IB World Religions 4.4.4. Cosmogony, Cosmology and Authority: Creation Myths, the Vedas, Brahmins and Gurus Notes

4.4.4. Cosmogony, Cosmology and Authority: Creation Myths, the Vedas, Brahmins and Gurus

Creation in the Vedic hymns

1. Hinduism has no single creation story and no text that settles the question. The Rig Veda by itself offers several accounts that do not agree with one another, and later texts add more.
2. The Nasadiya Sukta, the hymn of creation, opens by saying that in the beginning there was neither existence nor non-existence, and neither death nor immortality.
3. That hymn ends in a question rather than a doctrine. It asks who really knows where creation came from, and allows that even the highest overseer in heaven may not.
4. The Purusha Sukta gives a quite different account, in which the cosmos is produced by the sacrifice of Purusha, a primeval cosmic person, from whose body the world and its social order emerge.
5. A third hymn describes Hiranyagarbha, the golden womb, floating on the waters and giving rise to everything that exists.
6. Hindus have not treated these as rivals needing to be settled. They are read as different approaches to something the tradition holds lies beyond ordinary description.

Creation in the Puranas

1. The Puranas, the later collections of story and lore, tell creation in far more concrete terms, and this is the version most Hindus actually know.
2. In the Vaishnava account Vishnu sleeps on the coils of the serpent Ananta upon a shoreless ocean between worlds, and a lotus grows from his navel.
3. Brahma is seated on that lotus, and it is Brahma who fashions the world in detail, working as a craftsman rather than as its ultimate source.
4. Shaivas tell it with Shiva at the centre instead, and read his dance as Nataraja as the rhythm by which the cosmos is brought out and drawn back.
5. These images are carried in painting and temple sculpture, so most Hindus meet the doctrine as a picture long before meeting it as an argument.
6. Each account ends as well as begins. At pralaya, the dissolution, the whole creation is withdrawn into its source before the process starts over.

The Goddess as creator

1. Shaktas, who worship the Goddess as supreme, tell creation with Devi as its origin rather than as anyone's consort.
2. The Devi Mahatmya presents the Goddess as the power by which the universe is produced, sustained and withdrawn, taking all three works into herself.
3. On this account the male gods have their strength only because she supplies it, and they turn back to her when their own resources fail.
4. The best known episode has the gods unable to defeat the buffalo demon Mahishasura until their combined energies take form as Durga, who does it for them.
5. Traditions across Bengal, Assam and southern India carry versions of this cosmology, so it is not a minority curiosity within Hinduism.
6. Hindus who hold it describe the created world as the Goddess's own body and activity, rather than as something she made and then stood apart from.

Cyclical time and the yugas

1. Hindu accounts of the universe run in cycles rather than along a line, so creation is not one event but something that has happened many times over.
2. Each cycle passes through four yugas or ages: Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, each shorter than the last and each holding less dharma than the one before it.
3. Hindus place the present in the Kali Yuga, the last and most degenerate of the four, in which duty is hardest to keep and religious practice stands at its weakest.
4. A full set of four makes a mahayuga, and a thousand mahayugas make a kalpa, which is described as a single day in the life of Brahma.
5. At the close of that day comes pralaya, when the worlds are withdrawn, and after a night of equal length the whole process begins again.
6. The numbers are enormous by design. They set human history on a scale where no one life or civilisation is decisive, and they leave no room for a final end of the world.

The authority of shruti

1. Doctrine in Hinduism is not settled by a council or a single office, so the question of authority is answered by naming which sources carry weight.
2. The Vedas carry the most. They are classed as shruti, that which was heard, and Hindus hold that sages received them rather than composed them.
3. The strongest form of the claim is that the Vedas are apaurusheya, not of human authorship, and therefore not liable to the errors any author might introduce.
4. The Upanishads, the final layer of the Vedas, carry that same authority and supply most of the philosophical material the schools argue over.
5. Accepting Vedic authority became the working test of orthodoxy. Traditions that rejected it, Buddhism and Jainism among them, were classed as nastika and placed outside the fold.
6. In practice the authority is often formal rather than active. Many Hindus revere the Vedas without reading them, and take their working beliefs from the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranas and regional devotional poetry.

Brahmins and the guru

1. Textual authority still needs people to carry it, and Hindus have traditionally given that work to Brahmins, the varna charged with learning, reciting and teaching the Vedas.
2. Their authority rested on transmission. Vedic texts were preserved by mouth with extraordinary precision across centuries, and Brahmin families held the training that made this possible.
3. That authority is contested today. Reform movements and modern Indian law have opened Vedic study and temple priesthood well beyond Brahmin families in many places.
4. Beside the Brahmin stands the guru, whose authority is personal rather than inherited and rests on a realisation the disciple accepts as genuine.
5. Hindus hold that some knowledge cannot be taken from a text at all, which is why the Upanishads stage their teaching as conversations between a teacher and a pupil.
6. A sampradaya, a lineage of teaching handed from guru to disciple, is what gives a school its continuity, and Hindus commonly trace their own practice back along one.