The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c20.s3.6

v1.c20.s3.6

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.