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THE TWENTYFOUR TĪRTHANKARAS
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innocence and happiness, bodily strength and stature, span of life, and the length of the age itself, the first age being the longest and the sixth the shortest. Conditions in the first, second and third ages are those of a bhoga-bhūmi, happy and contented, enjoyment based, entirely dependent on nature, without any law or society, while life in the other three ages is described as being that of a karma-bhūmi, since it is based on and revolves round individual as well as collective effort. The fourth age of either cycle is supposed to be the best from the point of view of human civilization and culture, and it is this age that produces a number of Tīrthankaras and other great personages.
We are now living in the fifth age of the avasarpiņi (descending half-circle) of the current cycle (kalpa) of time, which commenced a few years (3 years and 31 months) after Mahāvīra's nirvāņa (527 B.C.) and is of 21,000 years duration.
Again, the bhoga-bhūmi and karma-bhūmi conditions are said to alternate, as mentioned above, in certain parts of Jambū-dvīpa which, it would seem, covers about the entire globe, and particularly in Bharata-kşetra which occupies the southern portion of Jambū-dvīpa and in the centre of which lies Bhārata-varsa, or the present subcontinent of India.
Thus, in this part of the world the first age of the present avasarpiņi was of enormous, incalculable length, possessed conditions of bhoga-bhūmi when human beings lived in the most primitive stage, wholly dependent on nature. The second age was half as big in its span, and conditions, though they gradually deteriorated, were those of a happy, contented, primitive bhoga-bhūmi stage. In the third age, the process of degeneration continued, yet it was still a bhoga-bhūmi. Towards its end man began gradually to wake up to his environment and be conscious of the deteriorating conditions, feeling for the first time the necessity of seeking guidance. The period, therefore, produced, one after the other, fourteen preliminary guides of man, er law-givers, known as the kulakaras or Manus.
