The Wheel of Ages

A day of the creator god lasts four billion three hundred and twenty million years. When that day ends, his night begins, and it is just as long, and through the whole of it the worlds are unmade and lie dissolved in a single dark ocean on which the god Vishnu sleeps. When he wakes, he makes the worlds again. He does this for a hundred of his own years, each year of three hundred and sixty such days and nights, and then even he ends, and the whole structure dissolves to its root and in time begins once more, as it has begun countless times before.

No other body of ancient literature reaches for time on this scale. The Puranas were giving the cosmos a depth of billions of years while the chronologies of the West still counted the age of the world in a few thousand. This is the one promise of the five marks that the Puranas keep magnificently: sarga and pratisarga, creation and re-creation, the turning of the worlds. This chapter follows the wheel.

The four ages

The smallest unit of the great scheme is already vast, and it is built on a simple, bleak idea: that time runs downhill.

There are four ages, four yugas, and each is worse than the one before. The first is the Krita or Satya Yuga, the age of truth, when order is whole and humanity needs no law because no one breaks it. Then the Treta, then the Dvapara, and finally the Kali Yuga, the age of strife, our own, when order has worn down to almost nothing. The Puranas give them a falling rhythm, in the ratio four to three to two to one. Counted in human years, with the twilight periods the texts add at each end, the Krita runs to 1,728,000 years, the Treta to 1,296,000, the Dvapara to 864,000, and the Kali to 432,000. Together the four make one mahayuga, a great age, of 4,320,000 years. The figures are given alike in the Vishnu Purana and, independently, in the law book of Manu, which is part of why they are so firmly fixed.

The decline is moral before it is anything else. The Puranas picture dharma, right order, as a bull standing on four legs in the first age, and losing a leg with each age that passes, until in the Kali Yuga it stands, swaying, on one. The Vishnu Purana describes our age without flattery, in Wilson’s translation: a time when “wealth and piety will decrease day by day, until the world will be wholly depraved,” when “property alone will confer rank,” when “falsehood will be the only means of success.” It is a sobering thing to read a text describe, fifteen centuries ago, the age it believed itself and you to be living in.

The day of Brahma

Above the great age the scale leaps, and keeps leaping.

A thousand mahayugas, the Vishnu Purana says, make one kalpa, and a kalpa is a single day of Brahma the creator. That is four billion three hundred and twenty million human years in one divine day. Within that day, fourteen Manus reign one after another, each over an age called a manvantara, each manvantara running to more than three hundred million years and having its own Manu, its own ruler of the gods, its own seven sages. We are said to be in the seventh manvantara of the present day, presided over by the Manu called Vaivasvata.

And the day of Brahma is followed by a night of equal length, and the days and nights make his years, and a hundred of his years make his life, a span that later reckoning works out to something on the order of three hundred and eleven trillion human years. When that is done, even Brahma dissolves. Set this beside the Western chronologies that were standard until the eighteenth century, which gave the universe a few thousand years, and the reach of the Puranic imagination is staggering. It is a conceptual scale, a vision rather than a measurement, and one should not pretend the ancient seers had measured the cosmos. But the instinct, that time is unimaginably deep and the present moment a speck within it, is one that later science would in its own way confirm.

The sleep between worlds

The turning of the wheel requires that the worlds end, and the Puranas describe their ending with a strange calm.

There are dissolutions of more than one kind. At the close of each day of Brahma comes what the Vishnu Purana calls the incidental dissolution, the naimittika pralaya: the three worlds are burned and then drowned, until all is one mighty ocean. In Wilson’s translation, “the creator, Hari, sleeps upon the ocean, in the form of Brahma,” through the long night, and creates anew at its end. The image is one of the most beloved in all of Hindu art: Vishnu, here named Hari, reclining on the coils of the endless serpent Ananta, also called Shesha, “the remainder,” what is left when everything else has dissolved, floating on the dark water while the cosmos waits to be born again. At the far greater scale, the end of Brahma’s whole life, comes the elemental dissolution, when the very elements collapse back into one another, earth into water, water into fire, each into its source, until all of nature returns to its unmanifest root.

What matters in all of this is the shape, and the shape is a circle. The cosmos in the Puranic vision has no first moment and no last. It is beginningless, it repeats, it has run through this same sequence more times than can be counted and will run through it again. Creation is not a single act but a rhythm, the breathing in and out of the divine, world after world after world.

Where we stand

The tradition places us with precision within this immensity, and the precision is worth examining.

We are, it holds, in the Kali Yuga, the last and worst of the four ages of the present great age. And the tradition dates its beginning: the Kali Yuga began, the Vishnu Purana says, on the day the god Krishna left the earth, at the close of the Mahabharata war. Later astronomers, following the calculations of Aryabhata around the year 499, fixed that moment at 3102 before the Common Era. Hindu almanacs still count from it; by that reckoning we are some five thousand years into an age that has another four hundred and twenty-some thousand to run.

Here the two registers of this treatise must be kept apart with care. That the tradition dates the Kali Yuga to 3102 BCE is simply true; it is what the tradition holds and reckons. That the Kali Yuga actually began in 3102 BCE is a different kind of claim, and the historical record does not support it; there is no war or departure of a god that the evidence can fix to that year. The date is the product of tradition and astronomical back-calculation, a sacred chronology rather than a documented one. Reported as the tradition’s reckoning, it is accurate. Asserted as history, it is not, and this volume does not assert it.

That is the wheel: four declining ages turning into a great age, a thousand great ages making a day of the creator, the worlds dissolving each night onto the serpent’s coils and remade each dawn, without beginning and without end. Against a backdrop of such depth, a single human life is almost nothing. The next chapter turns from the vastness of Puranic time to its tenderest and most intimate book, the one that answered that smallness with love.