Buddhist cosmology divides the life of a single world-system into four kalpas of roughly equal, incalculable length: an eon of forming, in which the world takes shape; an eon of duration, in which the formed world stands and beings inhabit it; an eon of dissolving, in which the world is destroyed by fire, water or wind; and an eon of voidness, in which nothing exists between one world-system's end and the next one's beginning. The four together make up one mahakalpa, a great kalpa, the largest ordinary unit of time named in the tradition.
Facts
Disputed
Proposed DatingWhether the tradition's vast, uncounted figures for each kalpa were ever meant as a real chronology or as a didactic device conveying inconceivable duration is read differently across Buddhist scholasticism and by modern scholars of it. 1 Some traditional commentators and modern scholars treat the four kalpas and their antarakalpas as a serious cosmological chronology meant to be reasoned about literally; others read the incalculable figures and the mountain and mustard-seed similes that accompany them as a rhetorical strategy for conveying a duration beyond ordinary counting rather than a chronology meant to be taken at face value, and the tradition itself has never settled which reading is correct. Dating
Proposed DatingEach of the four phases, forming, duration, dissolving and void, is itself an asankhyeya kalpa, an incalculable eon with no year count assigned to it in the tradition; four incalculables make one mahakalpa, and the scheme carries no calendar date, only its own internal proportions. 1 Proposed DatingWithin the duration phase, the tradition further names a smaller unit, the antarakalpa, defined as one full cycle of human lifespan lengthening from ten years to eighty four thousand years and then contracting back to ten; twenty such antarakalpas are said to make up the standing duration of a world-system before it begins to dissolve. 1 Identity
SymbolNo single glyph represents the scheme; the tradition instead conveys each kalpa's incalculable length only through similes, most durably the image of wearing away a solid mountain of rock by brushing it with a fine cloth once every hundred years, the same simile Buddhist reckoning uses elsewhere for a kalpa's length in general. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The Buddhist division of a single world system's life into four kalpas of forming, duration, dissolving and voidness, together one mahakalpa.
Related To
The five corruptions describe the moral and material decline within the duration eon of a single world system's kalpa cycle.
The Lingbao scriptures borrow the Buddhist kalpa (Chinese jie) for their own cosmology of cyclical eras; both doctrines structure cosmic time into ages that end in destruction and open onto renewal, one Daoist and one Buddhist telling of a shared unit of vast time.
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