Kushan devotee couple, around the Buddha, Brahma and Indra. 2nd century CE, Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara. [Image provided under GNU License]
The universe dies and then is reborn every several million years, representing a day in the life of the Hindu deity Brahma, or Buddhism's mahakalpa, the "great eon" between destruction and rebirth.
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
- Carl Sagan [1934-1996]
