What it is
The Nāsadīya Sūkta is a short hymn of seven verses in the Ṛgveda, the oldest of the four Vedas. Its name comes from its opening words, nāsad āsīt, “there was not non-being.” In English it is usually called the Hymn of Creation.
Most creation stories tell you what happened. This one asks. It strips away everything we could use to describe a beginning (being, non-being, air, sky, death, night and day) and then, carefully, lets a few things appear: a breathing One, heat, desire, the first seed of mind. And at the end it turns its own question back on itself: perhaps even the one who watches over creation does not know how it came to be.
Where it comes from
It is hymn 129 of the tenth maṇḍala (book) of the Ṛgveda, written Ṛgveda 10.129. The tenth maṇḍala is generally held to be the youngest layer of the Ṛgveda, and contains several of its most philosophical hymns. Dates for the Ṛgveda are debated, but this layer is commonly placed around the end of the second millennium BCE.
Like every Vedic hymn it was composed and passed down orally, memorised syllable by syllable for millennia before it was written down. The traditional index names its seer (ṛṣi) as Prajāpati Parameṣṭhin, its subject (devatā) as Bhāvavṛtta, “the course of becoming,” and its metre as triṣṭubh, four lines of eleven syllables.
What it deals with
- The beginning before beginnings. What was there when there was not yet anything, not even nothing?
- How difference appears. From a signless, undivided state, how do this and that, below and above, come to be?
- The source of mind. The hymn places desire before thought, and finds the bond between being and non-being in the human heart.
- The limits of knowing. Who could know how it all began, if even the gods came afterwards?
How to use this course
Start by listening: hear the hymn chanted in Sanskrit, with each word lighting up as it is sung. Then go verse by verse, where every word is broken out with its meaning. Reflect with a narrated reading and a look at how the hymn sits beside modern cosmology. Go deeper into its history, its echoes in the Upaniṣads, and its key words, and test yourself at the end.