Brahma (centre-top) emerges from a lotus flower.
|
In
the classic myths of Hinduism, there is no primeval emptiness: just different stages
of gods and the universe, recycling themselves like crops
There is no single Hindu
myth of origin. There are as many myths as there are texts; sometimes, the same text
has more than one. The earliest myths date back to the Rig Veda, the first of the
four Vedas, composed over a period of time, though certainly before 1000 BC, and
eventually committed to writing many centuries later.
Contrary to what some believe, the bulk of Rig Vedic hymns–all told, there are 1028
of them, spread over ten books–are not spiritual or metaphysical at all, consisting
mostly of tributes to an entire pantheon of anthropomorphic gods. But books one and
ten, which coincide with the emergence of varna, the four-fold hierarchical division
of society, which rapidly led to the proliferation of hundreds of castes, also contain
the origin hymns.
The most celebrated of these is the hymn that contains the earliest known reference
to varna. Creation is the result of the sacrifice of Purusha (Man), the primeval
being, who is all that exists, including “whatever has been and whatever is to be.”
When Purusha, who had “a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet” was sacrificed,
the clarified butter that resulted was made into the beasts which inhabit the earth.
This same sacrifice produced the gods, Indra (the menacing king of gods), Agni (Fire),
Vayu (Wind), as well as the Sun and the Moon. From Purusha’s navel the atmosphere
was born; his head produced the heaven; his feet produced the earth; his ear the
sky. The four varnas were born too: the mouth was the brahman (priest); the arms
the kshatriya (warrior); the thigh the vaishya (general populace); the feet the shudra
(servant).
Primeval incest is the other method by which creation takes place in the Rig Veda,
and this idea recurs throughout Hinduism. Later mythology claims Manu, the first
man, gave birth to the human race through the act of incest; Manu himself is also
born of incest that the creator indulges in. By the time we come to the texts known
as the Puranas (dates between 300 and 1500 AD), the story of creation becomes more
complex: the creator of the universe was the god Brahma, who came from the primeval
waters, and was swayambhu (self-existent). Brahma transformed himself into a giant
boar (varaha) to bring forth the earth from the depths of these waters. The first
man, Manu, was born directly of Brahma. Manu was a hermaphrodite, and created two
sons and three daughters from his female half.
What is striking in all this, of course, is that none of these stories actually say
how the universe began. There is no sense of things being created out of nothing,
the stuff of the universe only happening to be reused and recycled periodically,
like in a giant ecofriendly enterprise. In a sense, of course, this is a natural
outcome of the Hindu view of the eternally recycling universe, that goes through
the four successive periods, yugas, forever condemned to the cycle of regeneration
and destruction. The four yugas are said to be respectively 4800, 3600, 2400, and
1200 god-years long. A god-year, in turn, lasts 360 human years. The quality of life,
as well as of humans, progressively deteriorates in each successive yuga until we
reach the present dark (kali) yuga, which will end in the great universal deluge,
followed again by a new golden age and the birth of man from Manu.
This great cosmic cycle, eternally chasing its own tail, this depressingly monotonous
ebb and flow in which all illusion of forward movement is actually retrogression,
fairly accurately sums up the Indian peasant’s life over centuries. The hard summer
is followed by the great deluge of the monsoon, which rekindles the eternal hope
that at last hunger, misery, and want will come to an end. Thus every agricultural
cycle is actually the great cosmic cycle in microcosm. Practically all festivals
in various parts of India coincide with the major punctuations in this agricultural
cycle; for instance, even as I write these lines in late March, the traditional Indian
new year is being celebrated in most regions, now that the crop is ready.
A
visit to the barber
To the extent that India is still a predominantly agricultural society, these festivals,
and the various rituals that go with them, are an organic part of people’s lives,
and not just corporate inducements to an urban elite to consume more and more in
the globalized marketplace. Yet, since these festivals and rituals have actually
evolved over a very long period of time, they are now most often taken for granted;
like the self-existent creator, they just exist, with neither beginning nor end.
For most practitioners of these rituals, much of the original meaning is either unimportant,
or simply lost under centuries of cultural sedimentation.
Yet ideas persist over centuries and pop up at you when you least expect them. Last
week, I needed a haircut, and so I went to the barber who has performed this service
since I was about ten. It is a veritable ritual, evolved over two decades or so.
It begins with his magnanimously offering me tea, and ends with his never returning
change. In between, he asks about my family, I about his; he checks if I am still
off smoking, I if he is off drink. Through all this, of course, we discuss politics,
sports, and anything else of topical interest. This time, I asked him how he was
told the universe came into being. He laughed, snipped off a tuft of hair on my forehead,
and said: “Who knows how all this was created? Who was around to see? Even the gods
were born after something existed, so who can tell what happened when nothing existed?”
My barber has not read the Rig Veda. But if he were to, some day, he will be struck
by the following hymn:
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
Who covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
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?
(Rig Veda, X, 129) |
