonly find in social sciences; it is based on sound archeological and astronomical observations embedded in the physical evidence. In my mind, this alone makes it worthy of further investigation.
Claims
According to the Bhagawat Puran, Kalki is the prophesied 10th avatar of Vishnu that manifests at the end of Kali Yuga, the current epoch. Everyone seems to agree on this for the most part. The question is – when does Kali Yuga, the age of vice, end? We all sense there is something wrong with the world, and we cannot put our finger on it. We only know it cannot go on like this indefinitely. It is my claim, based on the analysis in this work that the end of the Kali Yuga is imminent; the final kings are present today, and the Kalki (or Kalkin) will be manifested imminently.
The owners of consensus (e.g., Wikipedia, Quora, and various ‘scholars’) will not agree with me. Some of them borrow from the astronomical text called Surya Siddhanta, which also uses the Chatur-Yuga terminology, and map its content to cosmic scales of time. In this cosmic setting, the Kali Yuga is estimated at some four hundred thousand years, and the ages get linearly longer as you go back to previous epochs. We know this is impossible based on geological evidence of the surface of the earth and the archeological evidence of hominid remains. There are other points of view, including the one proposed by the traditions carried forward by Sadhguru.
I worked on my analysis in 2019, and I waited for a couple of years to gather more supporting evidence and choose the right time to publish. If the claims I make are indeed true (or close enough), then our course of action would be entirely different than the course most of us are pursuing at the present time. If the world is going to change, prudence and preparation are necessary to look at the next phase of Human evolution – the Satya Yuga. The cost of engaging in such thinking is an open mind, and for those who have one already, it’s almost free. The rest of you will have to make an effort.
Determining Reliability
To draw any conclusions, we need criteria to decide the relative reliability of the information. I decided to settle on the following general criteria based on Dharmic Epistemology:
- Expert testimony is insufficient on its own
Remember that Sabda Pramana (expert testimony, prophets, prophecies, etc.) is the lowest pramana (mode of evidence) in Dharma. This is also true in Science. Therefore, no analysis based on historical records or third-party expert opinion is incomplete without direct (empirical) evidence that can be tested. - Verifiable or Falsifiable claims are more reliable than statements of fact
For instance, the claim that a particular constellation appeared in the night sky in a particular position during Event-A is more reliable than a claim that Event-A happened three thousand six hundred and five years ago. The former has more falsifiable information – one could refute the former claim by proving that such a constellation could never be in the said position. The latter claim is to be taken on faith alone and may even be mere speculation that derails the entire effort. - Claims verified by multiple researchers are superior
For example, if a claim is made consistently with small errors by multiple sources, it is more reliable than a claim made by a single source. This is particularly relevant to historical accounts – the more the accounts converge, the better.
Choosing an Approach
Based on the material I have studied, the two approaches to determine the end date of the Kali Yuga are as follows:
- Use Scriptural Claims: Using notes in scripture, we can determine the beginning and duration of Kali Yuga, and infer the end date. This is what Aryabhatta tried. It is roughly what you will find on Wikipedia and Quora. This method is easier – there are plenty of Purana texts and astronomical treatises like Surya Siddhanta and Aryabhatiya to draw from.
- Use Chronological data: Starting with a chronology that extends to the beginning of Satya Yuga, we can match the chronology of events and kings with history and then project the rest of the chronology into the future to find the end date of Kali Yuga.
Option (a): Scriptural Claims
The business of predicting the end of the Kali Yuga (and the beginning of Satya Yuga) is very old. With all ancient sources, it is natural to find contradictions within and between them. In this particular case, there are contradictions in the estimated start date and the duration of the Kali Yuga.
Sometime around 500 CE, Aryabhatta calculated the start date of the Kali Yuga by combining two ideas: a) The date of the Mahabharata war based on the astronomical observations in the Mahabharata regarding positions of heavenly bodies, b) Other ancient texts that state that Kaliyuga begins after the death of Sri Krishna. Using these two pieces of evidence, Aryabhatta concluded that the Kali Yuga started in 3102 BC, thirty-five years after the conclusion of the great battle of the Mahabharata. In more recent calculations by Nilesh Oak, the same astronomical observations lead to an earlier date, around 5000 BCE. Given the very ancient timeframes involved here, it seems unlikely that we can arrive at a date within an accuracy of a few decades.
In the Brahma-Vaivarta Purana, Sri Krishna says that Kali Yuga will end 5,000 years after its beginning, giving way to a Satya Yuga. Combining this claim with Aryabhatta’s estimate for the beginning of the Kali Yuga, this yuga would end by 3102 + 5000 = 2102 AD. On the other hand, the Surya Siddhanta, an astronomical text, claims that the Kali Yuga runs for 432,000 years. Both claims are non-falsifiable and have to be taken largely on faith. In the case of the Purana, you just have to accept the supposed testimony of Sri Krishna. In the Surya Siddhanta, you have to accept that the text is actually talking about human time scales and not some other cosmic interpretation of the Chatur Yuga system.
Option (b): Chronological Data
Given the inherent problems of contradictions and reliability in scriptural claims, I decided to use base the analysis primarily on chronological data and only use other scriptural claims for support. The key benefits of this approach are:
- Avoids scriptural conflicts: As mentioned before, different texts make wildly differing claims about the duration and beginning of Kali-Yuga. I reject all those claims as contradictory and having no intrinsic merit.
- Better Falsifiability: Thousands of years have elapsed, so the chronology has a lot of data points (dozens of kings and events). Each step can be matched up with historical records.
- Novelty: It appeared to me that this way has not been tried before by too many people. I did not find any similar work, hence this conclusion. If there is such work, please let me know.
The Problem with Sanskrit
Many translations of ancient Sanskrit popularized on the internet have been the work of scholars with a Judeo-Christian heritage or scholars who are influenced by such values and symbols. As a result, they are prone to using words that match religious ideas from the Bible and Old Testament or other prevalent Western idioms. When they do not understand a concept, the translation can sound like nonsense. This is simply an innocent outcome of cultural conditioning that we must adjust for. When every word is critical, it is better to perform one’s own translations to make sure any misrepresentations of Sanskrit are not hiding important clues.
For us to make a good-faith effort to understand a text written in Sanskrit thousands of years ago, we must take great care. Specifically, ancient genealogies or prophecies have to be read with an interpretation contemporary to the writer. They talk of events hundreds of years into the future when language, meaning, and cultural norms will have changed greatly. If one finds that a translated prophecy sounds meaningless, there is either some flaw in the interpretation of the original work is a mistake. It is best to make sure the translations take into account this temporal disconnect and use our knowledge of recorded history to bridge the gap.
Finally, Sanskrit is a complex language, and its sentence structure is more flexible than English. Objects, subjects, verbs, and adjectives can appear out of order in a Sanskrit sentence. This may be convenient for the poet and author, but a translator has to make sure the right sentences are reconstructed and adjectives and adverbs are attributed correctly. Furthermore, Sanskrit words often have several alternate meanings and must be interpreted in the broader context of the chapter, not just the particular verse where the words appear. Translations have to be chosen carefully so that a coherent picture emerges locally in each verse and overall in the context of the adjoining verses.
Chronology of Kings in Srimad Bhagwatam
Chapter 12 of the Bhagwat Puran (a.k.a Srimad Bhagavatam) provides a chronological genealogy of the “Degraded Dynasties of the Kali-yuga,” a period between the arrival of the Indo-Greeks and the Kalki Avatar. As I will show shortly, all but the final step in this chronology matches with a series of historical events in Asia. According to these calculations, the manifestation of Kalki will begin between May 2024 and October 2025.
The Anchoring Technique
Here is how the method works:
- Identify a highly reliable ‘anchoring event’ in the text
- Match each subsequent event with a recorded event in history (up to the present day)
- When you reach the present, use the rest of the text to make accurate predictions about the future
The accuracy of the predictions will depend on the level of accuracy of (1) and (2). The heuristic to pick the anchoring point is a balance between two conflicting criteria:
- Accuracy: The more precise the date for the Anchoring event, the more accurate the rest of the analysis. Therefore, it is important to find an event with plenty of corroborative evidence.
- Falsifiability: The further back we pick the anchoring event, the more falsifiable the analysis, and therefore, more reliable. However, the further back we go, we are likely to find less corroborative evidence.
I chose the coronation of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya as the anchor. The Maurya Empire was one of the largest ever in South Asia and was well documented by the Greeks as well as other local writers of the time. There has also been a lot of contemporary research among social scientists and historians centered on the Mauryan empire, in part because the empire is said to have been the hunting ground of Shri Chanakya, the famed author of the politico-economic masterpiece Arthasastra. This research helps us gain confidence in the date of this anchoring event.
Summary Table
Subsequent to the anchor point, I noted every verse in Chapter 12 that mentioned the number of years a particular king or lineage ruled and performed the calculations. The table below provides a summary. The key points to note about this table are
- The Duration, when available in the Srimad Bhagwatam, is used directly. If the duration is a range, we use historical sources to increase accuracy.
- The Estimated Start Date is a function of the previous value and the contents of the Duration column.
- The Estimated Start Date column and the Historical Start Date column (when we have the records) provide clarity on the nett error. This is the value we must minimize in the anchoring technique.
Links are provided in the first column to jump to the corresponding translations. All verses are from chapter 12, part 1.
(If the links in the table don’t work, please scroll down to the relevant sections)
* The text does not tell us the length of time that Susarma reigned, so I had to use other sources to estimate that length to 16 years. Some texts indicate Susarma only reigned for 10 years, not 16.
** This number is based on the range from 1947 to 2014. This is contemporary history, and we know the 13 prime ministers of India during that time, and their reigns
Mauryan Period
Shunga Period
Kanva Period
Thirty Kings from Bali
Mleccha (Abhira, Gardhabhi, Kanishka, Greek, Mughal) Period
Macaulay Period
Modh Period
Coming of Kalki
By definition, the end of Kali Yuga, the end of the Modh period, the arrival of Kalki, and the beginning of Satya Yuga coincide. We know that verse 12.1.41 is the last verse in the first part of the 12th chapter, “The Degraded Dynasties of the Kali Yuga.” The second part of the 12th chapter begins with a description of Kalki, so we don’t need to go any further to determine the end of the Kali Yuga. If you believe the Srimad Bhagwatam and the evidence presented so far, Modi is the last ruler of the “Degraded Dynasties of the Kali Yuga.”
The end of the Modi period and the beginning of the Kalki period (Satya Yuga) will depend on when Modi loses elections or relinquishes power or when the current geopolitical situation evolves. All of these possibilities will end the Modi period. Modi has already said he will run for Prime Minister again in national elections in May 2024. If you believe the chronology of the Srimad Bhagwatam, there will be no other ‘ruler’ between Modi and Kalki. If BJP/Modi loses the elections, Kalki will manifest by June 2024. If BJP wins, the options for the end of Modi’s rule are as follows:
- Most likely possibility: Per the rules of his party, Modi goes to the Margadarshak Mandal (Guidance council) at the age of 75. Modi’s 75th birthday is 17th September 2025.
- Unlikely: Modi rules for the entire term (through 2028) and possibly beyond breaking his party rule. This is unlikely due to the careful image Modi has constructed of being an honest politician.
I am discounting other possibilities, such as ill health, due to the lack of reports of any such issues with Modi and a presence of a strong security system in India.
Concluding Remarks: Join https://www.facebook.com/groups/thespiritualhindu for more updates.
