Arithmetic has to touch the ground somewhere. The Līlāvatī grounds it in measures — weights for the market, lengths for the map, and volumes for the grain — and this copy of the treatise works out the whole system, from a māṣa of gold to a yojana of road.
Weights and lengths
The text begins with the units of weight and distance, each defined in terms of the last.
A timaṣa is sixteen māṣas, and a karṣa. Four karṣas make a pala, knowers of the balance; the gold-karṣa is known as suvarṇa. Eight barley-corns make an aṅgula, four hastas made up of six aṅgulas each, and four such hastas make a daṇḍa here; a krośa is two thousand of those. A yojana is four krośas, and a vaṃśa is ten karaṇas; a nivartana is a field bounded by twenty vaṃśas, with four sides.
The system runs from grain to distance without a break: barley-corns to aṅgulas, aṅgulas to hastas, hastas to daṇḍas, daṇḍas to krośas, krośas to yojanas — one continuous ladder from the seed to the horizon.
Volumes for the grain-market
Then the measures of capacity — the units that mattered at the granary.
A tuṣa is one-sixteenth of a droṇa; an āḍhaka is one-fourth of a droṇa. And a prastha is a fourth part of an āḍhaka; its quarter is a kuḍava. The remaining terms — kāla, nādi, etc. — are to be known as common in the world.
Arithmetic with a world attached
What makes the Līlāvatī enduring is that its mathematics is never pure — every rule is tied to a measure, every measure to a use, every use to a life. This copy, one of several in the collection, is a reminder that Bhāskara taught arithmetic as the science of the real: gold weighed, fields bounded, grain measured, roads paced.