Composed over three millennia ago, around 1500 BC, Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation in the Rigveda, stands apart from every other cosmogony and ranks among the most world-shaking works of literature.
Most traditions begin with affirmation:
“In the beginning was …”
The Vedic seer, on the other hand, begins with erasure. He – or perhaps she – intuited that truth could not be grasped by affirmation, only by stripping away.
“Then was neither the non-existent, nor the existent…”
What is astounding is that it opens with a double negation, dismantling our most basic categories before anything else can be said. It is an apophatic vision, seeking truth not by affirmation but by unsaying. Long before the Upanishads gave voice to neti neti – “not this, not this” – the Rigveda had already broken open language itself.
Apophatic currents later surfaced in Christian mysticism (Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, and so on) – but they remained on the margins of a tradition more comfortable affirming divine attributes. In the Nasadiya, by contrast, the path of negation lies at the very threshold of creation.
Nasadiya Sukta (Rigveda 10.129)
नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत् ।
किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्
अम्भः किमासीद् गहनं गभीरम् ॥
There was no realm of air, no sky beyond.
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?
Was there water, unfathomable, deep?
न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत् प्रकेतः ।
आनीदवातं स्वधया तदेकं
तस्माद् धान्यन् न परः किञ्चनास ॥
nor the dividing line of night and day.
That One breathed without breath, by Its own puissance.
Other than That, nothing was.
अप्रकेतं सलिलं सर्वाऽइदम् ।
तुच्छ्येनाभ्व् अपिहितं यदासीत्
तपसस् तन्महिनाजायतैकम् ॥
All this was an undifferentiated flood.
That which was hidden by the void
emerged through the power of heat.
मनसो रेतः प्रथमं यदासीत् ।
सतो बन्धुम् असति निरविन्दन्
हृदि प्रतीष्या कवयो मनीषा ॥
Sages, searching in their hearts with wisdom,
found the bond of being in non-being.
अधः स्विदासीद् उपरि स्विदासीद् ।
रेतोधासान् महिमान आसन्
स्वधा अवस्तात् प्रयतिः परस्तात् ॥
What was above, what was below?
There were seed-bearers, there were mighty forces;
Energy beneath, impulse above.
कुत आजाता कुत इयं विसृष्टिः ।
अर्वाग् देवा अस्य विसर्जनेन
अथ को वेद यत आबभूव ॥
Whence was it born, whence this creation?
The gods are later than this world’s arising –
So who knows from where it came?
यदि वा दधे यदि वा न ।
यो अस्याध्यक्षः परमे व्योमन्
सोऽङ्ग वेद यदि वा न वेद ॥
whether He formed it, or did not,
He who surveys it from the highest heaven,
He alone knows – or perhaps He knows not?
The translation above has been synthesised from well-known sources and laced with my own touches.
Even after millennia, the Nasadiya leaves us suspended in mystery. It refuses the closure of certainty, daring to suggest that not even the highest heaven may hold the answer.
In his memorable series Cosmos, Carl Sagan recited these lines with awe. For here we meet the earliest voice of humankind asking the most unsettling of questions – and leaving them open. Video below –