Kalki Avatar · The One Who Is to Come

The Puranas say that time moves in great cycles of four ages. In the first, the age of truth, dharma stands firmly on four legs. In each age that follows it loses one, until in Kali Yuga, our own age, it stands on just one unsteady leg.

The Bhagavata describes how the dark age will look near its end. Wealth alone will be taken as virtue. Might will be taken as right. Promises will be broken lightly, and rulers will behave like robbers. People will grow restless, anxious and short of time, with little patience for kindness or for truth.

Yet the same texts say that even then the world is not abandoned. In the village of Shambhala, in the home of a good brahmin named Vishnuyasha, a child will be born who is called Kalki. He will grow into a warrior and a teacher. Mounted on a swift white horse named Devadatta and holding a sword that shines like a comet, he will ride across the earth, ending the reign of those who have lived by cruelty and deceit.

When his work is done, the minds of people will become clear again, like water when the mud settles. A new age of truth, Satya Yuga, will begin, and the whole cycle will turn once more.

Kalki is still to come. But the sages say his story is not only about the far future. Every time someone chooses honesty in a dishonest world, protects the weak or refuses to be cruel, a little of that new age has already begun.