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8.3.3. The Four World Ages
Before discussing Billy Kwan’s act, however, it is important to discuss the Eastern
cyclical concept of time adapted by Koch to his post-modern thought. According to the theory
of the four World Ages, from the Tantric scriptures said to have been directly handed down by
Shiva in the first millennium AD, the timeless universe is divided into yugas, ages, or cycles
limited in time. The Maha-Yuga, ‘great age’, represents a complete cycle corresponding to one
day (kalpa) in the life of the god-creator Brahma, which comprises the four ages of the cosmos.
The first age, the Krita-Yuga, begins with the creation of the universe and its population by
men, gods, demons and all other beings. It is characterised by wholeness and completion,
manifested in the full and uncontested rule of dharma, the righteous law of the cosmos. Men
are born virtuously, and all beings perform unquestioningly the duties and obligations which
dharma requires of them. Yet, with the progress of the life of the universal organism, there is a
loss of the completeness of dharma. In the second age, the Treta-Yuga, dharma’s presence in
the universe is atrophied to three-quarters, with the fourth quarter then filled with its opposite,
adharma, the absence of righteousness. Living beings begin to fall into spiritual decline.
Dharmic duties are no longer spontaneously carried out but must be learned. The third period,
Dvapara-Yuga, is the age of a dangerous balance between virtue and immorality. The
irrevocable loss of dharma and its correspondent replacement by adharma means that the
perfection of the spiritual order can no longer exercise its influence on the universe. Men are
vulgar, blinded by passion, crave possessions and wealth. True spirituality is only attainable
through ascetic practices. By the arrival of the fourth age, Kali-Yuga, the presence of dharma
in the universe has shrunken to one quarter, and the collapse of the created cosmos is at hand.
‘Kali bedeutet das schlimmste von allem; auch „Streit, Zank, Spaltung, Krieg, Schlacht“
(verwandt mit kal-aha, „streiten, zanken“)’ (Zimmer, 1986, 18-21). Kali-Yuga is the ‘Black
Age’ of universal destruction, characterised by the ‘vulgar traits of common despotism’, a loss
of spiritual dignity, and the ascension to power of ‘the strong, the cunning, the daring, and the
reckless—those able to inspire greed and fear’ (Zimmer, 1969, 106). It is an age where evil
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