Yuga (yuga)

A yuga is one of the four great ages through which the world declines and is renewed, running from the perfect Satya Yuga to the degraded Kali Yuga before the cycle begins again. The Mahabharata places itself at a hinge: the war at Kurukshetra ends the Dvapara Yuga, and Krishna's death opens the Kali Yuga in which the epic is being told and read. This is why so many characters speak of the times themselves turning, and why the destruction feels less like an accident than the closing of an age.