A section from the journey

The Egg of Brahma

How did everything begin? The Puranas answer with one of the most beautiful images in all the tradition. Before there was a world, there was darkness and water. Then a golden egg formed and floated there, and within it lay all that would ever be. The egg held the worlds, the seas, the mountains, the gods. From it the maker is born, and the cosmos unfolds. It is a picture you met as a seed long ago, in the Vedic hymns.

Every people that ever lived has asked the same young question. Where did everything come from? Before the world, what was there? This tradition gives many answers, but in the Purana-telling age one image rises above the rest for sheer beauty. It is the egg of Brahma.

Picture the beginning. There is no earth, no sky, no sun. There is only darkness, deep and unbroken, and a vast still water with no shore. Nothing has shape yet. Everything that will ever be is still asleep, unborn.

"This (universe) existed in the shape of Darkness, unperceived, destitute of distinctive marks, unattainable by reasoning, unknowable, wholly immersed, as it were, in deep sleep."

Then, out of that stillness, something stirs. The maker places a seed in the waters, and the seed becomes an egg. Not a small egg, but a single golden egg, bright as the sun, floating alone upon the deep. The old law-book of Manu tells it in a line.

"That (seed) became a golden egg, in brilliancy equal to the sun; in that (egg) he himself was born as Brahman, the progenitor of the whole world."

Here is the wonder of it. This egg is not empty. Everything is folded inside it, waiting. The Vishnu , the great model among these books, describes what the egg holds, and it leaves nothing out.

"In that egg, O Brahman, were the continents and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the universe, the gods, the demons, and mankind."

And the same book tells us the egg was the dwelling-place of Vishnu himself, in the shape of the maker, resting upon the waters. The whole cosmos, then, is held within a single divine shell.

"This vast egg, O sage, compounded of the elements, and resting on the waters, was the excellent natural abode of Vishnu in the form of Brahma."

Around the egg, the Purana says, lie seven great sheaths, layer upon layer, each one many times larger than the one it wraps. Water, air, fire, and more, folding outward beyond all imagining. The egg of the world is small only compared to what surrounds it.

Now, you have met this picture before, though you may not remember where. Far back in the Vedic age, a hymn sang of a golden womb, the , that arose in the beginning and held the seed of all things. That was the seed of this very idea. Here, ages later, it has grown into a full and glowing image of how the world began.

And hold one more thought as we go. If the world is hatched from an egg, then it had a beginning. And what begins can also end, and begin once more. The egg of Brahma is not only a story of how things start. It is the first turn of a great wheel we will follow next, of making, and lasting, and letting go.

The tradition imagined the entire universe held, once, inside something as small and whole as an egg. When you look up at a sky too wide to measure, does it help, or amaze you, to think it might rest in a single cupped hand? Sit quietly with that for a breath.