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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c20.s3: § 3. The Creator Gods

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c20.s3

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§ 3. The Creator Gods

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Two hymns ⁷ of the Rigveda are devoted to the honour of Viçvakarman, who is described as all-seeing, with eyes, face, arms, feet, on every side, a trait which is preserved in the post-Vedic representations of the god Brahman. But he is also said to have wings, and stress is laid on his being lord of speech, and the source of all prosperity. He is styled Dhātṛ, and Vidhātṛ, the establisher of earth and the disposer of the sky, and also the highest apparition.

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⁷ RV. x. 81, 82; 87. 2; x. 170. 4.

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The name is applied as an epithet to Indra, and to the sun as all-creating, and probably it was from the latter god that it developed into a name for the creator active god: in the Brāhmaṇas¹ Viçvakarman is identic with Prajāpati, and in post-Vedic literature he sinks to the humble level of the artificer of the gods. A class of Viçvasṛj gods, all-creators, is just alluded to in the Brāhmaṇas.²

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¹ ÇB. viii. 2. 1. 10; 3. 13; AB. iv. 22.

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² PB. xxv. 18. 2; verse in TB. iii. 12. 9. 7.

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Prajāpati is even a slighter figure than Viçvakarman in the Rigveda, and his name as a distinct deity occurs only four times, one late hymn being given to him.³ In that hymn, however, as it now stands, in an appended verse his supremacy is clearly asserted, and in more effective manner than in the older hymns, when they assert the greatness of one of the popular gods. He is there said to have created and established the heaven and the earth, to be the lord of all that is, the king of all that breathes and moves about, god above the gods, whose ordinances the gods and all beings obey, and who embraces all creatures. The deliberate intention to set out the nature of a creator god is expressed in the fact that the hymn is put in interrogative form, and the answer is given in the last verse. The form of the hymn is of importance as it gave rise to the most weird of the gods created by the Indian imagination in the Vedic age, the god Ka, ‘Who?’ He is in the Brāhmaṇa literature expressly identified with Prajāpati,⁴ but he is also in the ritual and in the Mantras distinguished from that god, separate offerings to this abstraction from a pronoun being duly provided for.

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³ RV. x. 121; 85. 43; 169. 4; 184. 1. For his later history see below, Part V.

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⁴ TS. i. 7. 6. 6.

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The name, Prajāpati, means lord of offspring, and is applied once in the Rigveda⁵ to Savitṛ, who is described as the Prajāpati of the world, and the supporter of heaven, and also to Soma as compared with Tvaṣṭṛ and Indra. As a distinct deity Prajāpati is naturally invoked to bestow offspring, in one case along with Viṣṇu, Tvaṣṭṛ, and Dhātṛ; he is said to make cows prolific, and in the Atharvaveda and the other texts of the later literature his connexion with offspring is regularly referred to. But Prajāpati is essentially in the later Saṁhitās and the Brāhmaṇas regarded as the chief of the gods, and in special the father god, who produces everything, who is the father of the gods⁶ on the one hand, but also of the Asuras,⁷ and who is of course the first sacrificer.⁸ Prajāpati is the hero of the cosmogonic myths of the whole of the Brāhmaṇa period; he creates the worlds and the Vedas,⁹ and the castes.¹⁰ In the Sūtras he is specifically identified with Brahman,¹¹ the god, the masculine of the idea of Brahman, ‘holy prayer,’ or the ‘holy power’. The predominance of Prajāpati, however, is not in the slightest affected by the development of this god in the Brāhmaṇas.

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⁵ iv. 53. 2.

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⁶ TB. iii. 1. 3. 4; ÇB. xi. 1. 6. 14.

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⁷ TB. ii. 2. 2. 3.

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⁸ ÇB. ii. 4. 4. 1; vi. 2. 3. 1.

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⁹ AB. v. 32 f.; JB. i. 357 f.; ÇB. xi. 5. 8; JUB. iii. 15. 4–17. 10; CU. iv. 17; ṢB. i. 5. 6–8. Cf. Geldner, *Ved. Stud.* ii. 139 (RV. vii. 33. 7); Oertel, *Trans. Conn. Acad.* xv. 155 ff.

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¹⁰ TS. vii. 1. 1. 4–6; PB. vi. 1. 6–13; JB. i. 68 f.; Oertel, *Trans. Conn. Acad.* xv. 196 ff.

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¹¹ AGS. iii. 4.

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Of the myths in which Prajāpati figures, the most interesting by far is that of his incest with his daughter Uṣas,¹ who changed herself into a gazelle, whereupon he assumed the form of the male animal corresponding to it. In the version of the Maitrāyaṇī Saṁhitā² Rudra aimed an arrow at him, but was induced to lay it aside by a promise of Prajāpati to make him the lord of beasts, if he did not shoot him. In the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa³ the gods in anger at the incest of Prajāpati make from the most terrible substances the form of Rudra, who shoots Prajāpati in the form of a deer, the myth being transferred to the sky, where the deer, Mṛga, the archer Mṛgavyādha, and the three-pointed arrow, Iṣu Trikāṇḍā, are pointed out. It is apparently a transfer to the god Prajāpati as creator god of a legend which seems in the Rigveda⁴ to be told, though in the most obscure terms of a father, who is probably to be taken as Dyaus with his daughter, presumably meant to be the earth, for an archer is alluded to in that legend. Elsewhere Prajāpati is recorded to have given Uṣas in marriage to Bṛhaspati or Soma,⁵ or to have married all his daughters, the Nakṣatras, to Soma.⁶

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¹ Oldenberg, SBE. xlvi. 78 ff.

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² iv. 2. 12.

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³ iii. 33. Cf. ÇB. i. 7. 4. 1 (Dyaus or Uṣas); PB. viii. 2. 10.

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⁴ i. 71. 5; x. 61. 5–7; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* ii. 52 f.

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⁵ JB. i. 213; AB. iv. 7; KB. xviii. 1; Oertel, *Trans. Conn. Acad.* xv. 174; Bloomfield, JAOS. xv. 181.

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⁶ TS. ii. 2. 5. 1; KS. xi. 3; MS. ii. 2. 7.

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Prajāpati also appears in other animal forms, which is in keeping with his position as the great generator: his eye swells, and, because it did so (*açvayat*), the horse came into being; he assumes the form of a boar in order to raise the earth out of the waters, a legend which is recounted in the Taittirīya Saṁhitā⁷ and which is the starting-point of the boar incarnation of Viṣṇu, and he also assumed the form of a tortoise to produce all creatures according to the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,⁸ whence arises the view that all men are the children of the tortoise. He is also identified with the primeval Puruṣa or giant from whom by the sacrifice the gods created the whole of the world, and also men and the gods.

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⁷ Macdonell, JRAS. xxvii. 178 ff.

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⁸ vii. 5. 1. 5.

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In the hymn⁹ addressed to him Prajāpati bears the title of Hiraṇyagarbha, the golden germ, and this mention of him is itself elevated by the Atharvaveda¹⁰ and by the later literature¹¹ to the rank of a supreme deity. In the Atharvaveda he appears as the embryo, which is produced in the waters on the process of creation. His position is definitely identified with that of Prajāpati in the Taittirīya Saṁhitā, and in the post-Vedic literature he becomes the expression of the nature of the personal god, Brahman, as opposed to the impersonal Brahman.

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⁹ RV. x. 121. 1.

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¹⁰ iv. 2. 8.

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¹¹ TS. v. 5. 1. 2.

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The Atharvaveda,¹² which combines theosophy with magic in the most curious way, is fond of inventing new expressions for the supreme deity. Thus it looks upon Kāla,¹ ‘time’, as the one existing thing in the universe, and again it invents Skambha,² ‘support’, as the necessary substratum on which the structure of the universe must rest, and exalts it to the position of a supreme god. Prāṇa,³ ‘the breath’, is also deified and identified with Prajāpati. Another god, Rohita,⁴ is doubtless really an epithet of the sun as ‘ruddy’, but it becomes identified by the Atharvaveda with Prajāpati: the alternative theory presented by Bloomfield⁵ that it is the development of the abstraction of red as advantageous for all those suffering from jaundice is not indeed inconceivable, but it is not necessary and, therefore, should not be preferred to the more obvious explanation which presents itself.⁶ Even in that text the Vrātya,⁷ who is the un-brahmanical Aryan when induced to enter the Brahmanical fold by a performance of some complication, the Vrātya Stomas, is celebrated as a universal god, a fact which has erroneously been interpreted as an allusion to the worship of the god Çiva by a special section of the population. The remains of the sacrificial offering⁸ are also celebrated as being the supreme god, and naturally so also the Brahmacārin or Brahman student,⁹ as well as other figures. To these aberrations of the Atharvaveda no attention is paid subsequently.

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¹² Deussen, *Gesch. der Phil.* I. i. 209 ff., 264 ff.; Edgerton, *Studies in honor of Bloomfield*, pp. 117 ff.

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¹ AV. xix. 53, 54.

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² AV. x. 8.

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³ AV. xi. 4.

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⁴ AV. xiii. 1–3; TB. ii. 5. 2. 1–8.

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⁵ *The Symbolic Gods*, pp. 42 ff.

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⁶ Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 407.

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⁷ AV. xv. 1; above, Part II, Chap. 9, § 10.

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⁸ AV. xi. 7.

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⁹ AV. x. 2; xi. 8.

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On the other hand the god Brahman is not found even in the Atharvaveda and still less in the other Saṁhitās. He may be traced merely in such later texts¹⁰ as the Taittirīya¹¹ and the Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇas.¹² The earlier conception in this case is unquestionably the neuter, Brahman, which denotes the prayer, the spell, and also more widely the holy power, whether embodied in the prayer or spell or manifested in the universe. The transition to the personal god is to be seen in the phrase, the world of Brahman: in its earliest occurrences that phrase may mean no more than the place of the Brahman, but it was inevitable, even if this is the case, that the idea of a personal god, whose world was meant, should have superseded the older idea. But it must be recognized that in the Vedic period there is no trace whatever of Brahman becoming a god of such importance as to supersede Prajāpati. The importance of the god Brahman can be shown only for a period during the development of Buddhism, since in the Buddhist texts we find many references to Brahman as apparently a very great and popular god among the Brahmans. He bears there an epithet Sahampati, which cannot be explained by anything known in the Brāhmaṇa literature, and this suggests that he may have been specially in honour among the eastern tribes of the Indians, and have received among them an epithet which is not recorded in our texts, which are essentially of the middle country lying further to the west than the home of the earliest Buddhism. It is of importance to note that in the Upaniṣads, where, if anywhere, the mention of Brahman as the creator god would be expected to be frequently found, it is comparatively rare, and Prajāpati is the normal name of the creator, and so in the Sūtra texts also.

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¹⁰ Keith, *Aitareya Āraṇyaka*, pp. 304, n. 23; 367; *JRAS.* 1910, p. 216; Windisch, *Buddha's Geburt*, p. 33; Deussen, *Phil. of Up.*, p. 199, who wrongly sees the god in AU. iii. 3. He occurs in BAU. iv. 4. 4; CU. iii. 11. 4; KU. i. 7, often in the Sūtras.

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¹¹ ii. 7. 17. 1.

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¹² xxv. 1.

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