Kalki Avatar -- The Avatar Who Is Still to Come

Every list of Vishnu's ten avatars ends with a figure who has not yet appeared. The fish, the tortoise, the boar, the man-lion, the dwarf, Parashurama, Rama, Krishna -- and Balarama or the Buddha, depending on the list -- all belong to stories already told. The tenth, Kalki, belongs to the future. He is the avatar of the end of the Kali Yuga, the last and darkest of the four ages, and his coming closes one cycle of time and opens the next.

The Bhagavata Purana mentions him twice. In its first book, listing the avatars, it says that at the junction of the ages, when kings have become little better than robbers, the Lord of the world will be born as Kalki, son of Vishnuyasha. In its twelfth book, which describes the decline of the Kali Yuga, it adds the details that have shaped every later image of him.

The twelfth book first paints the age that needs him. As the Kali Yuga wears on, it says, wealth alone will decide a person's worth, might will be counted as right, marriage will rest on mere attraction, learning will be judged by outward show, and rulers will plunder their own people. Lives will grow short, and people will be anxious and quarrelsome.

Then, in the village of Shambhala, in the house of a noble brahmin named Vishnuyasha, Kalki will be born. Riding the swift horse Devadatta, sword in hand, endowed with the eight divine powers, he will ride across the earth and destroy the millions of thieves who pass themselves off as kings. With them gone, the minds of the people will become pure again, their children will be born in the nature of goodness, and the Satya Yuga, the age of truth, will return.

When will Kalki come? By the traditional reckoning, the Kali Yuga began in 3102 BCE, around the time Krishna left the world, and lasts 432,000 years -- so on this count only about five thousand years of it have passed, and the end lies very far ahead. Many teachers have read the Kalki prophecy less as a date than as a promise built into the structure of time: no age of decline is final, and every cycle turns again towards truth.

That is also why the tradition has been wary of anyone claiming to be Kalki, and there have been several such claimants. The Purana's Kalki is not a sectarian leader but a cosmic event -- the Lord himself, arriving when the whole world needs renewal.

In art Kalki is usually shown as a warrior on a white horse, sword raised; some temple images give him a horse's head, and in a few he stands beside his horse. He is rarely the main deity of a temple, though there are some, and he appears in the sculptured panels of the ten avatars on many Vaishnava temples. For most devotees, his place in the list is what matters: it turns the story of the avatars from a record of the past into a promise about the future.