Origin 200 BCE to 400 CE
One of the thirty six thousand nights making up the whole life of Brahma, matching in length the kalpa, his day, that comes before it: 4,320,000,000 years, during which the three worlds lie dissolved in the naimittika pralaya and Brahma himself sleeps. A kalpa and the night that follows it together make one full day-night of Brahma; three hundred sixty such day-nights make one of his years, and a hundred of his years make the whole span this atlas records separately as Para. Where the kalpa holds fourteen manvantaras and their ages of creation, the night that follows holds none of them, only the unmanifest interval, and Brahma's waking at its end restores the cosmos exactly as it stood before, since what dissolves is the manifest world, not the substance beneath it.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodOne of the thirty six thousand nights across the whole of Brahma's life, the twin of the kalpa that precedes it: equal in length, opposite in kind, since where the kalpa is reckoned through fourteen manvantaras filling a day of creation, the night holds none of them, only the three worlds lying dissolved and unmanifest until Brahma wakes. 2 Origin of the NameRatri is the ordinary Sanskrit word for night. Applied to Brahma it narrows to name this one specific dissolution span rather than an ordinary night, exactly as Kalpa, an everyday word for an age or an era, is narrowed in this same family to name the day that precedes it. 2 Rival Systems
A Rival System's AttributionManusmriti fixes Brahma's night at the same length as his day and treats the pair as one combined unit of measure, without separately naming the night's own dissolution or attaching to it the later Puranic term naimittika pralaya that this family's name-origin and origin-period facts draw on. 3 Reckoning
Repeating Cycle Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Vishnu Purana describes Brahma, at the close of his day, entering a night of the same length, in which the worlds he made are drawn back into their source and he lies in sleep until the night ends and the work of creation is taken up again. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The dissolution that follows each Puranic kalpa in Hindu cosmology, matching it in length, during which the three worlds lie unmanifest and Brahma sleeps.
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