One thing first, plainly. Indian dates are mostly relative, pieced together from language and internal evidence, and firm dates stay disputed, because these texts were carried by mouth for centuries before they were written down. So whatever years follow, read them as approximate.

The rough order of composition

The Rigveda Samhita, about 1500-1200 BCE. The other Samhitas, about 1200-1000 BCE. The Brahmanas, about 1000-700 BCE. The Aranyakas and the older Upanishads, about 800-500 BCE, before the Buddha. The Buddha and Mahavira, fifth century BCE. The Vedangas and the sutra literature, about 600-200 BCE. The epics, about 400 BCE to 400 CE, with the Gita taking shape between about 200 BCE and 200 CE. Dharmashastra like Manu, about the second to third century CE. The darshana sutras, about 200 BCE to 400 CE. The Puranas, roughly 300-1000 CE. The Agamas and Tantras, about 500-1200 CE. The commentators of Vedanta: Shankara about 700 CE, Ramanuja about 1100, Madhva in the thirteenth century. Vernacular bhakti, from the sixth century to the seventeenth. And the Guru Granth Sahib in 1604.

Four meanings of when

Now a fine point, which also sets the stage for the Rama page ahead. When has four different meanings. The date of composition, when the text arrived in its form. The older oral stream behind it. The time inside the story, which the tale itself counts. And the tradition’s cosmic yuga-time. These four answer different questions, and they do not convert into one another. A whole page on yuga-time lies ahead.

Our own shelf on this same line

Now set this site’s own texts on this same line, older to newer, each with its rank beside it. The list below does exactly that.

The shape that emerges

A shape forms out of this. Two old anchors, the Upanishads and the Gita. Then a long quiet stretch. And then, in the second millennium, a dense thicket of bhakti and Advaita texts. With the epics and the Brahma Sutra now on the shelf, this spine is broader than before. Even so, there is nothing here from the ritual layers of Samhita, Brahmana, or Aranyaka, nothing from the Vedangas, nothing from Dharmashastra, and nothing from Agama-Tantra. This is the tradition’s spine of reflection and devotion.

The second clock

The line we have laid so far is the clock of ink: when a text arrived on paper. But the tradition keeps another clock of its own, and that one is far larger. In it, time sits nested one inside another. A kalpa is one day of Brahma, a thousand mahayugas, not around thirty-two billion years, but 4.32 billion. In one kalpa there are fourteen manvantaras, each of seventy-one mahayugas, about 300 million years, and the seventh, Vaivasvata, is running now. Each mahayuga is 4.3 million years, and within it sit Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali, four yugas, in the ratio four-three-two-one. We are seated in the Kali yuga of the twenty-eighth mahayuga of this Vaivasvata manvantara.

Those who lived not by centuries but by yugas

The story’s characters sit on this same clock, and their lifespans belong to this scale. Rama’s reign is said to have run eleven thousand years, and Dasharatha calls himself sixty thousand years old. That is the age-scale of Treta. And one character goes further still: Jambavan, the king of the bears. He appears in Rama’s service in Treta, and then that same Jambavan grapples with Krishna in Dvapara, in that very episode of the Syamantaka jewel, and gives him his daughter Jambavati. One being, that is, lived from Treta into Dvapara, the whole stretch between, which runs on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.

Then there are the chiranjivis, whom the tradition holds alive across the yugas: Hanuman, Parashurama, Markandeya, and a few more. Parashurama appears in both epics, in Treta and in Dvapara alike. Of Markandeya it is said that he saw even the dissolution, which means his life touches kalpas. And above them all are Devi, Shiva, and Vishnu, whose age is not counted at all, because they are not inside this clock but beyond it: sanatana, as the first page says.

So how old is the original

Right here rises the point that the clock of ink cannot make on its own. On this second clock, Krishna and the Mahabharata sit about five thousand years back, at the mouth of Kali. Rama sits far behind that, in Treta, at a distance of hundreds of thousands of years. Jambavan’s life stretches like a bridge between the two. And the events these texts tell, by the tradition’s count, happened in that deep time, long before the paper on which they were finally written. The picture below holds these two clocks side by side.

The two clocks answer different questions, and they cannot be converted into each other, exactly like the four meanings of when. The clock of ink asks: when was this text written. The clock of story asks: when did what it tells take place. The first runs on the scholars’ philology, the second on the tradition’s own yuga arithmetic. And one caution here stays the same: seating events in named yugas is itself a later arrangement (Devdutt Pattanaik), so read these deep numbers not as dates of history but as the tradition’s own counting. The full working of the yuga arithmetic is on the Rama page.