Start with a breath, and keep multiplying: six breaths make a pala, sixty palas a ghaṭikā, sixty ghaṭikās a sidereal day and night, thirty days a month, twelve months a year — and keep going and you reach a kalpa, a day of Brahma, at 4.32 billion solar years. That continuous ladder of time, from the body to the cosmos, is the subject of this commentary on the Sūryasiddhānta.
The ladder of small time
The commentary begins with the smallest practical units, anchored to something everyone has: breathing.
By six prāṇas or breaths, one pala of water is produced. By sixty palas, a ghaṭikā is stated by those who know the truth of time. By sixty nāḍīs, a sidereal day and night is proclaimed.
It is a beautiful move: the unit of time is defined by the breath, the day by the stars, and the two are joined in a single chain of multiplication.
The four yugas, calculated
Beyond the day, the text scales up to cosmic time. A mahāyuga — the great age containing Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara, and Kali — is 4,320,000 solar years, and each yuga is a tenth-part multiplied by four, three, two, and one respectively.
A tenth part of the yuga, multiplied by four, three, two, and one respectively, gives the measures of Kṛta-yuga and others. By the rule of three: by the sum of all dharma-quarters, measured as ten, the mahāyuga becomes 4,320,000.
So Kṛta is 1,728,000 years, Tretā 1,296,000, Dvāpara 864,000, and Kali 432,000 — each with its twilight (sandhyā) periods added on, and the arithmetic is worked out line by line in the margin, the same way a student today would show their working.
One system, no breaks
What makes the Sūryasiddhānta tradition remarkable is that the scale never changes units arbitrarily — a breath, a day, a year, a yuga, a kalpa are all the same system of measurement, and any of them can be converted into any other. This manuscript is a record of that consistency, preserved in the working examples of a scholar trained in a lineage that went back centuries.