Utsarpini, the Ascending Half, and the Wheel Without End

Utsarpini mirrors avasarpini's six ages in reverse. Beginning from the depths of dusama-dusama, extreme unhappiness, the world climbs back in stages, through dusama and dusama-susama, gathering a new set of Tirthankaras along the way, up through susama-dusama and susama toward susama-susama, the same effortless golden age with which avasarpini began, at which point the wheel turns over and the descent begins again. Jain teaching insists that this alternation has no beginning and no end, anadi-ananta, and that no creator god sets the wheel turning or brings it to rest, a point that marks Jain cosmology off sharply both from Hindu doctrines of periodic creation and dissolution by a divine agent and from the linear, single ended time of the Abrahamic religions.

Digambara and Svetambara Jain communities share the basic six age framework in both half cycles, though they differ on some points of detail and dating within it, a divergence scholars treat as evidence of a shared inherited scheme elaborated somewhat differently by each tradition rather than as two unrelated doctrines. Because the wheel has no first turn and no last, the doctrine also carries a practical implication for the individual, that liberation, moksha, is not something the cosmos itself moves toward as a whole, but a possibility open to a soul at any point along either half of the endless cycle.