Three Ages of the Dharma

Buddhist historiography in East Asia divides the centuries after the Buddha's death into three successive ages, distinguished by what survives of his teaching. In the first, the age of the true law, the teaching, the practice that puts it into effect and the attainment it leads to are all present together. In the second, the age of the copied law, the teaching and the practice continue but genuine attainment has become rare or absent. In the third and final age, mappo, the age of the decline of the dharma, only the teaching itself remains, as words that can be recited and studied but no longer reliably practiced toward liberation. Japanese calculations, working from a traditional date for the Buddha's death, placed the beginning of mappo in the middle of the eleventh century, meaning that by the Kamakura period the age had already fully arrived. The doctrine gave a shared historical framework to Buddhist thinkers who otherwise disagreed sharply, since it described a common problem, a world in which the old paths to enlightenment were understood to no longer function as they once had, without by itself prescribing any single solution. Some sutras attach specific lengths to each period, commonly five hundred years for the age of the true law and a thousand years each for the ages that follow it, though Japanese calculators treated these figures loosely enough to place mappo's own arrival in different centuries depending on which starting date was used.