The View from my Window

‘Lord Krishna spent 125 years on Earth’

Saturday, 11 September , 2004, 12:49

It was February 18, 3102 BC Friday at 02 hours, 27 minutes and 30 seconds in the afternoon when Lord Krishna left his earthly body for his heavenly abode - or so claims an ascetic after intensive calculations.

Swami Gyananand Saraswati of the Varanasi-based Adi Jagadguru Shankaracharya Vedic Research Institute also claims to have calculated exactly how many hours Lord Krishna spent on Earth and his precise age when the epic battle Mahabharata ended.

He says Lord Krishna spent 125 years on Earth and departed precisely 5,106 years ago. The ascetic scholar presented a detailed timeline of the life of the Lord before a gathering of scholars at Somnath temple in Prabhas Patan, 350 km from this Gujarat city.

He says his calculations are based on the study of various Indian scriptures, including Skand Purana, Shrimad Bhagawat Purana, Shri Vishnu Mahapurana, Matsya Parva and the epic Mahabharata.

He also referred to the astrological treatise Bhrigu Samhita for dating various events in Krishna’s life. He fed the data into a computer and used a special software to determine the longitude and latitude of various places mentioned in the texts.

He says Krishna died 36 years after the war of Mahabharata. “His age on the last day of the war was 89 years, two months and seven days. That tallies with the estimate of 125 years,” Saraswati asserts.

He claims that Krishna was born the 22nd day of the fourth month of the 863,874th year of Dwapar Yug, which was the eighth day of the second half of the Hindu calendar month of Shravan, the day Janmashtami, or the birth of Krishna, is celebrated.

Saraswati, who is at the Somnath temple complex for a traditional four-month sojourn of Chaturmas, declared his findings on Tuesday to coincide with Janmashtami celebrations.

He has also worked out a chronology of the temple, one of the Dwadasha Jyotirlingas or the 12 most important temples of Lord Shiva. The temple has been reconstructed many times in its history.

The present temple was constructed in 1951 at the behest of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first home minister, and the idols were installed by India’s first president Rajendra Prasad.