Pudgala parāvarta

A soul takes in matter constantly, as body, speech, mind and breath, and lets it go again. The time in which a single soul has taken in and released every last pudgala in the whole Loka, one after another, is one pudgala parāvarta. It contains infinitely many wheels of time.

There are four kinds, by matter, by space, by time and by state, each in a gross and a subtle form. The subtle dravya pudgala parāvarta is the one usually meant.

It exists in the texts for one reason, and it is not cosmological curiosity. It is the measure of how long a soul has already been wandering: infinite pudgala parāvarta, without beginning.

Against that, the tradition sets one of its most quietly dramatic claims. A soul that attains samyaktva, right belief, even once, has at most half a pudgala parāvarta of wandering left. Not infinite. Bounded. The entire scale exists to make that one contrast land.