Time is a wheel, and this is the worst quarter of it.
Four yugas turn from a golden age down to this one, Kali Yuga, which by the standard reckoning began in 3102 BCE and has some 426,000 years still to run. The cosmos is not going anywhere in particular: it dissolves and is remade, and a single day of Brahma runs 4.32 billion years.
Cyclical time is one of the deepest structural differences between the Indian traditions and the Abrahamic ones, and it changes everything downstream. There is no creation to date, no end to await, no single decisive intervention in history — the universe has been through this before and will again. The yuga arithmetic is precise and enormous: 1,728,000 years of Krita, then 1,296,000, then 864,000, then Kali Yuga at 432,000, the whole cycle repeating a thousand times in one day of Brahma. Kali Yuga is defined by decline: dharma stands on one leg instead of four, lifespans shorten, kings become predators, and merit is cheap because standards have collapsed — which is also the theological argument for why devotion has replaced sacrifice as the accessible path. The scheme is used rhetorically all the time in India, to explain everything from corruption to bad manners.
The same ground, other faiths
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