Brahma is made up of one thousand
mahayugas(“great cosmic ages”), each
of which lasts for 4.32 million years.
Each mahayuga is composed of four
constituent yugas, named the Krta
yuga, Treta yuga, Dvapara yuga, and
Kali yuga. Each of these is shorter than
its predecessor and ushers in an era
more degenerate and depraved. The
passage of the four yugas begins with a
time of sudden and dramatic renewal at
the onset of the krta yuga, followed by a
steady and persistent decline. Although
the kali yuga is the shortest of the four
ages, it is also the time of the greatest
wickedness and depravity, in which any
evil is possible. It is also, not surprisingly,
considered to be the period in which we
are now living. By the end of the kali
yuga, things have gotten so bad that the
only solution is the destruction and
recreation of the earth, at which time
the next krta era begins. Even though
the kali yuga is the shortest age, it still
lasts for 432,000 years, and the preced-
ing yugas are two, three, and four times
the length of the kali age. The increasing
degeneracy of each of the four yugas is
symbolized by the metals associated
with them: gold (krta), silver (dvapara),
bronze (treta) and iron (kali). Another
indication is the status of human beings,
who are said to become shorter, more
wicked, and shorter-lived in each suc-
ceeding age. The paradigm of the four
yugas leaves little room in traditional
Hinduism for the notion of progress,
since according to this system, things
will never be better than they
have already been. It idealizes a lost
and unattainable past rather than a
utopian future.
An alternate system of measuring
cosmic time connects the human and
the divine calendars, with one human
yearequal to a single day for the gods.
The six months when the suntravels
toward the north (uttarayana) is the
divine day, whereas the six months
when it travels south (dakshinayana) is
the divine night. Since an Indian solar
year is 360 solar days, a divine year
would thus last for 360 human years.
The life span of Brahma is one hundred
divine years and thus 36,000 human
years, after which the world is destroyed
and created anew.
A third system is that of the
Manvantaras, or ages of Manu. This sys-
tem divides the day of Brahma into
fourteen equal ages, with each one last-
ing a little less than 309,000 years. Each
age is identified by the particular divine
sovereign (manu) who rules during that
age. None of these three systems corre-
spond to one another, and there is no
real effort to reconcile them. This lack of
correspondence indicates that their
function was primarily mythic, to
establish a coherent cosmic chronology
and pattern rather than to describe
actual events.Cosmology
Hindu culture has no single cosmology
but rather several different systems,
each of which is well established in its
own right. The oldest model appears in
the Rg Veda(10.90), the oldest Hindu
religious text, and is known as the
Purusha Sukta(“Hymn to the Primeval
Man”). This hymn describes the cre-
ationof the world and all living beings
as the result of the sacrifice of the
primeval man (purusha). Different parts
of his body become different parts of the
physical universe and the traditional
social groups. Another Vedic metaphor
is that of the Golden Embryo, which is
the only existing thing until it develops
into Prajapati, the creator of the uni-
verse. A third version, that of the Cosmic
Egg, is found in the later religious texts
known as the puranas, which are com-
pilations of mythology and lore.
According to this image, the entire uni-
verse is originally contained in the
Cosmic Egg. Once it is broken, the egg’s
constituent parts (shell, white, yolk, and
membranes) become all of the things of
the earth. The final cosmological image
from the puranas, and perhaps the most
common, begins with the god Vishnu
floating in the sea of cosmic dissolution
(pralaya), lying on the back of his serpentCosmology