“The Solar Eclipse as an astronomical phenomenon has been fully explained by science and no one in this twentieth century can be pardoned if he seriously pretends to be ignorant of its real explanation.” – Sri Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati

This statement of Sri Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati is seen in his article “The Solar Eclipse at Kurukshetra,” published in The Harmonist, May 1929)

When people talk about the physical cause of an eclipse, Srila Saraswati Thakur says that science has given us the real explanation. During a solar eclipse, the Moon is positioned directly between the Earth and the Sun, blocking the light of the Sun from reaching part of the Earth. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth stands between the Sun and the Moon, and the shadow of the Earth falls upon the Moon. Observers can see the curved edge of the Earth’s shadow moving across the lunar surface. From the geometry of that shadow, together with other astronomical measurements, it is possible to calculate the diameter and circumference of the Earth. The eclipse does not merely tell us that the Earth is a sphere; the Earth’s geometry can be correctly measured.

The Earth is a globe with a diameter of 12,756 kilometres at the equator and a circumference of approximately 40,075 kilometres. These are not speculative numbers. They are measurable dimensions of the planet we live on, the planet people fly around in airplanes and rockets.

A globe hundreds of people have seen directly from space.

The Srimad Bhagavatam presents a description of the world that, if read as an ordinary geographical map of this planet, immediately creates difficulties. It speaks of India and of a continent called Jambudvipa, surrounded by an ocean of salt water. Beyond that are other great lands, each surrounded by another ocean: an ocean of sugarcane juice, and oceans of liquor, clarified butter, milk, yogurt, and fresh water.

Hundreds of people have flown around the world and looked down at the Earth from space. Has anyone reported seeing an ocean of liquor? Or an ocean of yogurt?

One of the offences against the Holy Name of Krishna is to disparage Srimad Bhagavatam and other sacred scriptures. The difficulty being discussed here should not be settled by saying, “The Bhagavatam speaks of oceans of liquor and yogurt, therefore the Bhagavatam is nonsense.” That would simply replace crude literalism – the belief that every word in the Bhagavatam must be understood as a concrete physical fact – with crass materialism.

The movements of the Sun, Moon and planets are mentioned in Srimad Bhagavatam. In Bhagavatam 5.21.8, it is stated that the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. The ancient commentator Sridhara Svami explains that this is the language of ordinary observation, not a literal description of what is physically occurring:

adbhyo va esa pratar udety apah sayam pravisati iti sruti-vyavaharo | na vastutah

“‘He rises from the waters in the morning and enters the waters in the evening’ is an expression found in Sruti; it is not literally so in reality.”

Sridhara Svami then states:

naivastamanam arkasya nodayah sarvada satah | udayastamanakhyam hi darsanadarsanam raveh

“The Sun does not actually set or rise. What are called rising and setting are simply the Sun becoming visible and invisible.”

Visvanatha Cakravarti states the point even more plainly:

srutir api vyavaharato, na tu vastutah

“Even the Sruti scriptures sometimes speak according to conventional usage, not according to literal reality.”

So, Sridhara Svami has explained that the “rising and setting of the Sun” mentioned in Srimad Bhagavatam was a statement based on ordinary observation. Truth be told, the idea that Jambudvipa sits at the center of the universe is an idea found in other, more ancient Puranic texts, such as the Vishnu Purana. The Bhagavatam’s descriptions of Jambudvipa and oceans of yogurt and liquor align with a much older body of traditional thinking – ideas and observations about the geography of the world that had been transmitted by sages long before the Bhagavatam manifested in its present form.

Thakur Bhaktivinode wrote:

“In the common place books of the Hindu religion in which the Raja and Tama Gunas have been described as the ways of religion, we have descriptions of a local heaven and a local hell; the heaven as beautiful as anything on earth, and the hell as ghastly as any picture of evil. Besides this heaven, we have many more places where good souls are sent up in the way of promotion. There are eighty-four divisions of the hell itself; some more dreadful than the one that Milton has described in his Paradise Lost. These are certainly poetical and were originally created by the rulers of the country in order to check evil deeds of the ignorant people who are not able to understand the conclusions of philosophy.

“The religion of the Bhagavat is free from such a poetic imagination. Indeed, in some of the chapters, we meet with descriptions of these hells and heavens and accounts of curious tales, but we have been warned, somewhere in the book, not to accept them as real facts but as inventions to overawe the wicked and to improve the simple and the ignorant. The Bhagavat certainly tells us of a state of reward and punishment in the future according to deeds in our present situation. All poetic inventions, besides this spiritual fact, have been described as statements borrowed from other works in the way of preservation of old traditions in the book which superseded them all, and put an end to the necessity of their storage.”

— from “The Bhagavat Lecture”, a speech in the English language by Thakur Bhaktinode at Dinajpur, Bangladesh, in 1869.