According to Hindu treatises and mythology, the present universe must go through four great epochs, each of which is a complete cycle of cosmic creation and destruction. Hindu mythology deals with numbers so large that they are almost impossible to imagine.
Hindus believe that the process of creation goes through a cycle, and that each cycle has four great yugas, or epochs of time. And since the process of creation is cyclical and endless, it begins, ends, and begins again.
The Kalpa or Aeon is said to consist of a thousand cycles of four yugas. It is believed that one cycle lasts 4.32 million years, and the duration of Kalpa is 4.32 billion years.
About the four yugas
There are four great eras in Hinduism. The first of these is the Satya Yuga, the golden age or the age of truth. It is believed that it lasts 4000 years. The second period - Treta Yuga - the age of perfectmorality or the silver age. Its duration is 3000 years. The third period - Dvapara Yuga - the Bronze Age. Its duration is 2000 years. And the last period is the Kali Yuga, which is also called the Iron Age, lasting 1000 years.
Hindu tradition claims that three of these great eras of the present universe have already ended. We are now living in the fourth Kali Yuga. It is difficult to comprehend and comprehend the meaning of the huge numbers expressed by the scheme of Hindu time, so vast are these numbers. There are different theories about the symbolic meaning of these dimensions of time.
Symbolic interpretations
Metaphorically, the four ages of the yuga can symbolize the four phases of involution, during which a person gradually lost awareness of his inner self and subtle bodies. Hinduism believes that humans have five types of bodies, known as annamaya kosha, pranamaya kosha, manomaya kosha, vignanamaya kosha and anandamaya kosha, which mean "gross body", "breath body", "psychic body", "intellect body" and "bliss body" respectively.
Another theory interprets these eras in terms of the extent to which truth is lost in the world. This theory suggests that only truth prevailed during the Satya Yuga (in Sanskrit, "satya" means "truth"). At the next stage, the universe lost one quarter of the truth, then lost half, and now, in the Iron Age, only a quarter of the truth remains. Therefore, evil and untruth have gradually replaced truth in the last three centuries.
Dasavatara: 10 avatars
OnDuring these four yugas, the god Vishnu is said to have been incarnated ten times in ten different avatars. This principle is known as Dasavatara (Sanskrit das means ten). During the Age of Truth, people were spiritually advanced and mentally strong.
In the Treta Yuga, people still remained righteous and adhered to a moral lifestyle. God Rama from the epic "Ramayana" lived at this time.
In the Dvapara Yuga people have lost all knowledge related to intellect and bliss. Krishna was born at this time.
The present era is said to be the most degenerate of the Hindu eras.
Life in the Iron Age
It is said that we currently live in the fourth of the four yugas, a world infested with vices. The number of people with noble virtues is decreasing every day. The attributes of Kali Yuga are hunger, war and crime, deceit and duplicity.
It has two phases: at the first stage, people who lost the knowledge of the two higher "I" had knowledge not only about the physical body, but also about the "breath body". However, at the second stage, even this knowledge left humanity, leaving us only with the awareness of the gross physical body. This explains why people are now more concerned with the physical self than with any other aspect of existence.
Due to the preoccupation with physical bodies and our lower selves, and because of our emphasis on the pursuit of gross materialism, this age has been called the Age of Darkness, the age when we lost touch with our inner selves, the age of the deep ignorance.
Whatsays in holy books
Both great epics - "Ramayana" and "Mahabharata" - spoke about the era of Kali Yuga. In the Ramayana there is a prediction of the sage Kakbhushundi:
In the Kali Yuga, the seat of sin, men and women are all immersed in unrighteousness and act contrary to the Vedas. Every virtue was engulfed in the sins of the Kali Yuga; all the good books are gone; the impostors brought with them a number of creeds which they invented themselves. People have all fallen prey to delusion, and all pious deeds have been consumed by greed.
Sage Vyasa in the Mahabharata explains:
In the Kali Yuga, functions of the proper order disappear and people suffer injustice.
What happens next?
According to Hindu cosmology, at the end of the Age of Darkness, the god Shiva will destroy the universe, and the physical body will undergo a great transformation, in fact, the end of the world will come. When this happens, the god Brahma will recreate the universe again, and humanity will again live in the age of Truth.
Easing Timeline
The doctrine of the yuga cycle says that we live in the Age of Darkness, when moral virtue and mental ability have reached their lowest point. The epic "Mahabharata" indicates that Kali Yuga is the period when the "world soul" turned black; the remaining quarter of virtue is gradually fading away. Evil and anger reign among the people; diseases and natural disasters are multiplying, people are afraid of suffering and poverty. All creatures degenerate.
Beginning and end of Kali Yuga
So, humanity lives in a dark era, where there is practically no goodness or virtue. But when did this era begin? And when will the world end? Despite the theological characteristics of this period, the dates of the beginning and end remain hidden in mystery. The generally accepted date that marked the beginning of the Kali Yuga is considered to be 3102 BC. e., which corresponds to the thirty-fifth anniversary of the end of the battle of the Mahabharata. This is surprisingly close to the proposed start of the current "Great Cycle" of the Mayan calendar in 3114 BC. e. Moreover, in both cases, the dates indicating the beginning of these cycles were calculated many years later. The recalculation of the Mayan calendars took place between about 400 B. C. e. and 50 AD e., it was at this time that the year of the beginning of the current Great Cycle was established. Indian calendars were recalculated around 500 CE. e. It was then that the famous astronomer Aribhatta named 3102 BC as the date for the beginning of the fourth yuga. e.
Calculations of the beginning of the epoch
It is generally believed that Aribhatta calculated the date corresponding to the beginning of the Kali Yuga, based on data provided by the Sanskrit astronomical treatise Surya Siddhanta, according to which the five "geocentric planets" - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - were aligned with 0° Aries (near the star Zeta Piscium), at its beginning. Thus, the date of February 17/18, 3102 BC became the starting point. e. However, modern simulations have shown that on this particular day, all these planets were located in a 42 ° arc in the sky and scattered acrossthree zodiac signs - Aries, Pisces and Aquarius, which is in no way a conjunction. The relative "alignment" of the planets has occurred in previous and subsequent ages.
Can it be argued on this basis that Aribhatta made a mistake in his calculations? Such an opinion would be erroneous, since the Surya Siddhanta never indicated that such an alignment of the planets took place at the beginning of the fourth of the four yugas. On the contrary, it says that this conjunction of the planets at 0° Aries refers to the end of the Golden Age. Unfortunately, this simple statement was subsequently distorted due to the desire to substantiate the year 3102 BC from the point of view of astrology. e. as the beginning of the fourth yuga, and was subsequently made public as an indisputable fact.
In general, in ancient Hindu astronomy, the point of view regarding the beginning of the yuga was that the real order of things is due to the movement of all planets from the position of 0 ° Aries. In addition, all planets return to the same position in the heavens at certain fixed intervals, resulting in a universal conjunction. According to the Surya Siddhanta, such a conjunction can be observed at the end of the Golden Age. However, the prevailing belief in Hindu astronomy is that it refers to the beginning of the Day and Night of Brahma, consisting of 1000 yuga cycles.
Similar information regarding the conjunction of the planets can be found in ancient Greek texts. In the Timaeus, Plato refers to the "Perfect Year", which takes place at the moment when the celestial bodies and planets return to their relativeposition despite all their intermediate reversals. This idea was echoed by the 3rd century Roman writer Censorinus, who pointed out that the Sun, Moon, and five wandering planets complete their orbits in the "Great Year of Heraclitus," when they simultaneously return to the same sign where they were previously. This "Great Year" has other names - "Perfect Year", "Platonic Year", "Aristotle's Highest Year", etc. Different philosophers called it different duration: 12,954 years for Cicero or 10,800 years for Heraclitus.
Researchers say the date is 3102 BC. e. for the Kali Yuga before 500 BC. e. not mentioned in any Sanskrit text. Where did Aribhatta get this information from? Most likely, the astronomer himself did not calculate this date. In one of the texts, he mentions that he composed the text at the age of twenty-three, in the year 3600 of the fourth yuga. Since his work was compiled in 499 A. D. e., the beginning of the Iron Age can be traced back to 3102 BC. e. The statement itself does not contain any information about the astronomical basis that would allow the date to be calculated. There is also no indication whether the calculation itself was compiled by Aribhatta. Perhaps this date was taken from some other source.
Calculation of duration
As the eminent researcher Sri Yukteswar pointed out, in many Sanskrit texts the duration of the yuga, which is 12,000 years, is artificially inflated to an abnormally high value of 4,320,000 years. This was calculated using a factor equal to 360, corresponding to the number of human years that make updivine year. But some ancient texts, such as the Mahabharata and the Laws of Manu, use the original duration of the Yugan cycle of 12,000 years. Many other ancient cultures - Chaldeans, Zoroastrians and Greeks - also show belief in a 12,000-year cycle of epochs.
Ascending and descending cycles
The concept of the ascending and descending Yuga cycle, which represent the spiral of time, is still common among the Jains, the oldest religious sect in India. Jains believe that in the full cycle of time (Kalachakra) there is a progressive and a regressive part. During the progressive half of the cycle, knowledge, happiness, he alth and spirituality gradually increase, and during the regressive half these qualities decrease. Each half cycle of the time spiral is made up of six smaller periods, and together these two half cycles make up a full cycle of time. They follow each other in a continuous sequence, just like day and night or waxing and waning moons.
The idea of an ascending and descending cycle of ages is also common in Greek myths. The Greek poet Hesiod (c. 750 BC - 650 BC) introduced a fifth period called the Age of Heroes, between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
Evidence from various sources supports the notion of a complete Yuga cycle (24,000 years), consisting of ascending and descending cycles, each lasting 12,000 years. Thus, the question arises about the relative duration of various Yugas in a full cycle and the transitional periods characteristic of the onset andend of each yuga and known as Sandhya (dawn) and Sandhyana (dusk) respectively.
Yuga timeline
These meanings are presented in Sanskrit texts for all Yugas and their dawns and dusks:
- Golden Age: 4000 years + 400 years of dawn + 400 years of dusk=4800 years.
- Silver Age: 3000 years + 300 years dawn + 300 years dusk=3600 years.
- Bronze Age: 2000 years + 200 years dawn + 200 years dusk=2400 years.
- Iron Age: 1000 years + 100 years dawn + 100 years dusk=1200 years.
Since so many errors have crept into the doctrine of the Yugian cycle, the question arises as to the accuracy of the relative duration of the yugas mentioned in the Sanskrit texts.
Transition from era to era
According to the timeline, the Golden Age begins before 12,676 BC. e., more than 14,500 years before the present. It also shows that this is the Kali Yuga, which should be considered ascending and which is the current age, and it will end in 2025. The full manifestation of the next ascending era will take place in 2325 CE. e., when the transitional period lasting 300 years ends. It will be followed by two more remaining ascending yugas. The cycle of 12,000 years will be completed by the ascending Satya Yugaraya.
The ancient text "Brahma-vaivarta Purana" describes a dialogue between the god Krishna and the goddess Ganges. It says that after 5,000 years of Kali Yuga, the dawn of a new Golden Age will come, which will last 10,000 years (text 50, 59). This can be immediately understood incontext of the Yuga timeline. Accordingly, the Kali Yuga ends around the year 5700 from its beginning, in 3676 BC. And after it ends, three more epochs will follow, spanning 9,000 years, before the ascending cycle ends.
