ence of NUNSwithin the monastic community, the life
span of the Buddhist teachings will be cut in half.
Early in the first millennium C.E., however, as the
Buddhist community became aware that this initial fig-
ure of five hundred years had already passed, new tra-
ditions extending the life span of the dharma beyond
this limit began to emerge. A 1,000-year timetable
seems to have been especially popular in Sarvastivada
circles, appearing in a wide variety of literary genres
(including sutras, VINAYAtexts, and AVADANAtales, as
well as in scholastic works) associated with this lineage.
The figure of 1,000 years also appears in several MA-
HAYANAtexts, including the Bhadrakalpika-sutraand a
commentary on the larger Prajñaparamita-sutra(Per-
fection of Wisdom Sutra) preserved only in Chinese (Da
zhidu lun).
With the passage of time even this extended num-
ber proved insufficient, however, and still longer
timetables were proposed. Later Mahayana scriptures
offer figures of 1,500 years, 2,000 years, and 2,500
years, of which the latter became especially influential
in East Asia. In THERAVADA circles a still longer
timetable of 5,000 years was adopted; this timetable has
been known since at least the fifth century C.E., when
it appeared in BUDDHAGHOSA’s commentary on the
An ̇guttaranikaya.The figure of 5,000 years has also be-
come standard in Tibetan Buddhism, drawn perhaps
from the Byams pa’i mdo(*Maitreya-sutra), which sur-
vives in two Tibetan translations. A slightly different
figure of 5,104 years is also used by Tibetan Buddhists,
calculated on the basis of an apocalyptic prophecy
found in the Kalacakra Tantra.
According to all of these traditions, after the req-
uisite time has elapsed Buddhism will completely dis-
appear from this world. Only at the time of the next
buddha, MAITREYA(commonly calculated at 5.6 bil-
lion, or sometimes 560 million, years from now), will
the truth discovered by S ́akyamuni and prior buddhas
be made available again. In East Asia, however, cal-
culations of the life span of the Buddhist religion took
a different turn, based on the development of a sys-
tem of three periods in the history of the dharma. Ac-
cording to this system, the third period in the life span
of the dharma was generally described as lasting for
10,000 years—a number that implies “infinity” in East
Asia. As a result, for East Asian Buddhists the life span
of the dharma has been radically extended, even as
this final period is described as one of decadence and
decline.
The periodization of decline
Texts predicting that the Buddhist religion will last only
five hundred years do not subdivide this figure into
smaller periods. With the advent of longer timetables,
however, Buddhists began to identify discrete stages or
periods within the overall process of decline. A wide
range of periodization systems can be found in Indian
Buddhist texts, ranging from two 500-year periods (in
the Mahavibhasa) to a 1,000-year period followed by a
500-year period (in the Karunapundarlka-sutra) to five
500-year periods (in the Chinese translation of the Can-
dragarbha-sutra). Clearly there was no consensus
among Indian Buddhists on the total duration of the
dharma or its periodization once the initial agreement
on a 500-year life span had been left behind.
Amid this great variety, however, a twofold peri-
odization scheme came to be widely influential in In-
dian Mahayana circles. According to this system
(which seems to have been formulated early in the first
millennium C.E.), after the Buddha’s death there would
first be a period of the true dharma (saddharma), fol-
lowed by a period of the “semblance” or “reflection”
of the true dharma (saddharma-pratirupaka). During
the first period, the Buddhist teachings are still avail-
able in their full form, and liberation can still be at-
tained; during the second, at least some elements of
the Buddhist repertoire remain available, but condi-
tions for spiritual practice are far less propitious. The
term saddharma-pratirupaka has sometimes been
wrongly translated into English as “counterfeit
dharma,” a concept that does appear elsewhere in Bud-
dhist literature, though not in the context of this two-
period scheme. It is quite clear, however, that Buddhist
writers viewed the period of the “reflected dharma” as
a time when access to genuine Buddhist teachings was
still available, albeit in a diluted and rapidly disap-
pearing form.
The distinction between saddharmaand saddharma-
pratirupakaappears to have been most useful as a con-
ceptual bridge between the older system of five hun-
dred years and longer systems, and as the expected
duration of the dharma moved beyond 1,500 years to
still longer figures, this twofold periodization system
seems to have gone out of use. Though references to
the saddharmaand the saddharma-pratirupakacon-
tinued to appear occasionally in other Mahayana texts
(for example, in the LOTUSSUTRA, where they play a
prominent role), longer periodization schemes for the
duration of the dharma that were formulated in India,
including the 5,000-year system now used in the Ther-
avada world and the comparable 5,000-year systemDECLINE OF THEDHARMA