Kala and the Great Cosmic Cycles of Time

Time, kala, holds a distinctive place among the substances of Jain metaphysics. It is counted as the sixth dravya, the principle that underlies continuity, change, and sequence in the cosmos. Without time there could be no becoming, no before and after, no aging of things or ripening of karma. Yet time occupies an unusual position in the scheme of substances, for while the other five are extended bodies, astikaya, occupying multiple space-points, time in the reckoning of many Jain thinkers is not extended in this way. The Svetambara tradition in particular tends to treat time as an auxiliary condition rather than a full extended substance, whereas the Digambara tradition often affirms it as a real substance composed of innumerable distinct time-atoms, kalanu, each resting on a single point of the cosmic space.

Jain thinkers distinguished two aspects of time. There is conventional or empirical time, vyavahara-kala, the time we measure by the movements of the heavens, divided into instants, hours, days, and years. And there is real time, nishchaya-kala, the underlying substance whose function is simply to make change and duration possible in all things. The smallest indivisible unit of time is the samaya, the instant it takes an atom to move from one space-point to the adjacent one. From this infinitesimal instant the tradition builds up an extraordinary hierarchy of larger and larger periods, culminating in vast unimaginable spans measured in palyopama and sagaropama, oceans of years.

The most vivid expression of Jain time is its cyclic conception of history. Time in the inhabited world is imagined as an ever-turning wheel, kalachakra, revolving eternally without beginning or end. Each full turn consists of two great half-cycles. The descending half is the avasarpini, during which happiness, virtue, longevity, stature, and prosperity gradually diminish. The ascending half is the utsarpini, during which these same qualities gradually increase again. As one half completes, the other begins, and so the wheel turns forever, an endless alternation of decline and renewal.

Each half-cycle is divided into six ages, called aras. In the descending avasarpini the ages move from the finest to the most degenerate: from a time of perfect happiness, through ages of diminishing bliss, into the present age of sorrow, and toward a final age of extreme misery. In the ascending utsarpini the same six ages unfold in reverse, from misery back up to supreme felicity. The earliest ages of an avasarpini are pictured as a paradisal era in which wish-fulfilling trees, kalpavriksha, provide all human needs and no toil or law is required. As conditions worsen, these trees fail, and human beings must learn agriculture, crafts, and social order.

It is within this framework that the great teachers appear. In each descending and ascending half-cycle, twenty-four Tirthankaras, the ford-makers who reveal the path across the ocean of rebirth, are born to renew the eternal teaching. Rishabha is remembered as the first of the present cycle and Mahavira as the twenty-fourth and last, having lived in the age of decline in which we now dwell. The teaching is thus never created and never finally lost; it fades and is revealed anew with the turning of time.

This cyclic vision reflects the deepest commitments of Jain thought. The universe has no origin in time and no end, no first moment when a creator set it in motion. Time is beginningless and endless, its wheel forever turning. Cosmic history is neither progress toward a goal nor decline toward a catastrophe, but an eternal rhythm. Against this vast and impersonal background, the individual soul's task remains constant in every age: to win release from the wheel of rebirth and pass beyond the reach of time altogether into the timeless freedom of the liberated.