This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Jain cosmology divides time into two half cycles running endlessly one after the other, an ascending utsarpini in which conditions improve and a descending avasarpini in which they decline, and each half is itself cut into six ara, unequal in length and named for the mixture of happiness and sorrow that marks them. The three that open the avasarpini, sushama sushama, sushama and sushama dushama, run from a golden age of effortless plenty toward gradual decline; the three that close it reverse the naming to dushama sushama, dushama and dushama dushama, sorrow steadily overtaking whatever happiness remains. Dushama is the fifth of the six, and Jain teaching holds it to be the age now in progress, begun by tradition a few years after Mahavira's death and running for a span the texts state in cosmic units rather than in a number a calendar could hold. Placed where it is, one age short of the cycle's worst, Dushama carries a specific doctrinal weight: it is described as the last age in which liberation, moksha, remains possible at all, a possibility Jain teaching holds will close entirely once the sixth and final age, dushama dushama, begins. That claim gives the present age, on the Jain reckoning, an urgency that a merely declining age would not carry on its own. The avasarpini does not reverse until its sixth ara completes and the ascending utsarpini begins the whole pattern again, itself divided into the same six named stages in reverse order, so that the cycle as a whole has neither a first age nor a last.