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Yugas (World Ages)

Kali Yuga

Also Known As Kaliyug
Four Ages

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Origin 200 BCE to 400 CE

The fourth and darkest age, the iron age of quarrel and strife. Righteousness stands on a single leg, spirituality is at its lowest ebb, and greed, dishonesty, and conflict prevail. At its close the cycle renews and a new golden age begins.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
200 BCE to 400 CE 1Tradition: González-Reimann, The Mahabharata and the Yugas
Origin Period
400 to 600 CE 2Tradition: Pingree, Jyotihsastra
Origin Period
The fourth and last of the four descending yugas within a single mahayuga, following Dvapara Yuga, and, like the other three, one of seventy one such mahayuga cycles that make up a single manvantara; at its close the sequence does not continue but restarts, with the next mahayuga cycle's Satya Yuga. 1
Origin of the Name
Kali is the losing throw of one in the Indian dice game, the name of a dice cast, and unrelated to the goddess Kali, whose name is a different word. It gives the age both its name and its length, one part to the first age's four 1
Identity
Position
4 of 4 1
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Manu 1.70: by the same reduction the Kali is 1,200 DIVINE years, the figure of 432,000 in this entry is that number multiplied by the 360 human years the tradition reckons to one divine year 3Tradition: Manusmriti, where the four ages are given in divine years
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The Vishnu Purana: in the Kali dharma stands on one foot alone. The age is not an end but a phase, at its close the cycle begins again with a new Krita 4Tradition: Vishnu Purana, where the ages are given in human years
Reckoning
Repeating Cycle
432,000 1
Rival Systems
A Rival System's Attribution
Aryabhata: 1,080,000 years. On the equal-quarters division of the Aryabhatiya the Kali is the same length as every other age, not one-tenth of the mahayuga, a difference of 648,000 years in the age we are said to be living in. The figure this entry records is the Puranic one 2Tradition: Aryabhata, Aryabhatiya
Legs of Dharma
1 4
In the classical reckoning dharma stands on one leg in this age, the last of its original four.
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Kali Yuga, the Present Age

Kali Yuga is the fourth and present age, of 432,000 years, in which dharma stands on one leg. The texts describe it in unsparing terms: rulers who plunder, teachers who sell knowledge, the collapse of family and of truth, short lives and small stature, and religion reduced to outward form. Traditional reckoning, following the astronomer Aryabhata and the Puranic sources, places its beginning at 3102 BCE, usually given as 18 February of that year, which leaves the great majority of it still to run; the age is not, on the traditional reckoning, anywhere near its end.

The name is from kali, the losing throw of one, and is unrelated to the goddess Kali, whose name is a different word with a different vowel. Modern reinterpretations that shorten the ages, notably that of Sri Yukteswar in The Holy Science (1894), are departures from the classical figures and should be identified as such.

Sources The Mahabharata and the Yugas: India's Great Epic Poem and the Hindu System of World AgesLuis Gonzalez-Reimann with Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical LiteratureDavid Pingree

Kali Yuga and the Epoch of 3102 BCE

The date usually given for the start of the Kali Yuga, 18 February 3102 BCE, is not a scriptural date but an astronomical one, and its origin is worth setting out. Indian astronomers of the classical period, Aryabhata in the Aryabhatiya of 499 CE among them, worked with a model in which the planets returned to a common starting point at a great conjunction, and calculating backwards from observed positions gave an epoch in the early fourth millennium BCE.

The Kali Yuga epoch is therefore a computed result, adopted as the zero point of the Kali Yuga era still used in Indian calendrical work, where the current year is given as a count of elapsed years since it. It is also the base from which the traditional 432,000-year duration is measured, which places the end of the present age far in the future.

That last point is frequently lost. Popular writing regularly presents the Kali Yuga as ending soon or as having ended, and neither claim follows from the traditional reckoning, on which barely five thousand years of 432,000 have run. Where a modern author has proposed a shorter cycle, as Sri Yukteswar did in 1894, that is a modern proposal and the atlas names it as one.

There is a further caution about the epoch. That Indian astronomers computed a date does not make it a historical event, and the traditional accounts that place the death of Krishna at the transition are religious narrative rather than chronology. The atlas records the computed epoch, the reasoning behind it and the tradition attached to it as three separate things, because they are.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Belongs to Tradition

Hinduism, Religions

The fourth and present Puranic yuga, in which the Vishnu Purana holds dharma reduced to a single leg, the close of the mahayuga cycle this atlas records as Hindu cosmological time.

Source Vishnu PuranaAnonymous

Found In

Mahayuga, Yugas (World Ages)

The Kali Yuga closes each mahayuga

Source Vishnu PuranaAnonymous

Originates in Language

Sanskrit, Languages

The name is Sanskrit, and the four age names are ordinary Sanskrit words before they are cosmological terms. Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali are the names of the four throws in an Indian dice game, four down to one, and the yuga names are taken from them. The connection is made in the older sources themselves.

Source A Sanskrit-English DictionaryMonier Monier-Williams

Related To

Iron Age, Ages

Theosophical and comparative-mythology writers, including Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return, compare Hesiod's Iron Age, the present degraded age, to Kali Yuga, the fourth and worst of the Hindu yugas.

Source The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and HistoryMircea Eliade; Willard R. Trask (trans.)
Kali Yuga, Ages
Sources
1. The Mahabharata and the Yugas: India's Great Epic Poem and the Hindu System of World Ages
Luis Gonzalez-Reimann, Peter Lang, 2002ch. 1, the names of the yugasView the Source
2. Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature
David Pingree, Otto Harrassowitz, 1981ch. 3, Aryabhata and the yugasView the Source
3. Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu)
Anonymouschapter 1, the decline of dharma
4. Vishnu Purana
Anonymous, Trubner & Co., 1864the Kali Yuga and its signsView the Source
Bhagavata Purana
AnonymousBook 12, the description of the Kali ageView the Source
A Sanskrit-English Dictionary
Monier Monier-Williams, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1899View the Source
Frequently Asked Questions

Has the Kali Yuga already ended, or is it ending soon?

Not on the traditional count; only on modern shortened reinterpretations.

On the traditional Puranic reckoning, no. The Kali Yuga is given a duration of 432,000 years and is dated from a computed epoch of 3102 BCE, so barely five thousand years of it have passed and the overwhelming majority remains. Popular writing that describes the age as ending soon, or as having already ended, is describing a different, much shorter reckoning, a modern reinterpretation, most notably Sri Yukteswar Giri's 24,000 year precessional cycle proposed in The Holy Science (1894), which this atlas records as a named alternative rather than folding it into the traditional count.

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