Yojana
A yojana is a measure of distance that was used in ancient India. A yojana is about 12–15 km.Edicts of Priyadarshi (Ashoka) (3rd century BCE)
, in his Major Rock Edict No.13, gives a distance of 600 yojanas between India, presumably Pataliputra, and "where the Yona king named Antiyoga ", identified as King Antiochus II Theos, whose capital was in Babylone. Since Pataliputra and Babylone are at a distance of about 4000 km, this would give a yojana of about 7 km.Yojana as per "Vishnu Purana"
Yojana is defined in Chapter 6 of Book 1 of the Vishnu Purana as follows:Clearly defined
The length of the yojana varies depending on the different standards adopted by different Indian astronomers. In the Surya Siddhanta, for example, a yojana was equivalent to, and the same was true for Aryabhata's Aryabhatiya. However, 14th century mathematician Paramesvara defined the yojana to be about 1.5 times larger, equivalent to about. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada gives the equivalent length of a yojana as about throughout his translations of the Bhagavata Purana. Some other traditional Indian scholars give measurements between 6.4 km and 8 km or thereabouts. In The Ancient Geography of India, Alexander Cunningham says that a yojana is traditionally held to be between 8 and 9 miles and calculates by comparison with Chinese units of length that it could have been between and.
