The End of Our World Is Not Nigh

Veda Vyasa, H.H. Wilson (T) · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 24 pages

Twenty-four pages of the Vishnu-Purāna in Horace Hayman Wilson's translation, arranged under an abstract and train of thoughts which numbers each section, with an appendix on sacred astronomical cycles and a closing page of suggested reading.

The selection opens with the prophecies on the four ages, the decline of all things and the deterioration of mankind during the Kali age — followed immediately by what the abstract calls its redeeming properties, since devotion to Vishnu is said to be sufficient for salvation in that age for all castes and persons alike, which is precisely what makes the age tolerable. The centre of the file is the doctrine of *three different kinds of dissolution*, taken in order: the first kind; the second, or elemental dissolution, in which all is resolved into primary spirit; and the third, or final liberation from existence. That third section is the longest and the least abstract, because it argues its case from the miseries of ordinary life, set out under numbered heads — the pains when the child is about to be born, when old age arrives, in the agonies of death, in the tortures of hell, and the striking claim that there is no end of pain even in heaven, whose felicity is called imperfect. The conclusion drawn is that exemption from birth is desirable to the wise, and that only knowledge and works can make a man a god. Between the doctrinal sections sit the measurements — the duration of a Pararddha, the clepsydra or water-vessel for measuring time, and the dissolution occurring at the end of a Day of Brahmā — and the file ends with the anecdote of Khandikya instructing Keshidhwaja how to atone for permitting the death of a cow.

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