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Kalpa of continuance

From Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia
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kalpa of continuance
住劫 (Jpn ju-ko )

    One of the four kalpas. The second period of the four-stage cycle of formation, continuance, decline, and disintegration, which a world is said to undergo repeatedly. In the kalpa of continuance, a world continues to exist in a relatively stable state along with its inhabitants. The kalpa of continuance consists of twenty small kalpas, measured in terms of cyclical changes said to occur in human longevity. According to The Dharma Analysis Treasury, in the first small kalpa, the human life span is immeasurably long and steadily decreases to 10 years. In the second small kalpa, it increases from 10 to 80,000 years and then again diminishes to 10. From the third through the nineteenth small kalpas, the increase and decrease of life span repeats itself in the same way as in the second small kalpa. In the twentieth small kalpa, the life span increases from 10 to 80,000 years. Though the above descriptions of one small kalpa differ, The Dharma Analysis Treasury determines that the first and the last of these twenty small kalpas are of the same duration and both equal to each of the other eighteen intervening small kalpas in duration. Later a new explanation was devised to the effect that the rate of increase and decrease in the second through the nineteenth small kalpas was one year every hundred years, which would make each of these small kalpas equal to 15,998,000 years. Whenever the human life span diminishes to 10 years—which happens 19 times in the kalpa of continuance—the three lesser calamities (war, pestilence, and famine) are said to occur. According to another explanation, these three occur alternately, that is, pestilence in one small kalpa, war in the next, and famine in the next.

See also kalpa.

Source

www.sgilibrary.org