Treta Yuga

Treta Yuga is the second age, of 1,296,000 years, three units of 432,000, and in it dharma stands on three legs. Sacrifice and ritual appear because virtue is no longer spontaneous, the texts say, and human lifespan and stature are reduced; the Ramayana is placed in this age, with Rama as the seventh avatara of Vishnu. The name comes from treta, a triad, referring to the three legs and, in some readings, to the three sacred fires. The descending ratio is often connected with the throws of the Indian dice game, in which krita is the winning throw of four and the others descend from it, and the connection is made explicitly in some of the older sources; if so, the entire cosmology of the ages rests on a metaphor from gambling, which several scholars have noted with some relish.

Two further avataras of Vishnu are traditionally placed within this age alongside Rama: Vamana, the dwarf who reclaims the three worlds from the king Bali, and Parashurama, the axe wielding sage said to have rid the earth of a corrupt warrior class, an act some tellings repeat twenty one times over. Accounts differ on where Parashurama's own deeds fall within the age, and some place them late enough to bridge into the Dvapara Yuga that follows, one more instance of the scheme's ages not being as cleanly bounded in the texts as the round figures suggest.

One question runs through every attempt to relate the yuga figures to history: are the years human years or years of the gods? The Manusmriti and the Puranas describe a divine year as 360 human years, and the yuga totals are given in the sources both as figures of divine years and as the very much larger figures obtained by multiplying by 360. The 1,296,000 years of the Treta is the multiplied figure; the underlying count is 3,600 divine years.

This is not a modern confusion. The sources themselves work with both scales, and the commentators discuss the relation, so a reader meeting two sets of numbers for the same age is meeting a real feature of the tradition rather than an error in transmission.

It is also the opening through which every modern reinterpretation has come. If the base figures are divine years, then the choice of multiplier is where a reformer can intervene, and reformers have. The atlas records the traditional multiplied figures as the tradition gives them, notes that the smaller figures are equally traditional, and treats the question of which is meant as one the sources leave open rather than one a reference work should settle by preference.

The Treta is also where the yuga scheme meets narrative. The Ramayana is placed in this age, and the epics and Puranas locate their events within the cycle rather than in any absolute chronology, which is one of the ways the scheme functions in practice: it is a frame for ordering the tradition's own material as much as a cosmological measure. That is a different use from dating, and the two should not be confused.