There will come a time, mendicants, when these people will have children who live for ten years. Among the people who live for ten years, girls will be marriageable at five. The following flavors will disappear: ghee, butter, oil, honey, molasses, and salt. The best kind of food will be finger millet, just as fine rice with meat is the best kind of food today.

The ten ways of doing skillful deeds will totally disappear, and the ten ways of doing unskillful deeds will explode in popularity. Those people will not even have the word ‘skillful’, still less anyone who does what is skillful. And anyone who disrespects mother and father, ascetics and brahmins, and fails to honor the elders in the family will be venerated and praised, just as the opposite is venerated and praised today.

There’ll be no recognition of the status of mother, aunts, or wives and partners of teachers and respected people. The world will become promiscuous, like goats and sheep, chickens and pigs, and dogs and jackals.

They’ll be full of hostility towards each other, with acute ill will, malevolence, and thoughts of murder. Even a mother will feel like this for her child, and the child for its mother, father for child, child for father, brother for sister, and sister for brother. They’ll be just like a deer hunter when he sees a deer—full of hostility, ill will, malevolence, and thoughts of killing.

Among the people who live for ten years, there will be an interregnum of swords lasting seven days. During that time they will see each other as beasts. Sharp swords will appear in their hands, with which they’ll take each other’s life, crying, ‘It’s a beast! It’s a beast!’

But then some of those beings will think, ‘Let us neither be perpetrators nor victims! Why don’t we hide in thick grass, thick jungle, thick trees, inaccessible riverlands, or rugged mountains and survive on forest roots and fruits?’ So that’s what they do.

When those seven days have passed, having emerged from their hiding places and embraced each other, they will come together in one voice and cry, ‘How fantastic, dear being, you live! How fantastic, dear being, you live!’