A nigoda soul lives the shortest life there is — 256 āvalikā, a kṣullaka-bhava — and lives it seventeen times and a fraction in a single breath, sixty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-six times in a muhūrta.
The unit is the atlas's kṣullaka-bhava: 256 āvalikā, the least time a soul can hold a body. One breath holds seventeen of them and a fraction; one muhūrta of forty-eight minutes holds 65,536. Teachers round it to seventeen and a half — sāḍhe satrah — and it is the figure reached for when a human birth is called rare.
And every one of those lives is shared. Gommaṭasāra 163: when one soul in the common body dies, infinite die with it; when one is born, infinite are born. The map draws one breath as a bar and ticks the lives along it.
Nigoda: the smallest body, the most souls — Seventeen lives in a breath highlighted