Hindu cosmology's system of four yugas, krita, treta, dvapara, and kali, describes a cosmic cycle of declining virtue and increasing disorder, running from a golden age of near-perfect dharma down to the current kali yuga's moral and spiritual decline, after which the cycle dissolves entirely in a great cosmic night, pralaya, before beginning again from the golden age once more, a pattern repeating across vast, precisely enumerated spans of cosmic time rather than occurring once. This is cyclical time taken to cosmological scale, treating not just human history but the universe's own existence as fundamentally rhythmic, expanding and dissolving the way breath moves in and out, rather than moving once from a beginning toward a single, final end.
Taoism reaches a structurally similar conviction from a different direction, teaching that reversal, fan, is the movement of the Tao itself, so that any process pushed to its extreme naturally turns back toward its opposite, a principle expressed in the Tao Te Ching's own compact aphorisms and echoed in the cyclical alternation of yin and yang that structures Chinese cosmology far more broadly than Taoism alone. Both traditions treat this cyclical structure as descriptive rather than merely poetic, something built into the actual behavior of history, nature, and the cosmos, not simply a metaphor for how things sometimes feel.