Avasarpini and Utsarpini

Avasarpini, the descending half of the Jain wheel of time, unfolds across six ages, aras, each shorter and less fortunate than the one before. The first, susama-susama, extremely happy, is an age of effortless abundance, when wish granting trees supply every need and people live for countless years in near painless comfort. The second, susama, happy, and the third, susama-dusama, more happy than unhappy, see comfort gradually give way to labour and want, and it is near the end of the third era that the Jain tradition places the birth of Rishabhanatha, the first of the twenty four Tirthankaras, the ford makers who teach the path to liberation in each half cycle.

The fourth age, dusama-susama, more unhappy than happy, is by far the most significant to Jain history, since it is here that twenty three further Tirthankaras appear, ending with Mahavira, the twenty fourth, whose death traditionally closes the era a few years afterward. The fifth age, dusama, unhappy, is the one Jain tradition holds the world to be living through now, reckoned to have begun shortly after Mahavira's death and destined to last twenty one thousand years, a long decline in virtue, lifespan and stature with no Tirthankara to guide it. The sixth and final age, dusama-dusama, extremely unhappy, brings near total degeneration, before the wheel turns and utsarpini, the ascending half, begins.

Utsarpini mirrors avasarpini's six ages in reverse. Beginning from the depths of dusama-dusama, extreme unhappiness, the world climbs back in stages, through dusama and dusama-susama, gathering a new set of Tirthankaras along the way, up through susama-dusama and susama toward susama-susama, the same effortless golden age with which avasarpini began, at which point the wheel turns over and the descent begins again. Jain teaching insists that this alternation has no beginning and no end, anadi-ananta, and that no creator god sets the wheel turning or brings it to rest, a point that marks Jain cosmology off sharply both from Hindu doctrines of periodic creation and dissolution by a divine agent and from the linear, single ended time of the Abrahamic religions.

Digambara and Svetambara Jain communities share the basic six age framework in both half cycles, though they differ on some points of detail and dating within it, a divergence scholars treat as evidence of a shared inherited scheme elaborated somewhat differently by each tradition rather than as two unrelated doctrines. Because the wheel has no first turn and no last, the doctrine also carries a practical implication for the individual, that liberation, moksha, is not something the cosmos itself moves toward as a whole, but a possibility open to a soul at any point along either half of the endless cycle.