A section from the journey

The Hymn That Dares to Ask

Not every creation hymn gives an answer. One of the most loved of all, the Nasadiya, only asks. It tries to picture the time before there was anything, before sky or death or night, and then it admits how little anyone can know. It even wonders whether the one who watches over the world from the highest heaven truly knows how it began. This honest not-knowing is one of the most beautiful things in the Veda.

So far the hymns have given us answers about how the world began. A cosmic Person, offered up, becomes the sun and sky. But the rishis were not satisfied with one answer. Some of them did something braver. They asked a question, and then they sat honestly inside the not-knowing.

This brings us to a hymn many people love more than any other in the whole Veda. It has a strange name, the , which simply comes from its first words. It is a hymn about the very beginning, the moment before there was anything at all.

Try to picture what it asks you to picture. Before the world, there was no earth and no sky above it. There was no air. There was no death, and so there was no deathlessness either. There was no night and no day. Hold that in your mind, if you can. Nothing yet, not even the empty space we know.

“THEN was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.”

Sit with how daring that line is. It says the beginning was neither something nor nothing. Our usual words simply do not reach it. The hymn then speaks of a deep stillness, and a first warmth that stirred, and the very first rising of desire, as the earliest seed of all that would come. But notice what the hymn keeps doing. It keeps wondering.

And here is the boldest stroke of all. The hymn says that the gods themselves came after the world had begun. The gods are not before creation. They are part of it. So, the rishi asks, how could anyone truly know where it all came from? Who was there to see?

“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.”

Read that last line again, slowly. He verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not. The hymn dares to wonder whether even the highest being, the one who watches the world from the loftiest heaven, truly knows how it all began. That is a breathtaking honesty. The rishi would rather admit the mystery than make up an answer.

Think of what kind of mind writes like this. It is a mind humble enough to say, before the greatest question of all, we do not know, and it is not shameful to say so. In this tradition, to ask honestly is itself a kind of reverence. Wonder is treated as holy.

And this hymn is a doorway. Until now, the hymns mostly looked outward, to fire and storm and dawn. But a hymn that asks what lies behind everything has already begun to turn inward. That turn, from praising the gods to seeking what is truly real, will open the next great age of our story. The question asked here will grow into the search of the forest sages.

The rishi of this hymn was brave enough to say, before the biggest question, perhaps even the highest one does not know. Where in your own life is it hard to admit that you simply do not know something? How might it feel to treat that not-knowing as a kind of open door, rather than a failure?