{"it":{"id":"TX023","kind":"text","sub":"Vedic","name":"Rigveda 10.129 (Nasadiya Sukta)","place":"Pune","date":"c.1500-1000 BCE (Book 10 latest)","oldest":"oral; oldest ms. c.1040 CE (Pune BORI collection, UNESCO Memory of the World 2007)","inst":"Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune","lang":"Vedic Sanskrit","src":[221,572],"lat":18.53,"lon":73.833,"tags":["Asia"],"sum":"Rigveda 10.129 opens \"Then, there was neither existence, nor non-existence\" and ends doubting whether even the highest being knows.","why":"It is one of the oldest texts to ask where the universe came from and admit no one may know.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Compare translations of the last verse.","rel":["TX024"],"hook":"A Rigveda hymn asks where the world came from, then admits even its overseer in heaven 'perhaps knows not'."},"S":{"221":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta"],"572":["Rigveda 10.129, Griffith translation (sacred-texts)","https://sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10129.htm"]},"rec":{"id":"TX023","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"RV 10.129.7","q":"Even the overseer in highest heaven may or may not know creation's origin. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"Griffith 1896","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta","mo":"creator uncertainty"},{"ref":"RV 10.129.1 (Griffith 1897 vol 2, Hymn CXXIX 'Creation')","q":"\"Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.\"","exact":"yes","tr":"R.T.H. Griffith 1897 (PD)","url":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.195722","mo":"creation"},{"ref":"RV 10.129.2 (Griffith)","q":"\"Death was not, then, nor was there aught immortal\"","exact":"yes","tr":"R.T.H. Griffith 1897 (PD)","url":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.195722","mo":"creation"}],"tr":[{"by":"R.T.H. Griffith","yr":"1896","t":"Hymns of the Rigveda","lic":"public domain","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta"},{"by":"R.T.H. Griffith","yr":"1896-97","t":"Hymns of the Rigveda","lic":"public domain","url":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.195722"}],"mo":[],"tl":[{"comp":"c.1500-1000 BCE (oral)","old":"Oldest mss c.11th-15th c. CE","pub":"Rosen 1838 / Müller 1849+","b":"S","url":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.195722"}],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Philosophical cosmogonic speculation; agnostic about creator.","alternative_reading":"none mainstream AA; occasionally cited for 'higher being'.","alt_proponent":"n/a","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Griffith 1896 translation PD.","key_theme":"creation questioned; 'perhaps he knows, perhaps not'","language":"Vedic Sanskrit","physical_object_institution":"Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune","composition_date":"c.1500-1000 BCE (Book 10 latest)","oldest_ms_date":"oral; oldest ms. c.1040 CE (Pune BORI collection, UNESCO Memory of the World 2007)","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0554","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta"},{"id":"S2573","t":"Rigveda 10.129, Griffith translation (sacred-texts)","u":"https://sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10129.htm"},{"id":"VTX023-3","t":"Rig-Veda, Book 10: HYMN CXXIX. Creation. – The Rig Veda","u":"https://sacred-texts.com/book/the-rig-veda/rig-veda-book-10-hymn-cxxix-creation"}],"sum":"# The Nasadiya Sukta: A Creation Hymn That Admits It Does Not Know\n\nA boy sits cross-legged before his teacher and repeats a line of verse. Then he repeats it again, word by word, with each word separated. Then in overlapping pairs and other permutations, the words woven into patterns, so that a single error in sound would break the pattern and be caught at once. This is how the hymns of the Rigveda were kept alive for well over a thousand years before anyone trusted them to writing: not on clay or stone or papyrus, but in the trained memory of generation after generation of reciters, with a fidelity that scholars of every background describe as unparalleled.\n\nAmong the hymns preserved this way is one that sounds, even now, startlingly modern. It is hymn 129 of the tenth book, called the Nasadiya Sukta after its first words, \"na asat,\" \"not the non-existent.\" It is a poem about the beginning of everything. And it ends by admitting that the answer may be unknowable, even to whoever stands highest in heaven.\n\n## The oldest book of India\n\nThe Rigveda is the oldest text in Vedic Sanskrit and one of the oldest surviving texts in any Indo-European language, the family that includes Greek, Latin, Persian and English. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns arranged in ten books, called mandalas, in about ten thousand six hundred verses. Most scholars date its composition to roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE, in the late Bronze Age of northwest India. Iron is never mentioned, one of the reasons it is placed before 1000 BCE. The hymns were collected and arranged, according to the scholar Michael Witzel, around 1200 to 1000 BCE, in the early Kuru kingdom.\n\nThe oldest parts are the \"family books,\" books 2 through 7, each tied to a lineage of poets. The first and tenth books are the youngest and the longest, 191 hymns each. The Nasadiya Sukta belongs to that late tenth book, and its tone is unlike most of what comes before it. Many of the earlier hymns praise gods such as Agni, the fire, and Indra, the storm warrior, and ask for their help. This one asks a question no god is invoked to answer.\n\nWhen were the hymns first written down? Nobody knows for certain. The oldest surviving manuscripts, from Nepal, date to around 1040 CE. In Pune, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute holds thirty Rigveda manuscripts, some on birch bark in the Sharada script, gathered in the nineteenth century from Kashmir, Gujarat and elsewhere; the oldest of them dates to 1464 CE. In 2007 those thirty manuscripts were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. But the words they record were already ancient when the first scribe touched them.\n\n## What the hymn says\n\nThere are seven verses. In Ralph Griffith's translation of the 1890s, the first begins: \"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?\"\n\nThe second goes further back: \"Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.\" And yet something was there. \"That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.\"\n\nThen the poem describes, as if from the inside, the moment when something began. \"Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.\" It was \"void and formless,\" and \"by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.\" The Sanskrit word for that warmth is tapas, heat, which later also came to mean the inner heat of discipline and meditation. After heat came desire, \"the primal seed and germ of Spirit.\" And the poets, the sages who \"searched with their heart's thought,\" found \"the existent's kinship in the non-existent.\"\n\nThen the poem turns, and asks the question that makes it famous:\n\n\"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?\"\n\nAnd the last verse refuses to settle it: \"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.\"\n\n## A deliberate silence\n\nThat final line is not a slip. The hymn is composed in a regular metre called trishtubh, eleven syllables to a line. But in the last verse one line is two syllables short, the line that says \"if he has created it, or if not.\" And the very last line ends on a clause with nothing to complete it, \"he verily knows, or maybe he does not know.\" The scholar Joel Brereton argued that both defects are intentional, a poet using broken form to enact a broken certainty. The metre itself falls silent where knowledge runs out.\n\n## How it has been read\n\nReaders have taken the hymn in very different directions. Later Hindu philosophy read it as a pointer to a single reality underlying all things, the \"One\" that breathed without breath before anything else. The scholar Karel Werner thought its source was not reasoning but \"visionary, mystical or Yogic experience put into words.\" Brereton suggested that its slow procession from non-being to being is meant to re-enact creation inside the listener, so that the poem's own speech mirrors the origin of the world.\n\nMany modern readers see it instead as one of the earliest records of sceptical inquiry. The astronomer Carl Sagan quoted it as an example of India's \"tradition of skeptical questioning and unselfconscious humility before the great cosmic mysteries.\" Others hear in its opening lines, a state with neither existence nor non-existence, neither air nor sky, an image of the universe before the Big Bang. That is our idea, not the poet's, and serious readers are careful not to press it too far. Even the conventional English title, Hymn of Creation, may mislead, because the poem does not actually tell a creation story. It asks whether one can be told.\n\nWhat is not in doubt is the hymn's position in the history of thought. Somewhere in northern India, before iron and long before writing, a poet set out the deepest question human beings can ask, sketched an answer involving darkness, heat and desire, and then placed the gods themselves after the beginning, unable to say for certain where it came from.\n\nIf the gods came later than creation, as the poet insists, then who or what did the poet imagine was watching from that highest heaven, and why should even that witness not be sure?","qs":["A Vedic poet asked where the universe came from and admitted even the gods might not know. How did they reach a question we still can't answer?","Is the hymn agnostic, or a careful statement about a reality beyond words? What in the text decides it for you?","Some readers hear modern cosmology in its opening lines. Fair parallel, or reading our own ideas back into it?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX023-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Rigveda 10.129 (Nasadiya Sukta), Pune — Rigveda MS in Sanskrit on paper, India, early 19th c., 4 vols., 795 ff. (complete), 10x20 cm, single column, (7x17…","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rigveda_MS2097.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"1500 BCE","h":"c.1500-1000 BCE (Book 10 latest)","s":[297]},{"v":"c. 1040 CE","h":"oral; oldest ms. c.1040 CE (Pune BORI collection, UNESCO Memory of the World 2007)","s":[297]},{"v":"Vedic Sanskrit","h":"Language","s":[297]}],"hs":{"297":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta"]}}