The story

As the narration drew towards its close, Parikshit asked Shuka who would rule the earth after Krishna had gone to his own abode. It is the question of a king about his successors, and Shuka answers it first as a chronicler. He names the dynasties of Magadha one after another: a minister who kills his master and crowns his own son, a line of kings born of a shudra mother, a brahmana who uproots the Nandas, and then house after house, until the rulers of the earth are men with no regard for dharma, who take what belongs to their subjects and live short lives with little strength and less understanding.

Then he turns from kings to the age itself, and his description is remembered because so much of it is ordinary. In Kali, he says, wealth alone will decide a person's birth, conduct and worth. Might alone will decide what is right. Marriage will rest on mere liking, trade on cheating. A brahmana will be known by his sacred thread and by nothing else, and a person's stage of life by its outward marks. A man without money will be thought unrighteous, and hypocrisy will pass for goodness. A bath will pass for purity, a distant pond for a place of pilgrimage, long hair for beauty, a full belly for the purpose of life, boldness for truth. Dharma will be practised for the sake of a good name.

Kings will rob their people, and the people, crushed by famine and taxes, will flee to the hills and forests and live on leaves, roots, honey and wild fruit. Cold, wind, heat and rain will torment them, and the longest life will be twenty or thirty years.

At the age's lowest point, Shuka says, the Lord will be born in the village of Shambhala, in the house of a brahmana named Vishnuyasha, and he will be called Kalki. Riding a swift horse named Devadatta, sword in hand, he will destroy the robbers who pose as kings, and when the minds of the people are cleared, a new Krita age will begin.

Shuka then tells what the Earth herself thinks of all this. She laughs when she sees kings bent on conquering her. They are playthings of death, she says, and each imagines that he will master the whole earth to the edge of the sea. Fathers and sons, brothers and brothers, fight over her and say "this is mine". She names those who claimed her before them: Prithu, Pururavas, Nahusha, Bharata, Mandhata, Sagara, Rama, Raghu, Yayati, Bhagiratha, and others, together with mighty demons like Hiranyakashipu and Ravana. All of them are gone, and only their stories remain.

Shuka is clear about why he has told these stories. They are meant to teach detachment, not to be collected for their own sake. What deserves to be heard is the praise of the Lord.

He then sets out the decline in its simplest form. Dharma stands on four legs: truth, compassion, austerity and charity. In the Krita age it stands on all four. In each later age it loses one, and in Kali only a quarter remains, and even that is wearing away. Greed and quarrels grow, people grow short-lived and unlucky, and the mind darkens.

Yet Shuka does not end on decline. The Kali age, he tells the king, is an ocean of faults, but it holds one great virtue: simply by singing of Krishna a person becomes free of attachment and reaches the highest. What was won in the Krita age by meditating on Vishnu, in the Treta by sacrifice, and in the Dvapara by worship, is won in Kali by singing the name of Hari. The age that has lost most of its dharma is given the easiest door.

The passage matters because of who is listening. Parikshit stands at the threshold of this age; in the first book he caught Kali and, when Kali begged for mercy, spared him and gave him places to live. Now, at the close of the Bhagavatam, Shuka shows the king what that age will become, and he ends the description with the remedy that the whole Bhagavatam itself offers: hearing and singing of the Lord.

Verses in this episode

Who appears, and what it shows

• Shuka — A sixteen-year-old sage so free of the world that women bathing did not cover themselves — and the one voice that tells the whole book.
• Parikshit — Saved by Krishna in his mother's womb, cursed to die in seven days, he spends the week asking the questions the book answers.
• Theme: Time and dissolution
• Theme: The power of the Name

Keep reading

• Krishna leaves the world — Skandha 11, adhyayas 30-31 — At Prabhasa the Yadus destroy each other, and a hunter's arrow finds the foot of Krishna resting under a pipal tree.
• Parikshit meets Takshaka — Skandha 12, adhyayas 5-6 — On the seventh day Shuka gives his last instruction, the king's fear is gone, and Takshaka arrives to find a man already free.

Questions to explore

• What signs of the Kali age does the Bhagavatam list?
• What is the "one great virtue" of the Kali age?
• Why does the Earth laugh at kings who want to conquer her?