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CHAPTER  XXXIV.

ON   THE   DIVISION   OF   THE   NYCHTHEMERON   INTO   MINOli
PARTICLES   OF  TIME.

Ghati.         The Hindus are foolishly painstaking in inventing the

most minute particles of time, but their efforts have
not resulted in a universally adopted and uniform
system. On the contrary, you hardly ever meet with
two books or two men representing the subject iden¬
tically. In the first instance, the nychthemeron is
divided into sixty minutes or ghati. We read in the
book Srudhava by Utpala the Kashmirian : " If you
bore in a piece of wood a cylindrical hole of twelve
fingers' diameter and six fingers' height, it contains three
mand water. If you bore in the bottom of this hole
another hole as large as six plaited hairs of the hair of a
young woman, not of an old one nor of a child, the three
mand of water will flow out through this hole in one
cjhati."

cashaka.          Each minutc is  divided into  sixty  seconds, called

easliaka or cakhaka, and also vighatilcd.

Plana.             Each sccoud is divided into six parts or prdna, i.e.

Page ,70. breath. The above-mentioned book, Sr{jtdhava, explains
thep7-dna in the following manner: "It is the breath
of a sleeping person who sleeps a normal sleep, and not
like a man who is ill, who suffers from retention of the
urine, who is hungry, or has eaten too much, whose
mind is occupied with some sorrow or pain; for the
breath of  a sleeping person varies  according to the