In Our Time - Hindu Ideas of Creation

Episode Date: December 5, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Hindu ideas about Creation. According to most Western religious traditions, a deity was the original creator of the Universe. Hinduism, on the other hand, has no single creation story. For thousands of years, Hindu thinkers have taken a variety of approaches to the question of where we come from, with some making the case for divine intervention and others asking whether it is even possible for humans to comprehend the nature of creation. The origin of our existence, and the nature of the Universe we live in, is one of the richest strands of Hindu thought.With:Jessica Frazier Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at the University of OxfordChakravarthi Ram-Prasad Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster UniversityGavin Flood Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. The Brumanda Puana, an important Hindu text written over a thousand years ago, contains an account one of many, of the beginning of the universe.

The book describes a huge golden egg from which emerged the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. From it also springs the foreheaded god Brahma, who creates all the people and creatures on earth. This creation story is well known in Hinduism, but it's not the only one. Unlike Christianity and other religions, Hinduism does not have a single story

about the beginning of the universe, instead offering a rich and intriguing series of possible explanations. For centuries, one of the central concerns of Hindu philosophy has been how a God could have created the world and whether there's something that humans can ever comprehend. Women to discuss Hindu ideas of creation are Jessica Frazier, lecturer in religious studies at the University of Kent and a research fellow of the Oxford

for Hindu Studies at the University of Oxford, Chakravati Ram Prasad, Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University, and Gavin Flood, Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford. Jessica Frazier, I've just seen it Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions have a fundamentally different approach in many ways to the universe. explain what the major differences are? Well, if you look at the first few millennia BCE, what we get is almost every culture

around the world is thinking about the nature of the universe and the origins of the cosmos itself. What's distinctive in the differences that they develop over the next few millennia is that the West develops monotheism. Certainly we see that in the Hebrew tradition that flows through into Christianity and Islam. And with that monotheism, the idea of one God, develops the idea that that God creates ex nihilo out of nothing. There's a transcendent divine reality. There's a worldly physical reality. They're two separate things.

But India does something quite different. India says perhaps that divinity creates from itself. It doesn't make sense to create ex nihilo. We never see anything arising out of nothing. Here we have a God who emanates, who creates ex-deo from himself, and from that we get a world which maintains the divine as a pervasive part of its own reality. So the God in Hinduism is there before creation?

That's a complicated one that I'll come to, yeah. Well, can you come to it now? Yeah, absolutely. In many ways we have a situation where the West says what could possibly be there at the very beginning. It must be God. In Hinduism, we get an interesting early hymn called the Him of Creation,

the Nasadiyah Sukta, written in the Rig Veda that says what was there at the beginning? What was there before the creation of the universe? What was there even before being or non-being? What could it have been? And the hymn thinks about this early reality and starts to say, what could it have been?

Even the gods don't know what the origins of the universe are because they're part of the universe. Even they can have no idea. So what is it? And the very line of this wonderful early hymn says, perhaps the God in the highest heaven, who sees all, knows what the origin is. origin of everything is. Or the last line challenges us, maybe God does not know. So this mystery

of what it is that could possibly be the foundation of all reality is said as a question that kind of inspires a series of Hindu creation stories that carry on throughout India's history. Chakrabati-Ram Prasad, the earliest known Hindu text which deals with the question of creation is that Rig Veda, which has been referred to, written about three and a half thousand years ago. What does it say? Well, the most important and earliest question on this is indeed raised in the Hymn of Creation that Jessica has referred to. There are two or three places where the question of origins is posed in the Vedas. And each time the seers, the bards who sang of these questions come up against this final mystery.

They keep asking this logical question that if you are going to ask about creation, could you not ask the same question about the creator? So having reached the boundaries of thought, they retreat to something that they are very interested in, which is the order of the world and the universe as it exists now. So they start switching from what we might think of as purely cosmogonic questions to questions about the origins of human order, about human nature, about society. And so we find in the very same hymns,

which are talking about these ultimate questions of creation, also questions about the creation of order within it. And this is the hymn of Dark Beginning? This is the Hymn of the Dark Beginning, which ends in the way Jessica has quoted. But even more interestingly, it's not even clear that what this hymn is referring to is a personal God. It talks about that which is in the highest.

So we could easily read it not as he who is in the highest, we could say it's what is it that is in the highest. And just as we say, maybe he does not know, we could equally read the Sanskrit as saying maybe even it does not know. So there is this sense of the absolute incomprehensibility of what was there before. And the explanations are full of ambiguity. The explanations are full of amputensibility and ambiguity.

That's right. It's mystery. It's a recognition that here human thought runs out. And that has a major effect on what happens subsequently as these great thinkers. What do you mean by runs out? In the sense that if you were going to say, we know now when people ask questions about the Big Bang, for example, that it's meaningless to say what was there before the Big Bang, because the idea of time and space originate with it.

So in giving an explanation, we are also drawing the boundaries of human thought. And this is what I think the Hym of the Dark Beginning is saying. It says this is where we have to stop. In one of the earlier accounts of creation, there are several, not a lot, is an important tradition involving a being known as Purusha. Can you tell us about Prussia? Yes, so in the hymn to Prusha,

we have this interweaving of the bafflement over the cosmos itself with a rather stronger view of the origins of human society. Purisha is this being which at one and the same time is a personalized entity, but also the very body of the cosmos. This is the hymn of the cosmic person. This is that Purusha basically translates as cosmic person. And in this, something has already happened because the gods who are part of the universe sacrifice that from which they have originated, which is the cosmic person. and from the different parts of this cosmic person emerge different elements of the universe.

Now that means not just the sun and the stars and the moon, not just the rivers and the mountains and the trees, but also different sections of society. So for these ancient people, social order was an integral part of cosmic order. And while they recognized that they couldn't give an account of where the universe began, they could certainly talk about where society began.

It's intriguing, isn't it, the ideas people are formulating to answer these same questions again and again and again and the ingenuity and the imagination involved? That's right. So what in effect happens is the question of origin simply becomes a formal way of structuring what you want to say. So if what is gripping you at that point in time, in culture, in thought, is something to do with human nature, about the nature of the self,

the nature of social order, the nature of the physical world. Whatever it is, you restructure that in terms of an origin narrative. And I think one of the reasons why we have this plurality of narratives in these Indian materials is because people are looking to give different answers, because that's what concerns them at that point. Gavin Flood, there's an early Sanskrit text called The Laws of, Manu. It contains contrasting version of creation. Can you take us in that direction?

Yes. Well, the Laws of Manu was composed about the 5th century, between the 3rd and 5th century AD. So it's many 1,000 years after the Rig Veda and or more. But it continues some of the themes of the Rig Veda very much.

So there are fundamentally two... Well, first of all, a word about the text. The text itself is part of a group of secondary revelation. which is concerned with Dharma. Dharma means virtue or law and it's concerned about how human beings should conduct themselves in the world.

Now it's very interesting that this book about human behavior, human law, contains in its first chapter a section on creation, on the creation of the universe, so that the human society is completely integrated into the order, the cosmical order. Now, there are two versions of creation in the first chapter of the text. The first one is that in the beginning there was darkness,

there was complete darkness, utter darkness. And then the one... And you quote a poem, which has the word, well, the translation of it is void in it as well. There are echoes of Genesis. There are echoes of Genesis, yes. In the beginning was... I think there are also...

There are reasons why that could be, actually, which we could talk about later on. So in the beginning there's this darkness. And the one, the one, the one, who is the Lord, who is light, sheds... moves into the darkness, the text says, and pushes the darkness away. And then out of his being, the one creates the waters,

says he creates water. And then from within the water, he plants his own seed within the water. And within the seed, from the seed, grows a golden egg, a massive golden egg. And then the Lord, it's quite a complicated story, the Lord then manifests himself into the egg and becomes Brahma, the Creator God.

And then the Creator God, After one year, he says, separates the egg in two, so into the sky and earth, and the in-between becomes the directions. Now, having done that, he then generates from his own body, it says, all the forms of creation, from human beings to lice and mice and rats and all the rest of it. And also, it then echoes the Prussia Sukhtra that we've had earlier

that society comes out of the great out of his body. So the Brahmins, the highest caste, come out of his mouth, the voice of society, the warriors, the strength of society come from his shoulders, and from his thighs come the commoners, and the serfs come from his feet. Now that's the first version of creation. The second version of creation is that in the beginning was one, Eka, one being, who split himself in two into male and female. And from their union was a shining man was born, called Virar,

and he practiced asceticism for a long time, and then out of him came Manu. Manu is the author of the laws of Manu, who's a semi-divine being, and Manu creates all the manifest forms of creation. Is there any sense in which what you've talked about, which is absolutely fascinating, relates to what Ram was talking about,

relates to the Sanskrit, ancient Vedic Sanskrit texts? I think it relates in two ways. One is that the universe is not ex nihil, it's not a creation from nothing, but it's generated out of pre-existing substance, pre-existent matter. And there's two versions of that. One is that God emanates the universe from himself, and the other that there is already some pre-existing matter there,

which is unconscious that the Lord acts upon. There's that version. And the other way that it's relevant is that society and the social order is completely, integrated into the structure of the universe. How far were these thought at the time to be metaphors and how far were they thought to be truths? Because one of the things about Christianity, for example, is that this was the truth.

The word of God was the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing got the truth, and you read Genesis as history. Indeed. I suspect my own view would be that they've thought, the early thinkers, thought of these things in fairly literal terms, as Thomas Aquinas would have regarded Genesis to be fairly literally true. So I imagine these early thinkers would think that too. I think I'd probably disagree with Gavin on this.

I think the way in which these narratives are constantly undermined, Gavin mentioned the idea of the golden womb. It first occurs in another of the Rig Vedic sultas, the Hiranyargarba, which basically means the golden womb, the golden egg. and there, although there are sort of very densely personal terms in which this God is talked about, it says this is the one that created the world,

created the vault of the skies, the animals, the breath, every verse ends with a refrain, who is this deity to whom we offer worship? It keeps asking this question. And I read that as a way of constantly undermining the kinds of explanations that the authors themselves, are offering so that it seems more as if the imagination fills the void but is aware at all times that it is only the imagination. Jessica, did you want to come in on that? You came in earlier on

something. No, I was going to reiterate some of Ram's points, but I think this theme of everything coming from one is a really interesting one, and they're both on the one hand trying to find a literal idea of where it all comes from, and on the other hand, also thinking in a more philosophical direction. And maybe that is reflected in what then happens in terms of bringing out this theme of the one and the many. There's an idea that

these images of a single being who is divided into the universe in his body or emanates the universe through his body or in some sense becomes the world developed much further in the philosophical tradition that we find after that. In what ways? Well, if you look

at texts in the Rigveda, we have these mythic accounts, but once you get to the Panishads which are slightly more philosophical text in, say, 500 BCE-ish. We have people trying to think about how this really would work. And thinkers are actually coming up with metaphors, images, analogies that would explain the way one thing can become the many things that we see around us in the world. There's the image of a single fire that is able to produce many flames, inexhaustibly many flames, of a tree that grows many, many branches, of clay that can be devoidable.

divide it up into many different objects. If you look at the Bhagavid Gita, a very popular text, there's the idea that these images generate a picture of the divine as constantly pervading the world, being the essence of everything. God is the light in the sun and the moon, he's the heat in fire, he is the life and all living beings. So this starts to generate an understanding that the divine really can still be found in the world around us to some extent.

And finally what then develops is when people come to worship individual deities more and more, Vishnu, Durga, Shiva, etc. Even in the later text, if someone asks the God to explain how he created the world, the gods often say, I flowed forth, Sarga, creation by flowing forth into the reality that's around us now. Howard, Bram, how urgent was this quest? Are we talking about men and it was largely men, I presume, studying this, who, had to find out, or how are we talking about men who were intellectually engaged in an almost, as you said, ironic and playful way sometime? How much did it matter to them? I think that if you look at the relatively small portions of the Vedas, which were devoted to this question, compared to the vast

amounts of material on ritual order, ritual performance, maintenance of the structures of society through ritual action. It seems as if the question of creation was a framing question, but it was not something that dominated that thought for very long. In the same way, when you move to the Upanishads, as Jessica was saying, slightly later material, which is more contemplative, which is more speculative in terms of the philosophical study of reality and self. Again, it talks much more about the constitution rather than the creation of reality. It's more about what is the relationship between our innermost being and the world. So it's about how we find ourselves in reality rather than where reality came from.

So I think once you've had these one or two major ideas, this impossibility of XNahilo, the flowing forth of things from what pre-existed, the integration of the body of the world and the being of the gods. Once those main themes emerge in this early material, it seems as if these thinkers moved on to more philosophical questions about what we are now rather than where we came from. And would the significance of the egg, which Gavin referred to, the significance of the egg be partly that it was so clearly

understood and so perceived to be the beginning of things as it was when they looked around nature. That's right. I think the thing about the egg is that it manages to be both literal and metaphorical. I mean we can take it all the way to how contemporary

Hindus often read this as pointing to the sort of the endlessness, the bounded yet infinite nature of the world. For example, physicists talk about how we ought to think about the universe as

two-dimensional creatures on a three-dimensional egg. That is, we can infinitely explore it, but yet it is bound, and it seems as if being the surface of the egg, its containment, has a highly metaphorical force. At the same time, of course, the egg

immediately suggests something from which things are born. So I think it encompasses a multiplicity of meanings. Gavin Flood, there's a powerful idea in Hinduism, the notion of recurrence, which is why there is

never nothing, because there's always recurrence. Can you develop that because it's a big idea, and let's spend some time on it? Yes, okay. The idea of recurrence, I think, is fundamental to all of these traditions. I mean, Rham was outlined the structure of

the basic structure, the basic pattern here, that originally you have the universe is a manifestation or emanation of a pre-existing substance. Can you say originally if it's always recurring? No, you can't. But you can in a sense, you can say it in the sense that there are these periods of cyclic emanation and contraction.

And some of the images used in the material at I study are God opens his eyes and closes his eyes or falls asleep and wakes up or breathes in and breathes out. and these are the emanations of the universe coming in and out endlessly. Now, what's interesting and significant, I think, is that why does God do this? Why does God create the cosmos or emanate the cosmos and contract it? And there is no telos to the universe itself.

There is no purpose to the whole creation. There's no end goal like end of history or something like that. So that marks it very differently, I think, from Abrahamic traditions, where there is a inherent purpose to the universe. but there is none in the Hindu traditions. But in response to that question, the text I read say there are two reasons why God creates this universe that emanates and contracts. One is so that souls can be liberated, and the second is because it's God's nature. It's his shakti or his power to do so.

So this idea of recurrence, it's like a systole and diastole. It's like a breathing in and out endlessly because it's the very nature of reality to do so. Ram's pointed out that in some of the hymns, there's this recurrent refrain saying, but we don't really know, we don't really know anything about this at all. Was there any agitation that they couldn't get to the bottom of it, as it were, that there wasn't a first thing?

I think that that sense of mystery is all pervasive because all these accounts that we read about the nature of reality and so on, there are always a hesitancy there, that actually God is unknowable, God is ineffable, or reality is ineffable, it's beyond our understanding. There is always that idea throughout the whole of the tradition, it seems to me. And it seems to me that that's one reason for a certain degree of toleration of other positions within the Hindu tradition. So we have to grasp the idea that of always, some being, entity, whatever is, always being there.

There's no beginning and obviously therefore there's no end. That's right. So that's what we have to get hold of. We have to get hold of that idea. Even to begin to understand what we don't understand? Yes. Yes, indeed. Jessica, can you tell us about, let's get in a bit more detail. The God Brahma, he's central in many texts.

What about him? Or her? In this case, it's a to him. There's an idea that you find in many cultures that which is the source and foundation of everything, that thing in the beginning that has been there always, isn't necessarily the same thing as the deity that actually shapes and gives,

sort of architectural coherence to the world. So you actually get a divide between a creator who is the origin and a creator who is kind of the one who is the artisan. It reminds me of, for instance, the Masonic idea of God is the architect or in the Hebrew Bible, actually. In the wisdom literature, you find the idea that God creates through wisdom, a being who helps to shape the world for him. And this is kind of the job of Brahma, the Creator God.

So he's not the origin necessarily, but he's the maker of the world around us. almost an artisan. And while he isn't worshipped very widely in India, he's actually very popular on a wider scale. I was in Thailand last year, and everywhere you go you find statues of Brahma. They're often, interestingly, outside police stations, town halls, schools, places where people are trying to bring order into the human world.

Brahma is a god who actually brings order into the physical world is a really useful deity to have a connection with in that respect. Ram, there's it was mentioned earlier in the programme and I'd like to sort of come back to it and bring it a bit more focus here. About 2,000 years ago, which is of course quite significant

in the Christian tradition, there seems to be in a shift that there was a supreme creator god in Hinduism. Now can you tell us more about that? Yes. So the earlier materials even when they do mention

a personalised deity is quite careful about naming him. This data is often put only in the context of questions about origin or about mystery. However, around this time, two millennia ago, you start having a more explicitly theological re-reading or an imaginative reworking of these questions. I think what happens at this point is that they are, almost done with this bafflement.

The tradition is beginning to say we must have a larger meaning to reality than just the mystery of its origins. So the mention of where it all came from, who fashions all of this, from whom does it emanate, starts coalescing around three major deities. One is Vishnu, one is Shiva,

and one is the Devi or Shakti or the goddess. and each of them starts having a set of narratives around him or her, which, again, not so much about the absolute origins because usually materials pre-exist or arise from the body of these beings, but you start having stories about the details of what happened in the initial part of the existence of this universe. Therefore, can you tell us about one of them, in more detail, Gavin Flood, the data called Shiva. It's a slightly later tradition. What role does Shiva apply?

Yes, Shiva is a god who has five functions in the tradition. One is he creates the universe, he maintains it, he destroys it, and then he reveals himself and conceals himself. Those are the five functions of Shiva. Now, when it says creates the universe, he doesn't create it from himself. He generates it from pre-existing substance. and that emanates as the universe. Now there are two versions of this idea. One is that there's Shiva is separate from the universe

and then he acts upon this pre-existing substance or called Prachrity or Maya and that develops as the universe. And the other version is that, so the universe is unconscious on that view, the other version is that there is a monistic version that Shiva emanates the universe from himself, in which case the universe is conscious, is pure consciousness. And they speak about the vibration,

the spander, the vibration of the universe in and out all the time. And within this structure, there are two levels. Shiva first creates what he calls the pure creation. And in the pure creation, he emanates eight beings from himself. The chief of whom is called Ananta,

the chief of the Lord of Wisdom. And it's Ananta who then creates the lower universe. So you've got a two-tiered universe here. The first is pure creation, created by Shiva, and the second is the impure creation created by his regent Ananta. So it's like a demiurge in Gnosticism in a way. So you've got these two levels, which is quite, I think,

that's another theme that's occurring right the way from the laws of Manu as well, from this earlier story that I spoke about, where this universe is actually eminent, or created by a being who was himself emanated or created by a higher being. So these things are all coexisting. Jessica, we've mentioned Brahma and Shiva. What about the third moment, Vishnu? Vishnu is an interesting one. Well, in some respects, we see a similar range of creation myths associated with Vishnu.

We've heard about the image of the golden egg, and there's a version of that and involves Vishnu. And we have him as a sort of a lord of the universe. He reclines on the world's serpent, on the great ocean of reality. and he himself then emanates Brahma, who goes on to create the world in sort of practical terms. But one of the things that's interesting about Vishnu is that he develops his own distinctive theology. We raised the issue earlier of the question of why the God, why God creates, what the purpose of the universe is, not just how, but why. And this question comes to be answered in the theology that's associated with Vishnu through his incarnation as the character Krishna. In the Christian context, God incarnates as Jesus and he's a humble carpenter who's engaged with human suffering.

Well, in the Hindu context, God incarnates as Krishna. He's a humble cowherd. And he's interested in enjoyment, in bliss, in the beauty and the pleasure, the passions of reality. And actually, there's the idea then that God creates so that he can enter into the world so that he can enjoy it, enjoying and relishing and appreciating the wonder of creation rather than sort of lamenting over its woes, that's one of the purposes that comes out in the theology associated with Vishnu.

Are we talking at this stage, say, 1,500 years ago, something like that, about many gods, is there any confusion? Is there any centre to it? Can you just give us some idea how this is received by people? Yeah, it can be very hard to understand, I think, when you're not used to the Hindu way of looking at things. where once you get into that world it feels very natural, I think comparatively you can look at it as the idea

that even in Jewish, in Muslim, in Christian thought, there's an idea that while there may be one God, he has different potencies, he has different powers, they may be represented as different angels or the different names of God. And in Hinduism, I think the idea that whatever the ultimate divine reality is, there's an idea that it has different aspects to it. So you may emphasize governance and protection.

You may emphasize prosperity. You may emphasize also the difficulties, the dangers, the pain and the mysteries of reality. And these gods, well, I'll move around, come to Gavin, I want to ask you, but are these gods prayed too? Are they, do people adopt them? That's the one I go for, like people adopt saints.

Yes. Yes, people adopt them, but there are also families who are focused on Vishnu or Shiva and so on. So it tends to be family-orientated and it depends what tradition you're born into. And they will offer sacrifices for what? What are they hoping to get to them as sacrifices? Well, they often make vegetarian offerings to the deity.

So it's a debate about me. It's a kind of pro quo sometimes that I make an offering to you and in return I receive a blessing. So that's the fundamental structure. But there's real devotion, real back to you amongst people. And what is interesting if we're talking about cosmology and the nature of the cosmos is that the universe and the creation of the universe is reflected and recapitulated in human action as well

so that the creative act of offering, making offering to the deity, in your ritual procedure you destroy symbolically the body in your imagination which is symbolic of the destruction of the universe and then the recreation of the universe again. So you recreate yourself in the ritual. sound plays an important part in these creation stories. Can you tell us something of that? Yes, well, sound is right there from the early tradition.

I'm not talking about words, I'm not talking about sound. Yes, Varch or Vark is the sound, or Shabda, the word. And in the sense, in the beginning was the word. In the beginning was, according to a fifth century philosopher called Bartri-Hari, the god, Brahman, is is identified with sound, with pure sound, pure sound, and also light. And light and sound emanate the form, the manifold forms of the universe, in a hierarchical sequence once again.

So this fundamental idea of hierarchy. And that sound emanates out and contracts back in as, reflected in the Sanskrit alphabet, the word al-m, as ah comes from the back of the throat and ends the lips, so the universe comes from the absolute sound and manifests out. and contracts back into itself. I think there is a very interesting series of developments that Barthruhari, the philosopher, the 6th century philosopher that Gavin mentioned,

initiates, which is this sense that the language that we use to describe where the universe comes from names reality in a way that reality itself does not, that the expression of what, where things came from, how things are, reaches its speak only in language itself. So the transition from sound to language is relatively small

in this kind of Hindu material because the tradition is largely oral. Language is not thought of so much as writing as speech. And speech, of course, requires sound. So when you have this idea that Brahman, the principle of reality, is sound, we mean at one at the same time that the universe being born in sound

allows us in the sound that is speech to capture its meaning. Jessica. One thing that's interesting that comes out of that concept, we think of creation in the West as material and this ties into modern concepts of science as looking at the universe as a kind of material phenomenon, its matter, it's physics.

But this other model of creation as the emanation of sound, which in essence is vital. vibration, its movement, it's a kind of energy, actually presents a whole different way of looking at what reality itself is and is very distinctive, I think, in the Hindu tradition, that you can then look at all beings, all things, time itself, as transformations of energy. And that's something that once would have looked very odd.

Now I think, even from the perspective of modern physics, is actually quite compelling. But there's a female energy principle there, isn't it, known as Shakti. Can you tell us about that, Jessica? Yeah, it's interesting that each male god has his... his own sort of creation mythology, but perhaps the deity most strongly associated with creation is the goddess. In the early period, Gavin mentioned Vach. This is actually seen as a female principle in the Rig Veda. And there's an idea that starts to develop that the energy by which

the gods create, the very potency and power that makes them strong, is actually a female divine principle called Shakti, which literally means potency, activity, capacity, linked to the modern Hindi sakti. So this feminine power eventually comes to be seen as a distinct, independent female divinity of its own. In a wonderful text called the Devi Mahatma, the greatness of the goddess, it speaks of all the gods gathering their energy and power together into one being who emerges as Durga, this beautiful, many-armed goddess who rides a lion, who carries the weapons of each of the gods in her hands, and who alone is able to conquer the demons. This image of the goddess as power is a very compelling one and is still very pervasive

today. Was there a stage, Ram, where we've talked about some of the stories. There's a point in Hindu thought where these develop into an explicit theology. I think the explicit theology happens much

later. The narratives that we've been talking about, about Shiva, Vishnu and Shakti, the narratives emerge around the start of the common era, but it's really only from the 5th, 6th century onwards. really only in the last thousand years,

have you had very explicit theological readings of this narrative? For example, Gavin talked about this idea of the world as an emanation of Shiva's consciousness. Now, the seeds of that kind of story are found 2,000 years ago in what are known as the Purana, the Shiva Purana, for example. But the theology for it happens really around the 10th, 11th century onwards. There is a philosopher in Kashmir called Abinava, who really talks about the metaphysical principle of consciousness

as what ties the reality of the world with God. In the same way, the stories about Vishnu and his descent as Krishna, again 2,000 years old, but the theology of it is really only developed about the 10th, 11th century onwards. Kevin, Govind, how does Hinduism see the relationship between the individual and the rather elaborate hierarchy we've been alluding to? Well, the individual reflects or recapitulates the cosmos, as it were, as a sort of William Blake-type idea that the universe is in a grain of sand.

So the whole cosmos is reflected in your own life and in your own person. So the hierarchy of the universe is ritually enacted in your body. So the top of the universe is at your head and the bottom is at your feet. And you symbolically destroy the universe in your ritual and recreate it. as a divine being. So it's constantly reflected all the time. Now, the relation between the individual and the cosmos is an interesting question because you as an individual are a soul who is reincarnated over and over again in different forms according to your past actions. And the purpose of life, the ultimate purpose of life is liberation, Moxha, which is stepping outside of creation, as it were,

which is becoming liberated from the cycle of reincarnation, liberated from creation. So the creation, as an egg in some of the texts I've looked at, the liberation is regarded as being outside of that, breaking open the egg, going beyond the egg, and that's ultimately the individual has to do that in order to be free. Can we just take the idea of Mokshar on if there's more to say, Jessica, is that? I think you've captured it essentially,

but what's interesting is that in the, again in the West we have a notion that creation has a final purpose and that is for everyone to get to heaven. whereas in the Hindu tradition, it's more about the idea that we can escape from creation. Creation is wonderful, it's many virtues to it, it involves suffering as well as pleasure, and ultimately one might want to break free of that.

So I think there's a sense that the ultimate goal is actually to return either to that peace and quiet before creation or perhaps to participate in the creation in the way that the divine might want. But in either case, you're somehow returning to the foundation that put it all into our... action. Go ahead. There's a nice story in the origins of Vishnu,

that what happens to the souls that don't get reincarnated, sorry, that don't get liberated, when the universe contracts when God goes to sleep, they all go back into a hive, as it were. They call it the beehive of the souls. And then when God creates the universe again, all the souls fly out into the cosmos as the bees fly out from their hive.

Ram, what is the relationship between God? in the world? Is there one version of that or many? There are many versions in, as we saw, in each narrative, Shiva, Vishnu, each of them has its own story. And I think, again, the imaginative role of

poetry, of trying to express this sense that there is some divine mystery to this I think takes the form of many stories and many sort of accounts. I think one of my favorite ones

comes from my own family tradition which worships Vishnu, in which at the time of the dissolution of the world, when form collapses into uniformity or formlessness, there is a banyan leaf, and on the banyan leave is a baby, which is Krishna,

and he solemnly sucks his toe contemplating the next act of creation while all the liberated souls look down on him. Gavin, finally, there's temptation all along the line here when I was reading for this programme to equate what was happening as metaphors

for the reality, or it might be another set of metaphors of contemporary physics. Do you see any relationship there between the Big Bang and the start of creation between the uncertainty and unknowability and that sort of thing? Well, I've always been struck. There does seem to be at least a surface level of similarity, but they couldn't have possibly known about these things, of course.

So I'm slightly hesitant about drawing parallels between contemporary physics, which changes all the time and ancient cosmologists. Briefly, Jessica, very. Very briefly. It's interesting that popular physicists like Carl Sagan and Fritz off Kappa noticed that there seem to be significant similarities. They just found this interesting. But one of the virtues of this is that it actually means that in the Hindu tradition,

you don't have a fight between religion and science. There's a perception that actually the power of nature is a wonderful display of the power of the divine. No problem with Darwin. There's no problem with Darwin, exactly. There's no sense that we need to struggle to bring the two together to make sense. An interesting case study of this is simply that the Indian second nuclear test explosions named their tests as the Shakti operation,

an operation involved in exploring divine energy. Well, thank you very much, Jessica Fersh, Gavin Flet, Chagravad, and next week we'll be talking about the letters of Pliny the Younger. Thank you for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4.