The yojana
The unit every measurement on this map is given in. Its size depends on which yojana you mean.
The everyday yojana, built up from the width of a finger, is usually reckoned at somewhere around eight or nine miles. Jain texts call this the utsedha yojana and use it for the heights of people and the sizes of ordinary things.
Cosmological distances use a different and much larger unit, the pramāṇa yojana, defined as five hundred times the utsedha yojana. Continents, oceans and mountains are measured in these.
So converting the map into kilometres is not a matter of one multiplication, and any single conversion figure you see quoted is choosing a definition without saying so. The relationships between the numbers are exact and reliable; the absolute scale is a matter of which unit is meant.
Measurements and counts
| Utsedha yojana | roughly 8–9 miles |
|---|---|
| Pramāṇa yojana | 500 × utsedha |
| Used for the continents | pramāṇa |
| Used for bodies | utsedha |
| Jambūdvīpa | 1,00,000 yojana across |