A kalpa is a long period of time (aeon) in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, generally between the creation and recreation of a world or universe.
Preceding the first and following each manvantara period is a juncture (sandhya) equal to the length of a Satya Yuga (1,728,000 years).
[5] A kalpa is followed by a pralaya (dissolution) of equal length, which together constitute a day and night of Brahma.
By these calculations the life of Brahmā seems fantastic and interminable, but from the viewpoint of eternity it is as brief as a lightning flash.
[7] The Vayu Purana has a different list of names for 33 kalpas, which G. V. Tagare describes as fanciful derivations.
[11] He confines his teachings to the present kalpa, the duration of which he doesn't arithmetically define, but uses a similitude:[12] Were a man to take a piece of cloth of this most delicate texture [of fine cotton], and therewith to touch in the slightest possible manner, once in a hundred years, a solid rock, free from earth, a yojana [12 kilometres] high, and as much broad, the time would come when it would be worn down, by this imperceptible trituration, to the size of a mung seed.
This period would be immense in its duration; but it has been declared by Buddha that it would not be equal to a Maha Kalpa.A similar similitude is found in the Mountain Pabbata Sutta (SN 15:5) of the Pali Canon:[13] Suppose there were a great mountain of rock—a league long, a league wide, a league high, uncracked, uncavitied, a single mass—and a man would come along once every hundred years and rub it once with a Kashi cloth.
More quickly would that great mountain of rock waste away and be consumed by that effort, but not the eon [kalpa].
That's how long, monk, an eon is.Described in the Vibhanga division of the Abhidhamma Pitaka are sixteen rupa brahma lokas (worlds or planes) and four higher arupa brahma lokas, each attained through the imperfect, medial or perfect performance of the four states of jhāna (meditation), granting a duration of life measured in kalpas that exceed the top-most heavenly loka of 9.216 billion years:[14] At the termination of each kalpa, the lower three rupa brahma lokas, attained through the 1st jhāna, and everything below them (six heavens, Earth, etc.)