The Turning of the Ages

The forest of Kamyaka had become almost a second home to the Pandavas in their long exile, and it was here, among ascetics and wandering sages who found their way to Yudhishthira's fire, that Markandeya came again to sit with them. He was the deathless one, the sage who had outlived floods and kingdoms and the memory of kingdoms, who alone among mortals had once floated as an infant on the waters of the dissolved worlds and seen Krishna himself in the form of a child on a banyan leaf swallowing all creation into his mouth - a wonder already told elsewhere, and no need to tell it twice here, save to say that a man who has seen the end of an age speaks of ages differently than other men do.

Krishna too had come to visit them in their hardship, and Draupadi sat close by, missing nothing of what passed between the sage and her husband.

It was Yudhishthira who broke the evening's quiet. "Grandfather," he said - for so they all called Markandeya, though he looked scarcely older than a boy of sixteen despite his unfathomable years - "I have watched dharma bleed from this age of ours drop by drop. Kinsmen slaughter kinsmen over a game of dice. The wicked prosper and the just are driven into forests like beasts. Tell me: was it always so? Has the world always been this cruel, or have we simply had the misfortune to be born into its worst hour? And if it has not always been so, how does such an hour end?"

Markandeya was quiet a moment, watching the fire, and then he began to speak of the ages of the world as a father might speak of the phases of a single, very long day.

"In the beginning of the wheel," Markandeya said, "there was the Krita age, and it was called the age of perfection because dharma stood upon four legs and did not totter. No man envied his neighbor's field in those days, for no man wanted anything he did not already have. There was no sickness worth naming, no falsehood worth telling, no lock upon any door, because no one in Krita Yuga had yet imagined a reason to steal. People did not need scripture to tell them how to live, for truth was as natural to them as breathing, and a man's word alone was worth more than any oath sworn today upon fire or water. Kings ruled because they were fit to rule, not because a father had died and left them a throne, and the earth gave up her harvest without needing to be forced.

But no perfection lasts forever within the world, for the world itself is a wheel and a wheel must turn. Slowly, imperceptibly, as the years and yugas rolled on, a fraction of that trust began to thin. Faith, once whole and unquestioned, began to require reminding, and so began the Treta age, when dharma still stood but now on three legs only. This was the age when sacrifice was born - not because people had grown wicked, but because they had grown forgetful, and needed rites and offerings to call back to mind what had once needed no calling. Vows appeared, and duties, and the careful ordering of rituals, all of them scaffolding built to hold up a goodness that could no longer simply stand on its own. It was not yet a fallen age. But it was the first age in which virtue had begun, ever so slightly, to require effort."

"After Treta came, and comes even now around us, the Dvapara age," Markandeya went on, and here his voice grew quieter, as though he were speaking not of some far country but of the very ground beneath their fire. "In Dvapara, dharma stands on two legs only, halved and limping, and this is the age of doubt. Men no longer simply know the right path; they must be shown it, argued into it, and even then half of them choose otherwise. Disease enters the world in Dvapara. Desire multiplies itself and calls itself need. Scriptures divide into schools, and each school insists it alone holds the whole truth, when in fact each holds only a broken piece of it. Kings still try to rule justly, but justice itself becomes harder to see clearly, clouded by ambition and the whispering of counselors who profit from confusion.

You asked me, Yudhishthira, whether this age has always been cruel. I tell you plainly: no. What you are living through is not the world as it always was, but the world as Dvapara has made it - an age balanced on a knife's edge between what still remains of the old faith and what is already beginning to fail. Your own life bears the marks of it exactly: a game of dice that should never have been played, an assembly hall where dharma was mocked in the presence of elders who said nothing, a forest exile borne by brothers who did nothing to deserve it. These are not signs that dharma has vanished. They are signs of an age standing on two legs instead of four, still upright, but only barely, and growing wearier by the year."

Draupadi, who had listened without a word until now, spoke. "And after Dvapara, sage? Does it grow worse still?"

"It does," Markandeya said, not unkindly, for a physician does not soften an illness by refusing to name it. "After Dvapara comes Kali, when dharma will stand on one leg alone, trembling, and when it stumbles it will be a wonder to all the worlds that it has not yet fallen entirely. I will tell you the signs of that age, not to frighten you, but so that whoever hears this in whatever age they are born may know it when they see it, and may guard themselves against despair.

In the Kali age, kings will tax their people heavily and protect them little, treating the crown as a harvest to be reaped rather than a burden to be carried. Learning will be bought and sold in the marketplace like grain, its worth measured only in what it earns rather than what it teaches. The young will command the old, and the old, having lost the respect due to their years, will not even remember how to ask for it. Rain will fall out of its season, too much or too little, so that farmers can no longer trust the sky. Men of no virtue and no learning will rise to power on cunning alone, while the wise and the honest are pushed to the margins and mocked for their honesty. The earth herself will grow tired and yield less to the plow than she once did, as though she too has wearied of bearing such tenants. And the years of a human life, which were long in Krita, will shrink and shrink again, until a full lifetime is barely long enough to raise a single generation to adulthood.

It is not a curse laid upon any one people. It is only the last turning of the wheel before it must turn back."

"But hear this too," Markandeya said, and for the first time that evening something like a smile crossed his face, "for Kali is not the end of the wheel, only its lowest point, and even the deepest night of an age carries its own dawn folded inside it.

When Kali has run its full course, when dharma is worn down to almost nothing and the world seems to have forgotten it ever stood on four legs at all, a child will be born in a village called Shambhala, to a humble brahmin household, and he will be called Kalki. He will grow to carry a sword of fire and ride a horse whiter than the moon, and he will move through the ruined age the way a fire moves through dry grass at the end of the dry season, sweeping away what is rotten so swiftly and so completely that nothing false is left standing anywhere in the three worlds. And when he is done, the wheel will not stop - it will simply begin again, and the Krita age will return, dharma once more upright on four legs, kings once more just, the earth once more generous, as though the whole long fall through Treta and Dvapara and Kali had been nothing more than a single long night before an old morning.

Yudhishthira, this is the consolation I have for you, and it is not a small one. Ages fall and ages rise as surely and as regularly as the sun sets and is born again at dawn; no age, however cruel, is the last word on the world. But notice this also: in every one of those ages, in Krita and in Kali both, a righteous man's task has never once changed. It is only ever to act rightly with the years he is given, in the age he is given, without waiting for a kinder one to arrive. You have not had the fortune to be born in Krita. Endure the age that is yours, Yudhishthira, and let that endurance itself be your dharma."

Yudhishthira bowed his head, and for a long while no one at the fire spoke.