Did Ancient Scripture Measure the Sun — and Can Monks Flatten Their Brain Waves? (Short version)

A well-known doctor went on a popular Nepali talk show and made two big claims: that the Garud Puran calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and that science backs ancient wisdom — for instance, that meditating monks can flatten their brain waves like they are asleep, slow down time, and even float off the ground. Big claims from someone who says he understands both scripture and science. So let us check them, one by one. That, after all, is what Sandehakari means: doubt first, then find out.

Claim 1: The Garud Puran predicted the Earth–Sun distance

The first problem is that it is the wrong book. The Garud Puran is read during death rites, and the only distance it mentions is the road a soul travels to Yamalok, the land of the dead — eighty-six thousand yojanas. Nothing about the Sun. The “Sun” line people quote is actually from the Hanuman Chalisa, a devotional poem written around 1600 CE — barely four hundred years ago — and in Awadhi, an everyday spoken language, not ancient Sanskrit. So the claim fails at the very first step: wrong scripture, and a modern one at that.

Now the famous calculation. Internet defenders take the line “yuga sahasra yojana” and multiply: 12,000 (the years in a yug) × 1,000 (sahasra) × 12.8 km (a yojana) = 153.6 million km. The real average distance is 149.6 million km. Close — but “close” here is off by 4 million km. To picture that gap, line up 314 Earths side by side. A spacecraft aimed with that number sails straight past the Sun.

But being off is not even the worst of it. A yug is a unit of time, not distance. You cannot multiply a stretch of time by a distance and get a distance — the answer is meaningless. It only “matches” because the units were cherry-picked. And the scriptures do not even agree on how long a yug is: by the oldest Vedic texts a yug is 5 years, which gives 64,000 km — the Sun in our backyard. Add a few zeros, as some texts do, and you get 15 billion km. Same formula, any answer you like. It only lands on the right number if you already knew the right number.

So the doctor is wrong — not by modern science, but by the logic of the scriptures themselves. This is not ancient knowledge. It is wishful thinking dressed up with numbers.

Claim 2: Monks flatten their brain waves, slow time, and levitate

The claim is that monks go “flat,” as if asleep. The opposite is true. In a 2004 study, the monks’ fast “gamma” brain waves spiked — high, not flat. A truly flat brain-wave recording (an EEG) means one thing in a hospital: the person is dead, or deeply sedated. Not enlightened. And that study had only 8 monks, with real difficulty separating genuine signal from muscle noise — so even the “spike” should be read with caution.

Larger, cleaner studies suggest only that meditation may help you focus — something we could have guessed without brain scans. They cannot tell us whether it works for everyone, or whether the effect lasts. So selling meditation as a cure-all is dishonest. It may be harmless on its own, but recommending it instead of medication to someone with severe depression puts the harm on you.

What about the rest? Slow breathing really does lower the heart rate — that part is true. But trained swimmers and runners do the same; it is not unique to meditation. Meditation can change your sense of time, but not time itself. Eating less is exaggerated. And levitation? Debunked — high-speed cameras have caught the stage-magician trickery every single time. The incentive is usually more followers and more donors.

So what did we learn?

Out of all those grand claims, exactly one held up. Look how much work it took to check them — and how easy they were to make in the first place. That is the whole point of Sandehakari: doubt first, then find out. Do not believe something just because someone with authority says it. Ask how they got there. Ask them to show their working, and watch how strong or weak it really is. Question everything — and when you turn out to be the one who is wrong, fix it. That is what honest thinking looks like.

You can find the more detailed, longer version here