“The Song of Creation” from the Big Veda (India)
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depth unfathomed?
Then there were neither death nor immortality,
Nor was there then the torch or night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.
At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
Arose at last, born of the power of heat.
In the beginning desire descended on it -
That was the primal seed, born of the mind.
The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom
know that which is, is kin to that which is not.
And they have stretched their cord across the void,
And know what was above, and what below.
Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces.
Below was strength, and over it was impulse.
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
So who knows truly whence it has arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe even he does not know.
Dianne M. Parker
Humanities 2211- 02Z
Professor Karen Scheafer
September 20, 2008
Who Really Knows How Creation Happened?
Before anything existed, there was nothing. Air and heaven did not exist.Nothing is known about what was in the beginning. I wonder where it was and who had it? Was water somehow in space, present in the midst of its unknowable existence?
Neither death nor immortality, nor time or eternity existed. Fire did not light the way, nor was day and night imagined. There existed only the One Being; silent, without motion, and present in the nothingness. The One was alive, complete and full, needing nothing to sustain self.
In the beginning, the blackness was wrapped up in itself and did not exist, but yet it was there. Its vastness was like water without light, thought without substance. From nothing, the One came to be, and was enfolded in it like a garment.
Finally, the One was in motion. Desire, the creative thought, was the heat by which the one moved in the void. His “want”, the first primeval thought, fell upon non-existence and planted the first seed; that which can grow, and became something that was.
The ancients looked within themselves with their great wisdom and found out their hearts. They know that what exists now is brother or sister to that which does not exist. They have searched the spirit world in their meditations, leaving their bodies and stretching their silver chords across the vastness of nothing. They have found out what is in the heavens and what is below the earth.
The One, who is “He”, released his thought projected heat of desire. His pregnant masculine forces moved into the void and impregnated all with the certainty that something will grow and become all that will be. He has fertilized the egg of hope.
His passion lept from him, before he knew it, in an uncontrollable urge to create.
But this is conjecture. No one really knows. Even the gods are not as old as the One and did not exist until after creation came to be. No one actually knows about any of it.
Whether the One did or did not create all things, only He knows for sure. He can look at all that is from His place in the heavens. “But, wait, maybe He doesn’t know either!” (1)
Source:
1. Fiero, Gloria K. “The Song of Creation from the Big Veda.” The Humanistic Tradition Book 1. New York: McGraw Hill 2006. (Reading 2.1, p. 14, 5th edition)
“The Song of Creation” (translated from the Big Veda) in The Wonder That Was India by A. L. Basham (Macmillan, 1954) (Credit to original work: Page 173)
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