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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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1. India. In India the doctrine appears in the form
of the four yugas, or ages, which make up the
mahâyuga (Great Year), a period lasting for 4,320,000
solar years. Each of the yugas differs from its prede-
cessor much as the Ages of Hesiod did, in that wicked-
ness and general evil grow greater. The last yuga in
the series is our own, and will come to an end with
a great conflagration followed by a deluge. Between
each two ages there is a twilight and a dawn lasting
for one tenth of the duration of the preceding or fol-
lowing age. By the time the fourth age, the Kaliyuga,
has come to an end, the world is made ready for the
beginning of a new Great Year. But Indian imagination
was such that the Great Years themselves were orga-
nized into groups of a thousand, called kalpas, a con-
cept which was introduced at the time of the Emperor
Asoka, in the third century B.C. It should be observed
that the yugas varied in length: the first, the Satyayuga,
corresponding to the Golden Age in Greek mythology,
was the longest; the Kaliyuga, which began on 18
February 3102 B.C. will be the shortest. It is interesting
that the four yugas have some of the characteristics
of the human life-cycle in that the capacity for com-
mitting evils enters after childhood and increases until
old age.