The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Jains conceive of time as an endless round. Time is pictured as a wheel with twelve spokes, or ages, classified in two sets of six. The first set is called the “descending” series (avasarpinī), and begins with the age of the superlative giant-couples. That paradisiac period endures for ten millions of ten millions of one hundred millions of one hundred million periods of countless years, and then yields slowly to the only half as blissful period when men and women are only four miles tall. In the third period — that of Ṛṣabhanātha, first of the twenty-four world saviors — happiness is mixed with a little sorrow, and virtue with a little vice. At the conclusion of this period, men and women are no longer born together in couples to live together as man and wife.

During the fourth period, the gradual deterioration of the world and its inhabitants steadily continues. The life span and stature of man slowly diminish. Twenty-three world saviors are born; each restating the eternal doctrine of the Jains in terms appropriate to the conditions of his time. Three years, eight and one-half months after the death of the last of the saviors and prophets, Mahāvīra, this period comes to an end.

Our own age, the fifth of the descending series, began in 522 b.c. and will last for twenty-one thousand years. No Jaina savior will be born during this time, and the eternal religion of the Jains will gradually disappear. It is a period of unmitigated and gradually intensifying evil. The tallest human beings are only seven cubits tall, and the longest life span no more than one hundred and twenty-five years. People have only sixteen ribs. They are selfish, unjust, violent, lustful, proud, and avaricious.

But in the sixth of the descending ages, the state of man and his world will be still more horrible. The longest life will be only twenty years; one cubit will be the greatest stature and eight ribs the meager allotment. The days will be hot, the nights cold, disease will be rampant and chastity nonexistent. Tempests will sweep over the earth, and toward the conclusion of the period these will increase. In the end all life, human and animal, and all the vegetable seeds, will be forced to seek shelter in the Ganges, in miserable caves, and in the sea.

The descending series will terminate and the “ascending” series (utsarpinī) begin, when the tempest and desolation will have reached the point of the unendurable. For seven days then it will rain, and seven different kinds of rain will fall; the soil will be refreshed, and the seeds will begin to grow. Out of their caves the horrible dwarf-creatures of the arid, bitter earth will venture; and very very gradually there will be perceptible a slight improvement in their morals, health, beauty, and stature; until presently they will be living in a world such as the one we know today. And then a savior will be born, named Padmānātha, to announce again the eternal religion of the Jains; the stature of mankind will approach again the superlative, the beauty of man will surpass the splendor of the sun. At last, the earth will sweeten and the waters turn to wine, the wish-fulfilling trees will yield their bounty of delights to a blissful population of perfectly wedded twins; and the happiness of this community again will be doubled, and the wheel, through ten millions of ten millions of one hundred millions of one hundred million periods of countless years, will approach the point of beginning the downward revolution, which again will lead to the extinction of the eternal religion and the gradually increasing noise of unwholesome merrymaking, warfare, and pestilential winds.^[11]

This ever-revolving, twelve-spoked wheel of time of the Jains is a counterpart of the cycle of four ages of the Hindus: the first age a long period of perfect bliss, beauty, and perfection, lasting 4,800 divine years;* the second of somewhat lesser virtue, lasting 3,600 divine years; the third of equally intermingled virtue and vice, lasting 2,400 divine years; and the last, our own, of steadily increasing evil, lasting 1,200 divine years, or 432,000 years according to human calculation. But at the termination of the present period, instead of beginning again immediately to improve (as in the cycle described by the Jains), all is first to be annihilated in a cataclysm of fire and flood, and thereby reduced to the primordial state of the original, timeless ocean, to remain for a period equal to that of the whole length of the four ages. The world’s great ages then begin anew.

Figure 56. The Cosmic Woman of the Jains — Detail of Cosmic Wheel (gouache on cloth, India, eighteenth century a.d.)