The Ages of the World (Yugas & Kalpa)
Time runs not in a line but in vast wheels — four declining ages, ours the darkest, turning without end.
Hindu cosmology thinks in staggering spans of cyclical time. History runs through four world-ages, the yugas, in which righteousness steadily declines: a first golden age of full dharma, then two diminished ages, and finally the kali-yuga, the present 'dark' age of strife in which virtue stands on a single leg. The four ages together make one great cycle, vast numbers of which compose still longer cosmic days and nights of creation and dissolution. Time does not run in a line toward an end but turns in immense recurring wheels.
Key passages(8)
They who know (the true measure of) day and night, know the day of Brahmâ, which ends in a thousand Yugas, and the night which (also) ends in a thousand Yugas.
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Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad · Vedic Revelation (śruti)
'Do not say, "from seed," for seed is produced from the living ; but a tree, springing from a grain, clearly rises again after death .
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'Now (if one who knows this, dies), whether people perform obsequies for him or no, he goes to light (arkis), from light to day, from day to the light half of the moon, from the light half of the moon
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Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad · Vedic Revelation (śruti)
That Pragapati is the year, and he consists of sixteen digits. The nights indeed are his fifteen digits, the fixed point his sixteenth digit. He is increased and decreased by the nights. Having on t
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Let a man meditate on the fivefold Sâman as the seasons. The hinkâra is spring, the prastâva summer (harvest of yava, &c), the udgîtha the rainy season, the pratihâra autumn, the nidhana winter.
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Some call him the father with five feet (the five seasons), and with twelve shapes (the twelve months), the giver of rain in the highest half of heaven; others again say that the sage is placed in the
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