Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 457

RECKONING TIME FROM THE DELUGE
417
saved along with the seven great Penitents. The universal
flood is not, to my knowledge, more clearly referred to in
the writings of any heathen nation that has preserved the
tradition of this great event, or described in a manner more
in keeping with the narrative of Moses, than it is in the
Hindu books to which I have referred.
It is certainly remarkable that such testimony should be
afforded us by a people whose antiquity has never been
called in question
the only people, perhaps, who have
never fallen into a state of barbarism a people who,
judging by the position, the climate, and the fertility of
their country, must have been one of the first nations to
a people who from time imme-
be regularly constituted
morial have suffered no considerable changes to be made
in their primitive customs, which they have always held
inviolable.
And curiously enough, in all their ordinary
transactions of life, in the promulgation of all their acts,
in all their public monuments, the Hindus date everything
from the subsidence of the Flood. They seem to tacitly
acknowledge the other past ages to be purely chimerical
and mythical, while they speak of the Kali-yuga as the only
era recognized as authentic.
Their public and private
events are always reckoned by the year of the various
cycles of sixty years which have elapsed since the Deluge.
How many historical facts, looked upon as established
;
;
;
have a far less solid foundation than this
Another very remarkable circumstance is that the Hindu
method of reckoning the age of the world agrees essentially
with what we have in Holy Scripture. In Genesis viii. 13,
for example, we read
In the six hundredth and first year,
in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters
were dried up from off the earth.' We read in Hindu
works
On such a day of such a month of such a year
of such a cycle, reckoning from the commencement of the
truths,
!
'
:
'
:
Kali-yuga.'
It is true that in the passage just quoted from Holy
Scripture the date is reckoned from Noah's birth.
He was
then entering on his six hundred and first year. But
according to many chronologists, it appears that in times
immediately succeeding the Deluge the Scriptures reckon
time by this patriarch, and that the anniversary of his