The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c38.22

v2.c38.22

The hymn is clearly difficult to understand: the part of the seers, which appears merely as a statement of what their reflections have arrived at, is even understood by Bloomfield¹ to be a cosmical action, indicating that they took part in the creation of the universe. This seems, however, unnatural and strained, but not more so than the interpretation of verse 5 adopted by Deussen,² which would make it into an assertion that the sages were able to discriminate between the thing in itself and the phenomenal world, between *natura naturans* and *natura naturata*. What is clear is that there is conceived as first existing one thing, which is described as breathing without wind,³ an effort to express a primitive nature different in essence from anything known to the priest, conceived perhaps metaphorically only as a dark ocean or chaos. In this through Tapas, which here must rather be cosmic than refer to the activity of seers or other human powers, by inward fervour, springs up the being enveloped in a shell, which in the later conception is the golden world egg. The next step in development is the appearance of desire, unless that it is to be taken as born of mind, when it is described as the first seed of mind. If so, the mind must be deemed to be an attribute of the one which develops in the shell, whence springs desire: in the alternative the phrase may be taken as the source which produces mind, and desire, unconscious will, may be held to produce conscious will or mind. The latter view, however, is unnatural in point of language and has the additional disadvantage that in the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka⁴ we already find that mind is given as prior to desire in a passage which is based on the hymn. Nor can we hold—and this is much more important—that Kāma was conceived as unconscious will: it is rather the natural expression for conscious desire, which would rise from the existence of mind as a substratum. The later philosophy makes the knowledge of desires depend on the existence of mind, and this idea may be foreshadowed here, where mind is made a cosmic *prius* of desire.¹ Beyond this the poet does not go: he ends with the suggestion of a supreme deity as distinct from the gods who are created, and ends with a doubt whether such a deity has power of knowledge, that is, whether it has consciousness at all. We cannot, therefore, really say whether or not the first cause of the world is deemed a conscious entity at all: the assertion that it was not-being, and yet not not-being, which is in words a little inconsistent with the assertion that the sages found the root of being in not-being, searching in the heart, is in effect an assertion that it was a peculiar sort of being, different from ordinary being. The reference to the heart, however, as the place of search reminds us that the heart even in the Rigveda seems the abode of mind,² and suggests that in the ultimate issue the final entity might be deemed to be possessed of mind, for consciousness, without an object, is the nature in the Vedānta of the Brahman and even of Puruṣa in the Sāṁkhya.