________________ JAIN CONCEPTS OF GEOGRAPHY AND COSMOLOGY 237 of Jamboodweep one after the other at an interval of 24 hours. Each of them takes 48 hours to complete one round. As Jamboodweep has a diameter of 800,000 miles, its circumference works out to about 2,512,000 miles. Since a sun is supposed to cover half of it in 24 hours, it works out to about 51000 miles in an hour. The Jain concept thus implies an exaggeration of 51 times in the size of Jamboodweep. Another aspect pertains to the width of Ganga. Our assumption of its maximum width of five miles during monsoon is reasonable. Since the texts stipulate 500 miles width at the mouth, the exaggeration works out to 100 times. That is almost double the exaggeration noticed in time-distance phenomena. Since we have only these two cases to gauze the level of exaggeration, it would not be appropriate to take their mean as the rate of exaggeration. Moreover, the rotation of earth cannot be directly related to the supposed movement of suns above the surface of Jamboodweep. As such, it would be better to arrive at the likely rate of exaggeration on the basis of the width of Ganga, which rests on hard facts. It would therefore not be out of place to gauze the rate of exaggeration as 100 times. Thus if we assume that the size of Yojan could be 100th part of what is normally accepted, the diameter of Jamboodweep would work out to 8000 miles, which is close to the actual diameter of the earth (7926 miles). The area of Ayodhya in that case could be about 69 sq. miles, which would be reasonable, because it was the principal city of India. The width of Ganga at the mouth would work out to 5 miles, which could be very likely in monsoon. Similarly the east-west length of Bharat Kshetra would work out to 1152 miles, which is not far away from the size of Indo-Ganga plain. The problem would, however, arise about its north-south Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org
