Document 1-1: From the Rig Veda: “The Creation Hymn” (ca. 600 B.C.E.)

An Indian View of Creation

The Rig Veda is the oldest and most important Indian scripture. Originally composed and transmitted in oral form between 1500 and 1000 B.C.E., it was written down in Sanskrit around 800 to 500 B.C.E. The Rig Veda includes compositions by many different authors and contains several different types of texts, including hymns to gods, creation stories, and instructions for religious rituals. The hymn included here asks as many questions as it answers about the creation of the universe. As you read it, pay particular attention to the way it treats apparent opposites, such as light and dark, existence and nonexistence, and knowing and not knowing. What point was its author trying to make about the essential nature of the universe?

  1. Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.

    What covered in, and where and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?

  2. Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider.

    That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.

  3. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.

    All that existed then was void and formless: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.

  4. Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning — Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.

    Sages who searched with their heart’s thought discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent.

  5. Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then, and what below it?

    There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder.

  6. Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?

    The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?

  7. He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,

    Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

Charles F. Horne, ed., The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, vol. 9: India and Brahmanism (New York: Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb, 1917), 48.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. How does this hymn characterize the period before the creation of the universe? What essential ingredient of reality was missing?
  2. What importance do you attach to the hymn’s insistence that “the Gods are later than this world’s production”? If the gods did not create the world, then who or what did?
  3. Do you agree with the hymn’s claim that certain questions about the origins of the universe are unanswerable? Why or why not?